Expressing Critical Thinking through Disciplinary Texts

Insights from Five Genre Studies

Ian Bruce

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350127906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Exploring how critical thinking is expressed in writing, this book investigates the specific linguistic elements involved in this process. Ian Bruce takes a genre-based approach to compare the textual expression of critical thinking in samples of academic, professional and journalistic writing, using five studies to examine the similarities and differences in the elements deployed across different genres. Looking at phenomena such as the relations between propositions and words which express the writer's personal attitude, content-organizing patterns, and the role of metaphor, this book highlights the most important contributory factors in the expression of critical thinking. Providing an in-depth exploration of how it is articulated through different types of specialist writing, this book provides a lens to both examine texts and to identify and practice this skill.

1

Critical thinking

Definitions, origins, controversies

1.0 Overview

My overall aim in this book is to explore how critical thinking is communicated through written text. While most books that deal with the subject of critical thinking are concerned with how it is formulated, and draw on the disciplines of philosophy, logic or rhetoric, my focus here is on understanding how critical thinking is expressed through the written texts of different disciplines. As a framework for this enquiry, I use genre analysis and bring together the findings of five previously published studies to provide insights into the textual means employed.

In this chapter, I establish the context of the book, first, by defining the key terms that I use, second, by briefly considering the origins of critical thinking in Western scholarship and science, and third, by discussing the different approaches to the teaching of critical thinking. In Chapter 2, I outline the genre model that I use as an analytical framework to investigate how critical thinking is expressed through specialist writing from different disciplines. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5, I explore how critical thinking is expressed in academic writing, specifically in undergraduate essays, PhD discussion chapters and research article (RA) literature reviews. In Chapter 6, I examine its expression in an example of business writing, the online genre of the fund manager commentary (FMC), and in Chapter 7, I explore how it is expressed in journalistic opinion writing, exemplified in a political commentary column from The Guardian newspaper. Finally in Chapter 8, I review the discussions and findings of the previous five chapters. I consider how they contribute further to understanding how critical thinking is expressed through writing and how this may be taught by writing instructors.

1.1 Definitions

To establish a definitional framework for the following chapters, I begin by introducing the key terms that are used, those of critical thinking, enacting criticality, text and discourse. The concepts related to these terms are presented briefly here and discussed again in greater detail at the beginning of Chapter 2. For the purposes of this book, the term ‘critical thinking’ is used to describe an evaluation made within any field of human activity about some aspect, object or behaviour of that field according to the ‘standards of judgment of that field’ (Swales & Feak, 2012, p. 328). This definition accords with the ideas of McPeck (1981), who states: ‘the criteria for the use of scepticism are supplied by the norms and standards of the field under consideration’ (pp. 7–8). The adjunct term ‘enacting criticality’ refers to the actual process of the communication (transmission and reception among interlocutors) of such an evaluative judgement. A core idea in the definitions of McPeck (1981) and Swales and Feak (2012) underpins the approach to critical thinking taken here, which is: when expressing critical thinking, writers (or speakers) communicate evaluative judgements on some aspect of their particular area of specialist activity according to the values and standards of the discipline, profession or area of activity within which the evaluation occurs. In Western societies, critical thinking is usually regarded as a central element of engagement with any field of specialist human activity, such as academic scholarship, research, professional practice, business, manufacturing, art, sport, entertainment or politics. It is seen as essential to the development and refinement of the knowledge, skill, product, service or other outcome of the specialist field within which it occurs.

Following this definitional approach, an underlying requirement for any credible enactment of criticality is for an interlocutor to be an insider within, or possess a certain threshold level of knowledge about the field of activity within which a judgement is being made. In relation to academic subjects, the philosopher Hirst (2009) calls this type of disciplinary insider knowledge the logical grammar of a subject, or as he states, ‘the logical grammar of its key concepts’ (p. 37), which I suggest involves the epistemology and specialist knowledge of a particular subject discipline. Brookfield (2012) further defines this type of fundamental insider knowledge as ‘the building blocks of knowledge that every student of that subject needs to know in order to be regarded as well versed in it’ (p. 28). Brookfield goes on to say that ‘what counts as content grammar is determined by scholars and institutions and [is] often codified by professional associations in standards and lists of best practices’ (p. 28). However, since the focus of this book is on how critical thinking is expressed through written text (as part of the larger process of enacting criticality), the terms ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ are also central to this definitional framework.

