This article has benefited from questions, comments, and corrections from Sunita Abraham, Desmond Allison, Giséle Allison, Purnima Kumar, Malavika Mohanan, Tara Mohanan, Chitra Shankaran, and Susheela Varghese. I hope that the questions, comments, and corrections from the current reader (which means you) would result in further improvement.

In its standard use, "liberal education" refers to a form of education based primarily on liberal arts (i.e., natural sciences, social sciences and humanities). The way I use the term, taking a set of 101 courses in natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities is hardly sufficient to satisfy the requirements of liberal education. Rather than basing the concept on subject areas, I use the term "liberal education" to refer to what all educated individuals ought to have, independently of their professions.

The distinction between general and specialized thinking abilities is similar to (if not the same as) Piaget's distinction between domain-general and domain-specific cognitive abilities. I believe that general thinking abilities are best acquired by generalizing specialized thinking abilities in a number of different domains.

The modes of inquiry in a discipline are the same as the modes of critical and creative thinking in the discipline combined with the epistemological criteria that they implicitly assume. [Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Epistemological criteria are the criteria on the basis of which we decide whether a proposition should be regarded as knowledge.]

Epistemic = knowledge related.

I am not denying differences between moral reasoning and empirical reasoning. For instance, the totality of empirical disciplines can be refuted by demonstrating that inferences deduced from them contradict true observations, the totality of moral principles cannot be refuted in terms of observations. They can only be subverted by demonstrating a logical contradiction internal to the principles. Such differences across domains do not negate the broad unity of reasoning across domains.