Critical Reading Skills
It has occurred to me that the critical reading is an underdeveloped skill of mine, and one which seems to receive scant attention in college; at lease up to this point.
It seems to me that the important things to pay attention to while reading any piece do indeed reduce to the old journalistic adage of “Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.” Unfortunately, we are lucky to pay attention to any two of those; and typically, it is the first two. “Where” is taken as irrelevant, “when” as a question more suited to history than the subject matter (whatever it may be), “why” is taken to be impossible or at least unanswerable to a satisfactory extent, and how simply a stylistic concern.
However, I find myself increasingly interesting in both the “how” and the “why,” and particularly the “why of the how.” That then brings “when” and “where” into sharp relief, for it is only possible to understand the “why of the how” in relation to where the “who” was taught, who they are trying to talk to, and what the state of affairs was at the time – in short, the when.
My interest stems from an increasing awareness that knowledge is not merely a set of axioms about the world; propositions said by someone, or theories advanced and retracted. My course of study at college is centered around the idea of evaluating knowledge, which means evaluating the things people write. However, that is only really possible if one makes an attempt to understand how someone thinks – that it to say, it is important to try and understand what questions the writer is answering, and the distinction between that and how they are answering those questions.
The quality of knowledge really rests on those two issues, as well as the issues implicit in answering them. For example, determining which questions the writer is attempting to answer will implicitly entail determining why those questions are important; something that can be answered at a superficial level with an understanding of their history and what their contemporaries and colleagues were saying, and at a deeper level by determining the ontology the writer is using; i.e. the author’s conception of reality. For it is only within the confines of that ontology that the writer can truly make sense, and be understood – as opposed to being merely intelligible, which encourages the cross-pollination of conclusions sans reasoning from one sphere to another.
Still, it seems as if that sort of textual analysis is absent. I understand, of course, that there are time constraints, and there is often a trade-off between the amount of material covered and the depth to which it is covered. It feels, to a large extent, that the answer for what is missing – namely, the depth of analysis – is implicitly “grad school,” though I find such an excuse both unsatisfying and unsatisfactory.
I do have one class, this semester, whose teacher places a significant emphasis on the “when” and the “how,” as well as the “why of the how;” it makes the class fascinating, despite my relative lack of interest in the subject matter (modern political thought). The downside, of course, is that the class entails “receiving the answers,” and as such reduces to a demonstration of how to read the text to arrive at a particular conclusion, as opposed to how to ask the questions such that you can arrive at answers.
The distinction is subtle; in the former, the questions are implicit but the focus is on the answers; in the latter, the focus is on the questions, while the answers are less important. The former treats academia as an accumulation of conclusions, while the latter treats academia as a process. The measure of success in the former is how well you have memorized the conclusions (usually others) have created and vetted, while in the latter the measure is on how well one can apply the process.
I have an abiding interest in the latter, with considerably less interest in the former.
Perhaps the focus I am looking for is, indeed, at “grad school.” But such a solution seems misleading. It smacks of – excuse me, for I cannot recall the word – a continual passing of the buck. I was told much the same thing during High School; only to find that college is more of the same. Certainly, the standards are higher, the ambition grandeur. But the approach, and the result, seems much the same: a focus on the accumulation of conclusions; for lack of a better for, an accumulation of knowledge, and not on the process of acquiring knowledge. I suppose some would argue that the latter is embedded in the former, and that it would be impossible to separate the content of knowledge from the means of acquiring it. While true, I do not believe such an objection is either relevant or applicable: there is a distinct difference between acquiring the accumulated knowledge of a field, and performing that accumulation yourself. The techniques, the skills, are different: and learning how to acquire “ready-made” knowledge is a far cry from ‘making’ that knowledge in the first place.
As mentioned earlier, my course of study – Epistemology of the Social Sciences – is directly aimed at this problem, though I cannot claim complete coverage. The problem I identified last years was that the sum of accumulated knowledge was too great for any one individual to accumulate themselves; and expertise in a field would take years. There is thus a need for a way to “filter” that knowledge. An initial, perhaps even stopgap, solution to that problem would be to build a network of experts you can call on. But such a filter, while invaluable, introduces another intermediate between one’s self and knowledge, or more essentially understanding. There is thus a need for further examination; a way to evaluate knowledge directly. Such is my ambition, though I have been assured it will remain unrealized; as this task has not, explicitly, been carried out and thus there is no ready-made recipe for me to follow. The irony is palpable. Given the lack of direct prior research on the matter, I have added attempting to understand the processes of knowledge accumulation, as well as their history (in a rather Kuhn-ian conception of science, conceived off before I read Kuhn). The hope is that by understanding the process of knowledge accumulation, I can evaluate that process, and thereby arrive at some approximation, some estimate, of the quality of the resulting knowledge.
Which leads me, of course, back to the premises of this post: that my ability to do so is rather less developed than I’d like. Still, such is the purpose of school.