Text, as Widdowson (2004) states, is ‘the linguistic trace of a discourse process’ (p. 69). Thus, text here is taken to mean the words on the page, which may be a written document or the written transcription of a spoken monologue or dialogue. Discourse, on the other hand, refers to the interpretations that relate to a text, involving the transmission and reception of ideas among interlocutors. Therefore, while a written text is the linguistic medium through which ideas are encoded and decoded, creating discourse involves the application to the text of socially constructed knowledge, interpretive frameworks and personal strategies along with a working knowledge of the different elements of the linguistic system used. Here discourse is seen as involving both social and cognitive processes within which texts may play a central and integral role. Where specialist written texts are involved, enacting criticality occurs among interlocutors (writers and readers) engaged in co-constructing discourse within particular disciplinary contexts.

Thus, the central idea that underpins the approach to critical thinking of this book is that enacting criticality is a contextually situated, discursive process, involving a wide range of types of knowledge that may include disciplinary, social, procedural and linguistic elements. Therefore, in exploring the genres discussed in Chapters 3 to 7, it is important that the theoretical approach used to examine the written expression of critical thinking is able to account for, and integrate the elements of, both the actual text and the discursive intentions and meanings that relate to the creation and interpretation of the text. In addressing this need for an encompassing theoretical approach, Chapter 2 outlines the genre model used to examine the different categories of texts of the subsequent chapters. However, to first establish a context for these investigations of expressing critical thinking through writing, Section 1.2 briefly considers the historical origins of critical thinking in Western scholarship and science.

1.2 Critical thinking in Western scholarship

The idea of expressing critical thinking through argumentation and reasoning, and the need for educated people to enact criticality when engaging with knowledge or scientific discovery are concepts that have a long history in Western scholarship – concepts that began with the approaches to philosophy and the theories of rhetoric, dialectic and logic of ancient Greece and Rome. In this section, I attempt to illustrate, very briefly, the historical development of the concept of exercising critical thinking through reference to a small number of landmark works.

During the classical period, theories advanced for the discovery of knowledge consisted of rules or patterns for deductive reasoning, such as the ‘syllogism’.¹ Closely related to the theories of knowledge discovery of this era were proposals for principled approaches to the oral evaluation and communication of knowledge, specifically ‘rhetoric’ and ‘dialectic’. For example, Aristotle’s famous work Rhetoric provided a set of rules for persuasive speech-making. Similarly, dialectic, as a type of oral debate, was made popular by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues, its purpose being to establish the truth of a matter by following a prescribed set of principles as an approach to resolving a disagreement. Separate approaches for exclusively written communication emerged later during the early medieval period. Then the selective and pragmatic use of classical principles called ‘rhetorica nova’ was applied to a wide range of written texts, including letters, legal documents, sermons and verse. At this stage, the idea that written texts may be structured differently from spoken texts also began to be considered. This development is exemplified by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century in his work Summa Theologica, which employed empirical reasoning and systematicity in addressing counter-arguments in religious debates.

During the Renaissance, the ideas and publications of the scientists and philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented changing orientations towards the discovery of knowledge and how newly discovered knowledge should be reported. In his work Novum Organum, the English philosopher/politician Francis Bacon (1561–1626) proposed that knowledge discovery should involve qualitative observations of nature that provide a basis for establishing natural laws or principles. In seventeenth-century England, meetings of groups of scientists in London from about 1645 led to the formation of the Royal Society. Drawing on ideas from published works of Francis Bacon, the members of the Royal Society proposed ‘empiricism’ as a basis for enquiry in all areas of science. In conjunction with this new scientific approach, the members also sought a suitable theory of communication for the reporting and dissemination of scientific findings, a theory that moved away from the deductive routines of traditional, persuasive rhetoric. The figure within the Royal Society who was most influential in developing this plain, direct form of communication – the New Rhetoric (NR) – was John Locke (1632–1704), who proposed that argument should be based on factual content and supported induction as a means for presenting proof or evidence.

However, Bacon’s ideas about the centrality of observation to knowledge discovery differed from those of the French philosopher Descartes (1596–1650), who proposed that knowledge is solely developed by means of human reasoning. In his work Discourse on the Method, Descartes proposes four principles for systematically evaluating knowledge, sometimes referred to as ‘principles of systematic doubt’, according to which reasoning about anything begins with doubt or scepticism. As a result, ideas about critical thinking or scepticism also came to be considered to be an integral part of the processes of the discovery of knowledge and its communication.

