Getting Started and Stopping

Rarely is our thinking clearer than when a thought comes to us as if emerging in a single, powerful wave from a great silence.  Take a moment and recall one of those experiences of really clear understanding..

And then shift to the opposite experience, probably much more frequent, when thinking is clouded by trying to get too much done while we are being tossed on the choppy seas of multiple competing obligations and desires.  It's an unpleasant space best exited as quickly as possible.  Under those conditions, people trying to make good decisions have the cards stacked against them.

These experiences of thinking are very different from one another, but what is it that makes this striking difference?  Whether we call it consciousness or mindfulness or awareness, the reference is the same: first and foremost, clear thinking is about taking possession of our own minds and remembering to do this when people and things around us try to pull us into one kind of distraction or another.  Since there are always myriad attractions and demands competing for mindshare, maintaining mindfulness is a process of constant renewal.  One way to think of maintaining mindfulness is as keeping an open mind and a fresh perspective always.  Many people will assert that they do keep an open mind and a fresh perspective, and perhaps they do; our concern must be with ourselves.  We will know we are succeeding at open-mindedness when our internal dialogue subsides, the plans and calculations take a rest, and the world presents itself simply as vibrantly alive, reflecting itself back to us in, as the Buddhists say, its "suchness."   Recalling this reference point in times of stress and pressure gives us a grounding that we and others quickly learn to appreciate.

While mindfulness is good anywhere and always, we all know that there are times when the pressure is especially on and that in these times there can be much at stake for ourselves and others in the quality of our thinking.  At a conference on critical thinking, one of the presenters was asked what her definition of critical thinking was.  It is not at all unusual for instructors of critical thinking to have a definition they prefer, and our speaker was no exception.  Her definition of critical thinking, however, caused quite a stir.  "Empowerment in a crisis," she answered.  Critical thinking doesn't need a crisis to kick into gear, of course, but when a situation does get critical, we want the kind of thinking that has critical in its name to be right there at our service.

Deciding on an approach

Whether we are faced with a single decision or have had a bucket of questions tossed in our direction all at once, there is a better probability of good outcomes if we respond thoughtfully rather than in an uncritical, knee-jerk fashion.  There is some romance attached to "shooting from the hip," but unless that's where your brains are located, it's advisable to situate your metaphorical organ of effective response elsewhere.

One way of constructing a critical response to a situation is, perhaps paradoxically, to deconstruct it.  The sense in which we intend the term here is positive in that critical analysis should have the function of adding to our understanding of a situation.  So while "deconstruction" may sound like an exercise in fault-finding negativity, it is not focused on being that kind of analysis.

Deconstruction is concerned with analyzing texts of all sorts to keep their discourse alive, not to shut them down.  This textually-oriented analysis suits the purposes of critical thinking well, because if you think about it, all of our ideas about situations beyond the most rudimentary sense data are representations in language and images.  This is what texts are: language and image.  In a very general sense, our minds are always working with texts.  Sometimes we are working with a text toward a particular goal or in response to a challenge or for the pleasure of the exploration.  Whatever the case, a deconstructive approach reminds us to consider a variety of possibilities of understanding the text at hand.  The main point here is to realize that we do not need to have something that is physically written in front of us to make use of methods of textual analysis when we decide it is time to stop and  think about something.  

One question that must occur early on is whether textual analysis methods are too complex and unwieldy to use when we have to think quickly in the fast-moving situations of daily life.  It's a reasonable question, especially if one has encountered some of the breathtakingly subtle analyses that are to be found in the literature of deconstruction.  But deconstructive methods are not necessarily reserved for those with much time on their hands.   Indeed, the primary mission of the Critical Points approach is to enable useful critical thinking to occur at various levels of detail and with varying amounts of available background information.  Some situations will work out fine if we keep analysis light and minimal, while others call for deep involvement in which we have to give it everything we've got.  The main point here is that different levels and types of analysis will be appropriate in different situations; our task here is to be flexible in our thinking and skillful enough in the techniques of thinking to be capable of whatever sort of analysis a situation calls for. 

There are two basic ways to approach a text, whether written, spoken, or imagined: holistically or piece by piece.  Metaphorically, holistic reading is like looking at the forest, while piece-by-piece reading is like looking at the trees.  In a holistic approach, one simply takes what comes as an observer and lets the various elements of the text flit across the screen of awareness and coalesce into a set of impressions of the whole piece.  This is a quick way of getting whatever the text is trying to convey, though generally at the expense of the details.  Obviously, in a text that is all about details, such as a technical manual or a contract, holistic reading has very limited utility, though even these texts lend themselves to holistic reading as part of the development of a tentative understanding of a thing or a situation.

Approaching a text with a piece-by-piece intentionality commits one to a slower process that requires establishing piece boundaries (because the pieces won't come pre-carved up for your particular method of analysis) and then examination of the text for the presence or absence of some pre-determined characteristics that contribute to its overall level of success or failure.  The way characteristics are pre-determined may be very specific or it may be general, but the fact is we will not notice what we re not prepared to notice; it is in this broad sense that we say we examine a text for pre-determined characteristics.  Piece-by-piece reading only makes sense if one already has a theoretical framework in mind that the pieces can fit into; otherwise, piece-by-piece reading leaves one with a heap of idea fragments and no usable sense of what the text was trying to impart.  This is true whether the theoretical framework is narrow, such as a biological theory, or maximally encompassing, which we generally think of as a world-view.  

Premature reliance on piece-by-piece analysis leads to confusion.  For example, beginning to investigate an unfamiliar topic with a well-intentioned occupation with details is one of the known patterns of ineffective studying; students using this approach to the material memorize many fragments of a text but do not have the big picture in mind that would enable them to grasp how the parts fit together.  If there are many details to master, it may seem more efficient to get right down to work analyzing or memorizing them, but it is best to survey the situation to get a general idea of the lay of the land before immersing oneself in details.  This way, there is a basic organizational scheme to help keep conceptual order.  Every analysis, even a deconstruction that eventually demonstrates multiple centers of attention, needs a point of departure. Once a holistic reading is done, focusing on points that catch one's attention is a good way to get started on an analysis that will develop one's own line without being encumbered by the fantasy of being all things to all people, of covering everything that could possibly be useful or significant. Seeing what happens when one re-reads using words, phrases, and maybe even apparent gaps in the text that call attention to themselves can help focus attention and give one potentially useful reference points. A good metaphor of piece-by-piece reading might be stars and balck holes; the stars attract our attention and the black holes, while not directly visible, are indirectly perceptible because they somewhat distort the texts n which they are embedded.

Both the holistic and piece-by-piece ways of reading or hearing can contribute their own unique insights, but we can see that there are times when one is more likely to contribute to clear thinking  than the other..  Moreover, even though people may have their temperamental preferences--some people seem to like to think of themselves as more intuitive and some might like to think of themselves as more detail-oriented analytical types--there is no hard and fast rule that says one or the other is always better.  Beyond this basic distinction, of course, lies the range of theoretical options: the various natural scientific, social, psychological, metaphysical, and other explanatory systems that people use to make sense of the world.  Open-minded thinking is ready to do what the situation calls for.  So fortunately, there is no requirement that we choose any one way of approaching texts to the exclusion of the other.  Intentionally utilizing both holistic and piece-by-piece reading gets us the best of both worlds, which is exactly what we propose to do in the Critical Points method, and being aware of the myriad theoretical options for interpretation puts many conceptual tools at our disposal.  It is sometimes said that if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; the Critical Points method encourages us to assemble a diverse set of interpretive tools.  It also encourages us to stop and consider what tools we want to use before get to work on a problem.