Critical reading
Encyclopedia
Critical reading is the opposite of naivety in reading. It is a form of skepticism
that does not take a text at face value, but involves an examination of claims put forward in the text as well as implicit bias
in the texts framing and selection of the information presented. The ability to read critically is an ability assumed to be present in scholars and to be learned in academic institutions.
There is no simple relations between these levels. As the hermeneutics have shown (see "the hermeneutic circle
") are the understanding of the single words depending on the understanding of the text as a whole (as well as the culture in which the text is produced) and vice versa: You cannot understand a text if you do not understand the words in the text.
The critical reading of a given text thus implies a critical examination of the concepts used as well as of the soundness of the arguments and the value and relevance of the assumptions and the traditions on which the text is based.
"Reading between the lines" is the ability to uncover implicit messages and bias.
Reading and writing are thus reciprocal processes, reading is an active process, and the best way to learn critical reading is probably by training academic writing.
Bazerman (1994) writes about the active role of the reader, and remarks (p. 23): "The cure for real boredom is to find a more advanced book on the subject; the only cure for pseudo-boredom is to become fully and personally involved in the book already in front of you". Bazerman's book is informed by an advanced theoretical knowledge of scholarly research, documents and their composition. For example, chapter 6 is about "Recognizing the many voices in a text". The practical advises given are based on textual theory (Mikhail Bakhtin
and Julia Kristeva
). Chapter 8 is titled "Evaluating the book as a whole: The book review
", and the first heading is "books as tools".
) has demonstrated that the way we read and interpret texts is dependent on our "pre-understanding" and "prejudices". Human knowledge is always an interpretative clarification of the world, not a pure, interest-free theory. Hermeneutics may thus be understood as a theory about critical reading. This field was until recently associated with the humanities, not with science. This situation changed when Thomas Samuel Kuhn published his book (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which can be seen as an hermeneutic interpretation of the sciences because it conceives the scientists as governed by assumptions which are historically embedded and linguistically mediated activities organized around paradigms that direct the conceptualization and investigation of their studies. Scientific revolutions imply that one paradigm replaces another and introduces a new set of theories, approaches and definitions. According to Mallery; Hurwitz & Duffy (1992) the notion of a paradigm-centered scientific community is analogous to Gadamer's notion of a linguistically encoded social tradition. In this way hermeneutics challenge the positivist view that science can cumulate objective facts. Observations are always made on the background of theoretical assumptions: they are theory dependent.
By conclusion is critical reading not just something that any scholar is able to do. The way we read is partly determined by the intellectual traditions, which have formed our beliefs and thinking. Generally we read papers within our own culture or tradition less critically compared to our reading of papers from other traditions or "paradigms".
is known for his studies on the effect of heredity on intelligence. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance and intelligence came into disrepute after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data. Tucker's paper (1994) is illuminative on both how "critical reading" was performed in the discovery of the falsified data as well as in many famous psychologists "non-critical reading" of Burt's papers. Tucker shows that the recognized experts within the field of intelligence research blindly accepted Cyril Burt's research even though it was without scientific value and probably directly faked: They wanted to believe that IQ is hereditary and considered uncritically empirical claims supporting this view. This paper thus demonstrates how critical reading (and the opposite) may be related to beliefs as well as to interests and power structures.
Skepticism
Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...
that does not take a text at face value, but involves an examination of claims put forward in the text as well as implicit bias
Bias
Bias is an inclination to present or hold a partial perspective at the expense of alternatives. Bias can come in many forms.-In judgement and decision making:...
in the texts framing and selection of the information presented. The ability to read critically is an ability assumed to be present in scholars and to be learned in academic institutions.
"...a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what
he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick
out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of
prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. "
John Steinbeck, The Winter of our Discontent
Levels of understanding
Understanding of- Single words
- Single sentences (grammar)
- Text Compositions, rhetorics and genres
- Revealing ideological influences
There is no simple relations between these levels. As the hermeneutics have shown (see "the hermeneutic circle
Hermeneutic circle
-Definition and usage:The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the...
") are the understanding of the single words depending on the understanding of the text as a whole (as well as the culture in which the text is produced) and vice versa: You cannot understand a text if you do not understand the words in the text.
The critical reading of a given text thus implies a critical examination of the concepts used as well as of the soundness of the arguments and the value and relevance of the assumptions and the traditions on which the text is based.
"Reading between the lines" is the ability to uncover implicit messages and bias.
Symptomatic reading
Thurston (1993, p. 638) introduces the concept of "symptomatic reading": "Symptomatic reading is used in literary criticism as a means of analysing the presence of ideology in literary texts. French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser develops the technique of symptomatic reading in Reading Capital"The reciprocal nature of reading and writing
When you read, you have to seek information, and you are confronted with different views, which forces you to consider your own position. In this process, the reader is converted to a "writer", whether or not he writes or publishes his own ideas.Reading and writing are thus reciprocal processes, reading is an active process, and the best way to learn critical reading is probably by training academic writing.
