Abstract: Disclosed herein is a software application that provides a “critical thinking exercise” that presents a problem, solvable by a user exercising critical thinking skills. Each critical thinking exercise conforms to an archetype (e.g., a framework or a set of specifications) based on which each critical thinking exercise is created by an author, for a user. The critical thinking exercise archetype facilitates the exercise of user critical thinking skills. The user can analyze a number of author specified investigation scenes, identify the problem, select author pre-defined hypotheses, and form arguments supporting or falsifying the hypotheses with user-selectable items such as: evidences, inferences, conclusions, and conclusion confidence levels provided in the critical thinking exercise by the author. A solved problem entails that collection of user-formed arguments that resolves the problem to the highest level of certainty possible.