Reading Critically at University

Mike Metcalfe

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446232835
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Investigación en educación

Have you ever been asked to critique an article, book, or past project and wondered what exactly was meant by `critique?? This book provides 13 different ways of undertaking a critique. It will help you to confidently use these critique methods to develop your own methods. Each chapter contains sample passages, example critiques and explanations of underlying theory to help you to consolidate your understanding and skills.

Reading Critically at University will support undergraduate and postgraduate students across the social sciences, as they master different critique methods. It will also be an excellent resource for all undergraduate study skills modules.
SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, resources and videos on study success!

1	Using Argument to Critique

Critique the following passage by highlighting the message, the point the passage makes. This might also be called the moral, the conclusion or the argument of the passage.

Few people will know where Invercargill is, the New Zealand one that is. It is a little town on the very southern tip of the real ‘God’s Own Country’. It must be a contender for the town closest to the Antarctic. For people growing up there in the 1950s and 1960s it must have felt fairly isolated despite the lovely countryside.

This story involves a young lad, about 11 years old, trying to make a little pocket money from a paper-round. You need to imagine a paper-round in Invercargill in those days. It involved going from one fairly remote house to another, often before dawn in the cold and rain. He did this lonely chore on his heavy old bicycle. One morning the lad arrived at the newsagent to pick up his papers and there was this dog he had never seen before sitting outside the newsagency. He noticed how very friendly it was, so he gave it a few strokes. On the way out the dog was still there, still being friendly, so the boy encouraged it to go with him on his lonely round. The dog looked extremely pleased and full of life. When the boy threw the first newspaper onto the porch of a house, the dog ran and fetched it back. It turned out to be a very long morning.

Is the claim, the argument, the passage makes:

• that planning goes wrong, even in simple situations,
• that we need to reveal our own assumptions about situations,
• that if you persuade people or dogs into routines then a change in circumstances can turn a strength into a weakness, or
• that only people are self-conscious, animals and objects are not,
• that (and this one works for me) trying to influence others to your intent is problematic?

There is no right answer; a critique is what you want to mention after reading the passage. The skill is being aware of where your thoughts are coming from. This chapter deals with the argument stance of critique which encourages your thoughts to come from first identifying what you thought was the argument made by the passage.

In the dog passage, the argument the passage is making is a bit vague. To note this can be part of your critique. In some passages the author can be very explicit about the argument he or she wants to make.

Those who believe that deterrence justifies the execution of certain offenders bear the burden of proving that the death penalty is a deterrent. The overwhelming conclusion from years of deterrence studies is that the death penalty is, at best, no more of a deterrent than a sentence of life in prison. The Ehrlich studies have been widely discredited. In fact, some criminologists, such as William Bowers of Northeastern University, maintain that the death penalty has the opposite effect: that is, society is brutalized by the use of the death penalty, and this increases the likelihood of more murder. Even most supporters of the death penalty now place little or no weight on deterrence as a serious justification for its continued use.

States in the United States that do not employ the death penalty generally have lower murder rates than states that do. The same is true when the U.S. is compared to countries similar to it. The U.S., with the death penalty, has a higher murder rate than the countries of Europe or Canada, which do not use the death penalty.

The death penalty is not a deterrent because most people who commit murders either do not expect to be caught or do not carefully weigh the differences between a possible execution and life in prison before they act. Frequently, murders are committed in moments of passion or anger, or by criminals who are substance abusers and acted impulsively. As someone who presided over many of Texas’s executions, former Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox has remarked, ‘It is my own experience that those executed in Texas were not deterred by the existence of the death penalty law. I think in most cases you’ll find that the murder was committed under severe drug and alcohol abuse.’

There is no conclusive proof that the death penalty acts as a better deterrent than the threat of life imprisonment. A survey of the former and present presidents of the country’s top academic criminological societies found that 84% of these experts rejected the notion that research had demonstrated any deterrent effect from the death penalty.

Once in prison, those serving life sentences often settle into a routine and are less of a threat to commit violence than other prisoners. Moreover, most states now have a sentence of life without parole. Prisoners who are given this sentence will never be released. Thus, the safety of society can be assured without using the death penalty.

Source: www.teacher.deathpenaltyinfo.msu.edu/
c/about/arguments/argument1b.htm

The author is presenting the argument that the death penalty prevents future murders. It is one side of the capital punishment debate. Identifying the argument by the author may be part of your critique; you could compare it with the argument you think the passage makes. For example, you might see the passage as an argument:

• that the United States is behind much of the Western world in its attitude to capital punishment, or
• that it is sad that the author has to still make this argument in the twenty-first century.

What argument do you identify in the passage below about the Napoleonic wars?

It’s hard to imagine now but back at the time of the Napoleonic wars, as the British waited for the French invasion of Britain, the average villager in the North of England would never have seen a French soldier. They had heard that they were horrible, unnatural creatures, about to invade and slaughter everyone in their beds. Added to this, most of these same people would not have seen a monkey, as Africa was a long way off and there was a distinct absence of zoos, TV and printed picture books. Into this state of ignorance a ship sailed up the North Sea. During some bad weather, the captain’s pet monkey, dressed up in a sailor suit, was washed overboard. It somehow made it to the shore whereupon the locals captured it. It was wearing a uniform and clearly not an Englishman, so the locals assumed it must be a Frenchman, most likely a spy for the invasion force. They tried to talk to the monkey but it only babbled back in what must have been French. They did the only right thing and hanged it in the town square as a warning to all other French spies. I gather the people who live in Hartlepool are a bit embarrassed by this bit of their history but I suspect that most English people have some sympathy for such a simple confusion of identity. In more recent times, the local rugby club has a hanging monkey as a logo on its club tie.