The critical approach to knowledge of British empiricism was further extended in the eighteenth century by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), who was a strong empiricist who also belonged to the ‘sceptical’ philosophical tradition. Hume argued that human knowledge was based on what is observable, but also that humans had inbuilt capacities to form conceptions and make deductions about empirically observed knowledge. Later, in the early nineteenth century, empiricism as a basis for scientific investigation further evolved into the positivist approach, and was extended into the human sciences by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who also emphasized the importance of the relationship between theory and empirical observation in order to gain a greater understanding of the world: ‘If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theories’ (Comte, 1974, p. 27). Thus, from the ideas of Comte, the combination of inductive and deductive reasoning that characterizes ‘positivism’ or the ‘scientific method’ emerged. Some elements of this approach can also be seen in the writings of the German philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916) and the American philosopher and logician Charles Peirce (1839–1914).

In the philosophy of science in the early part of the twentieth century, there was a strong focus on theory-internal elements of critical/analytical thinking, involving the stringent application of logic to propositions as part of the development of scientific theory. This emerged when a number of philosophers of science (the Vienna Circle) developed a theory of scientific discovery termed ‘logical positivism’. This theory emerged from the ideas of Frege (1848–1925), Russell (1872–1970) and Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Following this approach, rules of logic are applied to the analysis of scientific propositions, such as in Russell’s ‘logical atomism’ whereby ‘[t]he truth or falsity of complex statements might, it seemed, be assessed by the truth or falsity of their most simple (empirical) atomic constituents’ (Oldroyd, 1986, p. 221).

The ideas of logical positivism of the members of the Vienna circle were challenged by Karl Popper (1902–94), who was less interested in the meaningfulness of the propositions expressed within scientific theories than in the efforts of scientists to test their theories. His idea of ‘falsification’ was that scientists should test their hypotheses by carrying out empirical work with the ultimate goal of examining the extent to which they are wrong: ‘Scientific theories were not the digest of observations, but that they were interventions – conjectures boldly put forward for trial, to be eliminated if they clashed with observations’ (Popper, 1963, p. 46). Following Popper’s approach, scientific predictions are expressed as ‘falsifiable’ statements so that they can be tested empirically. If a theory, once tested by the examination of the appropriate empirical evidence, could not be falsified, it could be said to be ‘corroborated’. Thus, Popper’s influence on science was his emphasis on the critical scrutiny of theories and the rigour in approaches to the empirical work that sought to prove or disprove them.

In the social sciences, the Critical Theory School emerged from the Institute for Social Research, established in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt. Critical theorists claimed that previous approaches to research, such as positivism, ignored political and social issues, and they proposed that research in the social sciences (differing from that of the physical sciences) should fulfil social agendas in order to benefit the whole of society. The Critical Theory approach eventually became associated with particular research methods: action research (the investigation of professional practice for the purpose of improvement) and critical discourse analysis (ideology critique).

The second half of the twentieth century saw more radical challenges to theories of science and knowledge discovery. Thomas Kuhn (1924–96), an American physicist and philosopher, focused on the social dimensions of scientific enquiry. In his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn suggested that the history of scientific thought is actually one of discontinuities, and that any scientific method used for the discovery of knowledge is an artefact of the constraints placed around it by the practitioners of a particular scientific community, which he termed a ‘paradigm’. Another philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend (1924–94), whose book Against Method (first published in 1975) emphasized, even more than Kuhn, the time- and context-situatedness of scientific ideas, raises the issue that ‘progress’ is often only made when current, received, scientific understandings are challenged by new ideas or theories that, by contrast, appear irrational – that is, outside of the current paradigm. Other theorists, such as those working in the field of the sociology of science (e.g. Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984; Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Knorr Cetina, 1999), have also argued that what is held to be scientific knowledge is the product of the thinking and values of historical periods, discourse communities and institutional environments within which such knowledge is developed, with these contextual elements influencing the ontological and epistemological views of researchers.

Thus, a thread that runs through Western theories of reasoning and knowledge discovery has been the emphasis placed on the scrutiny and critique of new knowledge, with different principled approaches to how new knowledge is validated being proposed during different historical periods. While earlier eras sought to articulate universal laws and principles that related to the discovery and communication of knowledge, a significant theme that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century was recognition of the influences of historical, cultural, social and institutional contexts on the research methods of science and on how the process of scientific inquiry evolved. During this era, those writing about the philosophy and sociology of science began to challenge any idea of uniformity of method and structure, emphasizing the ‘situatedness’ of both scientific research and its reporting in texts. Situatedness refers to the influences of cultures, societies, discourse communities and institutions and the...