Introduction

The Critical Points method, like the methods of critical thinking developed before it, is an attempt to find an emphasis or orientation for analysis that will favor clear thinking.  It makes some use of formal pattern matching, focused on logic and rhetoric, but this evolution in critical thinking grows out of a recognition of a particular danger in a pattern-matching strategy, namely, a steep learning curve.  To succeed in this type of approach, one must enter the situation equipped with an extensive and deeply-understood inventory of logical and/or rhetorical patterns and then evaluate the text at hand for its inclusion or avoidance of the good and bad patterns in the inventory.  In the hands of an expert practitioner, this approach can yield some very pointed analyses, but one needs a high level of skill to make it work credibly in real-world situations.  The same is ultimately true about a social critique approach to critical thinking, which includes logic and rhetoric, but contextualizes them within social problematics.  While the inherent perspectivism in discussions of social problematics may allow for interesting discourse without invoking the available inventory of logical and rhetorical forms, it is still skill in these classical categories that will close the deal with a discerning audience.  The Critical Points approach has much in common with these other modes of critical thinking in that it concerns itself with logic, rhetoric, and context while also retaining concern for the bottom-line need to make good decisions.  Unlike most systematic methods of critical thinking,  however, in which doing a usefully circumspect analysis generally requires mastery of that large set of concepts and techniques that have been developed to classify recurring patterns of effective and ineffective thinking, the Critical Points method puts detailed classification and examination of context more into the background.

While the influence of Analytic thought is evident at virtually every turn, the Critical Points method is more proximally grounded in three sources that may appear to be both marginally relevant and dramatically divergent, but that actually each have something valuable to contribute to the project of analytical thinking: (1) the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points methodology, a quality assurance technique originally developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to minimize the likelihood of food-based problems on space flights and now being applied gradually to many areas of the American food supply, and (2) the I Ching, or Book of Changes, a manual of divination commonly taken to be the oldest book in Chinese literature, and (3) a variety of deconstruction, a method of textual analysis rooted in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time that (to oversimplify) takes note of how a text creates, acknowledges, develops, ignores, or denies relationships, logical or narrative gaps in texts, and possibilities of extension.  If this suggests that the Critical Points method is something of a departure from the Analytic approach that dominates the sub-discipline of critical thinking, then the impression has been correctly made.

Since the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) methodology is generally outside the experience of instructors and students of critical thinking, it bears some explanation for those who are interested in background information.  HACCP is a quality control methodology that was developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for NASA to minimize risks of food-borne disease to astronauts.  In its present form, it is based on seven principles:

• Analyze hazards. Potential hazards associated with a food and measures to control those hazards are identified. The hazard could be biological, such as a microbe; chemical, such as a toxin; or physical, such as ground glass or metal fragments.

• Identify critical control points. These are points in a food's production--from its raw state through processing and shipping to consumption by the consumer--at which the potential hazard can be controlled or eliminated. Examples are cooking, cooling, packaging, and metal detection.

• Establish preventive measures with critical limits for each control point. For a cooked food, for example, this might include setting the minimum cooking temperature and time required to ensure the elimination of any harmful microbes.

• Establish procedures to monitor the critical control points. Such procedures might include determining how and by whom cooking time and temperature should be monitored.

• Establish corrective actions to be taken when monitoring shows that a critical limit has not been met--for example, reprocessing or disposing of food if the minimum cooking temperature is not met.

• Establish procedures to verify that the system is working properly--for example, testing time-and-temperature recording devices to verify that a cooking unit is working properly.

• Establish effective recordkeeping to document the HACCP system. This would include records of hazards and their control methods, the monitoring of safety requirements and action taken to correct potential problems. Each of these principles must be backed by sound scientific knowledge: for example, published microbiological studies on time and temperature factors for controlling foodborne pathogens.

(FDA document BG 01-4)

One might wonder what this has to do with critical thinking, but that connection should become evident in the pages of this text.  We will be focusing on two related concepts of the HACCP methodology that can be adapted to be especially useful for critical thinking purposes: Flow Analysis and Danger Zones.  In the HACCP system, Flow Analysis calls for tracking food through its entire production cycle.  Danger Zones are points in food handling where spoilage or contamination may occur.  We will adapt HACCP's notion of Flow Analysis by thinking it in terms of deconstruction, in which one follows the flow of a text in order to decide where interrupting that flow will best serve the purposes of the analysis.  For critical thinking purposes, the task of Flow Analysis is to document what occurs at or close to the surface in a spoken or written text, including 

• introduction of problem statements

• identification of concepts and phenomena calling for explanation and any explanations provided

• theses and conclusions

• assertion of facts and beliefs

• stipulations and definitions

While this brief overview might seem to suggest that Flow Analysis is just renamed pattern-matching, there is a difference in the intentionality of the reader that focuses on preliminary intuitions as a way to bring Change Zones into focus.

The notion of Change Zones derives from HACCP's Danger Zones.  The identification of Change Zones is aimed at making clear where 

• new information is being introduced or 

• a change in the acknowledged truth value of a claim logically or illogically occurs or is being made more likely to occur

Attentiveness to such conditions of change should better enable the reader/hearer to mobilize such intellectual resources as may be available than if the text were simply allowed to flow unchallenged according to the author's will.  The space opened up by this attentiveness makes possible the reflective moment in which critical thinking can occur.

The theory behind the Critical Points method admittedly draws on a unusual array of sources that will be unfamiliar in one way or another to almost everyone. The method itself, however, is intended to be simple enough to reduce the overhead needed to bring a useful level of critical thinking to the table and yet sophisticated enough that it can support analyses able to hold their own in the contemporary critical milieu.  As such, it is flexible in its inventory of deductive and inductive techniques, fallacies, etc.  Those included in this text simply seemed to be among the most commonly occurring or most helpful to know.  If that knowledge comes more easily through use of this method and facilitates a quality of analysis that reveals aspects of texts otherwise obscure, we would have to reckon this undertaking a success.