Bazerman (1994) writes about the active role of the reader, and remarks (p. 23): "The cure for real boredom is to find a more advanced book on the subject; the only cure for pseudo-boredom is to become fully and personally involved in the book already in front of you". Bazerman's book is informed by an advanced theoretical knowledge of scholarly research, documents and their composition. For example, chapter 6 is about "Recognizing the many voices in a text". The practical advises given are based on textual theory (Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
and Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
). Chapter 8 is titled "Evaluating the book as a whole: The book review
Book review
A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and merit. A book review could be a primary source opinion piece, summary review or scholarly review. It is often carried out in periodicals, as school work, or on the internet. Reviews are also often...
", and the first heading is "books as tools".
Epistemological issues
Basically critical reading is related to epistemological issues. Hermeneutics (e.g., the version developed by Hans-Georg GadamerHans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method .-Life:...
) has demonstrated that the way we read and interpret texts is dependent on our "pre-understanding" and "prejudices". Human knowledge is always an interpretative clarification of the world, not a pure, interest-free theory. Hermeneutics may thus be understood as a theory about critical reading. This field was until recently associated with the humanities, not with science. This situation changed when Thomas Samuel Kuhn published his book (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which can be seen as an hermeneutic interpretation of the sciences because it conceives the scientists as governed by assumptions which are historically embedded and linguistically mediated activities organized around paradigms that direct the conceptualization and investigation of their studies. Scientific revolutions imply that one paradigm replaces another and introduces a new set of theories, approaches and definitions. According to Mallery; Hurwitz & Duffy (1992) the notion of a paradigm-centered scientific community is analogous to Gadamer's notion of a linguistically encoded social tradition. In this way hermeneutics challenge the positivist view that science can cumulate objective facts. Observations are always made on the background of theoretical assumptions: they are theory dependent.
By conclusion is critical reading not just something that any scholar is able to do. The way we read is partly determined by the intellectual traditions, which have formed our beliefs and thinking. Generally we read papers within our own culture or tradition less critically compared to our reading of papers from other traditions or "paradigms".
A famous example
The psychologist Cyril BurtCyril Burt
Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt was an English educational psychologist who made contributions to educational psychology and statistics....
is known for his studies on the effect of heredity on intelligence. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance and intelligence came into disrepute after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data. Tucker's paper (1994) is illuminative on both how "critical reading" was performed in the discovery of the falsified data as well as in many famous psychologists "non-critical reading" of Burt's papers. Tucker shows that the recognized experts within the field of intelligence research blindly accepted Cyril Burt's research even though it was without scientific value and probably directly faked: They wanted to believe that IQ is hereditary and considered uncritically empirical claims supporting this view. This paper thus demonstrates how critical reading (and the opposite) may be related to beliefs as well as to interests and power structures.
Literature
- Althusser, Louis & Balibar, Etienne (1970). Reading Capital. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books.
- Bazerman, Charles (1994). The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines. 5 edition. Houghton Mifflin Company.
- Brody, Roberta (2008). The Problem of Information Naïveté. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(7), 1124–1127.
- Eco, Umberto (1992). Interpretation and overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Ekegren, P. (1999). The Reading of Theoretical Texts. A Critique of Criticism in the Social Sciences. London: Routledge. (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 19).
- Halpern, D.F. (2003), Thought & Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, 4th ed., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.
- Kuhn, T. S. (1962, 1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Mallery, J. C.; Hurwitz, R. & Duffy, G. (1992). Hermeneutics. IN: Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. Vol. 1-2. 2nd ed. Ed. by S.C. Shapiro (Vol 1, pp. 596-611). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
- Riegelman, Richard K. (2004). Studying a Study and Testing a Test: How to Read the Medical Evidence. 5th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
- Slife, Brent D. & Williams, R. N. (1995). What's behind the research? Discovering hidden assumptions in the behavioral sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ("A Consumers Guide to the Behavioral Sciences").
- Thurston, John (1993). Symptomatic reading. IN: Encyclopedia of contemporary literary theory: Approaches, scholars, terms. Ed. by Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (P. 638).
- Tucker, William H. (1994). Facts and fiction in the discovery of Sir Cyril Burt's flaws. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 30, 335-347.
See also
- Critical literacyCritical literacyCritical Literacy is an instructional approach, stemming from Marxist Critical pedagogy, that advocates the adoption of "critical" perspectives toward text. Critical literacy encourages readers to actively analyze texts and offers strategies for what proponents describe as uncovering underlying...
- Critical thinkingCritical thinkingCritical thinking is the process or method of thinking that questions assumptions. It is a way of deciding whether a claim is true, false, or sometimes true and sometimes false, or partly true and partly false. The origins of critical thinking can be traced in Western thought to the Socratic...
- ExegesisExegesisExegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially a religious text. Traditionally the term was used primarily for exegesis of the Bible; however, in contemporary usage it has broadened to mean a critical explanation of any text, and the term "Biblical exegesis" is used...
- Information literacyInformation literacyThe National Forum on Information Literacy defines information literacy as “...the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand.” This is the most common definition; however,...
- Source criticismSource criticismA source criticism is a published source evaluation . An information source may be a document, a person, a speech, a fingerprint, a photo, an observation or anything used in order to obtain knowledge. In relation to a given purpose, a given information source may be more or less valid, reliable or...
External links
- Lye, John (1997). CRITICAL READING: A GUIDE
- What Is Critical Reading?