Like the dog passage, the argument does not appear to me to be explicit. This is not to say it does not have an argument. Every passage can be given an argument. Is it:

• something about the public image of the French in 1800,
• that magistrates in Hartlepool are incompetent,
• about the importance of having appropriate court procedures for identifying prisoners?

Moreover, is the argument hidden so as not to offend the residents of Hartlepool? The argument stance of critique encourages the reader to think about the passage in these terms. Other critique stances encourage different thoughts.

Explaining argument (the theory)

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Philosophical history

The stance of critique that asks what argument you see in a passage and how well it does that has been with us at least since the Ancient Greek Socrates who lived some 2500 years ago. His ideas for how to distinguish good knowledge from bad is still the source of discussion on electronic bulletin boards today. By ‘argument’,¹ it is meant something akin to legal argument or reasoned debate, not quarrelling; its purpose is to validate knowledge claims. Socrates used a questioning form of argument where he asked people to state, in a short sentence, what they thought they knew. He would then question them in an attempt to test their claim. So, if we used the passage above about the paperboy’s dog, rather than let the author present the whole passage, the Socratic method would first ask for the author’s argument, what he or she claims to know. In this case it may be ‘that companions involve you in extra work’. This would then be questioned to establish its validity. For example, ‘What experience do you have with dogs?’, ‘What good experiences have you had with stray dogs?’ and so on, depending on the answers provided. Therefore, the Socratic method provides one way to extend your critique of a passage. Having identified the argument (claim), you can ask yourself questions of the passage as per the paperboy’s dog example. Does the passage explain the advantages of a dog in terms of companionship? Socrates’ questioning method, perhaps due to Aristotle’s concerns with questioning and with the invention of cheap printing, tends to have died out. These days we tend to adopt a style as per debating societies and law courts where the process starts by allowing each of the interlocutors time to present their ‘case’, verbally or in written form as a monologue. This needs to anticipate the counter arguments, the questions that are likely to follow from what is said. This presentation is then critiqued.

In modern times the philosopher Karl Popper in Conjectures and Refutations (1963) supports the Ancient Greeks arguing that the process of making and justifying an argument, to an appropriate audience, is the process that produces valid scientific knowledge. It tests the quality of what we know; perhaps it actually creates what we know. Numerous other philosophers have also supported this line, discussing how this language-based competition might be designed to ensure new knowledge is created and tested, while trying to ensure ineffective rhetoric and quarrels are avoided. These books include Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric (1969), Walton’s The New Dialectic (1998), Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument (1964), Crosswhite’s The Rhetoric of Reason (1996) and Eemeren et al.’s Handbook of Argumentation Theory (1987). Their concerns include how to exclude power from blocking open debate. Historically there is a lot of evidence of powerful social groups not wanting open and public debate, not wanting their claims countered or questioned. Given the millions of people who died as a result of this, such as from ‘Nazi science’ on race and ‘Stalin science’ on agriculture, this concern is very real. Therefore, this stance of critique carries with it implications for the identification of valid knowledge and for the emancipation and empowerment of ‘others’ – a heavy burden.

Identify the argument

A critique using the ‘argument stance’ starts, as was suggested with the passages above, from identifying an argument. Being such an important concept in Western thinking, the word ‘argument’ has numerous equivalents. Conceptually this is the same thing as the conclusion, the point, a proposition, a conjecture, a knowledge claim and perhaps the message, the moral and the purpose of a passage. If explicitly provided, the argument, as a one-liner, is normally identified as starting with the word ‘that …’. For example, that capital punishment does not stop murders. It may be stated at the beginning, at the end, both, not at all and indeed many passages (essays, presentations) are not really coherent enough for a critiquer to be able to identify any one argument. Hopefully there is the argument the author intended, but there may also be another one the critiquer wants to identify. The argument identified can only be the critiquer’s interpretation of the passage.

There may be hidden arguments, ones you think the author would be aware of but was hiding and ones he or she may not have thought of. The task is not to read the author’s mind, but rather to identify from the passage the argument you want to discuss. Different critiquers will identify different arguments, which make for the possibility of interesting discussion. In the paperboy’s dog passage three possible arguments were identified. The death penalty passage was very focused, making it hard for me to identify more than the one clearly stated argument. The monkey passage is very much open for interpretation by the reader; perhaps the author’s argument was that you should laugh.

Supporting evidence

An argument (conclusion) needs to be justified, supported with evidence. This evidence may be reasoning or observations (empirics).² The death penalty passage argued that the death penalty does not prevent future murders. This argument was justified using reasoning including that murderers are usually in no state of mind to care what the punishment is. The supporting empirical evidence provided was the murder statistics in various states, comparing those that do or do not use the death penalty. The passage also anticipates the counter argument’s evidence of the findings of the Ehrlich report, where it says this has been discredited.

An argument is only as good as the evidence that supports it. The argument may not be novel but the supporting evidence can be. You may have often heard that the courts need to be very careful that they prosecute the right person; the monkey passage provides some refreshing historically verifiable evidence that mistakes have been made. The quality of evidence is not a simple or absolute thing. Science likes very exact measurement as its evidence; enquiry into complex social situations tends to put more emphasis on insight. Social enquiry is suspicious of how easily the eye is deceived and is very aware that seeing something occurring is very different to accurately appreciating the underlying social forces that are causing it to occur. Observations may be the basis of scientific evidence but for the social enquirers the intent is often to make different things happen as a result of their intervention. The only suggestion I have to help you decide whether or not the supporting evidence is adequate is simply to ask if it would be convincing to a knowledgeable audience. I would suggest that the evidence in the dog and monkey passages above was not as convincing as the evidence presented in the dea...