Criticality is a verb, an action towards the ends of excavating

Processing information using observation, discernment, synthesis, analysis, and critical thinking as ways to draw conclusions and make good determinations

Feb 10, 2023

Image is a photo of a misty evergreen forest with cream text in block letters that says: BEYOND THE ALTAR and CRITICALITY. The two words are separated by a cream divider line.

Hey everyone, I hope you are doing well as we are fully entrenched in mid-winter, and I hope you’re all finding ways to stay warm and cozy in community. This essay begins our conversation about criticality, and how to move forward in discernment about the information we consume which, if you’re anything like me, just continues to increase over time as we have more and more access to different platforms, voices, and avenues to learn from. Let us begin!

Criticality is a way of processing information that differs a bit from criticism or critique. Criticality as a method, or a framework, isn’t as much about drawing a conclusive analysis as much as it’s about looking at the world through multiple lenses to discern the objective, purpose, reasoning, positionality, accuracy, validity, or relevance of any given thing. To be critical is to exercise judgment, discernment, inquiry, and draw comparisons to form a conclusion. Criticality opens up the ability to read or view something and go beyond the surface of what’s being said to peel back the layers and look deeper at the material.

Criticality seems to be more about the process of asking, than declaring. What sort of questions can be asked of the material and its author? How do we identify the explanations behind what we’re seeing? What are the sources? Who is the material meant for and does it include pathways to understanding for everyone? Where have we seen this discussed, before, ever? Who is included, or excluded from the conversation? Can we identify multiple points of view on the issue or the topic, and are they included? If not, how do we diversify our sources to learn more perspectives? We don’t—or we shouldn’t—ask these questions to preemptively dismiss someone or prove them wrong, or catch them in some kind of inconsistency. Inquiry isn’t a spiteful endeavor. Inquiry is a process of determination. After asking rigorous questions and disassembling the material, you may find that you agree. You might find that you don’t. The agreement or the disagreement isn’t necessarily the point. It’s the disassembly, and reassembly, that is.

So to be critical doesn’t mean to be disparaging or dismissive. What it means is that when exercising criticality, we’re practicing healthy skepticism, not taking things for face value, seeking more than one or even two or three sources for information, and drawing conclusions based on multiple streams of evidence—synthesizing. It means asking how this information came about, where it came from, in which context it appears, and what its overall objective is. It means exercising caution before engaging a reaction. It means analyzing the situation, breaking down language and the way it's used, and digging into the source material. Criticality is a useful tool for identifying insidious and harmful rhetoric and even propaganda from government entities and political organizations to harmful ideology across pop culture and social media. It can be applied to material propagating in our communities, and to ourselves too—in drawing conclusions, making claims, or otherwise exercising judgment or flexing an opinion; we might turn criticality inward to ask these same questions of ourselves, to employ the same lenses of examination and analysis to ourselves; to push ourselves beyond the initial appearance, treatment, and statement to get beyond the surface treatment. We are peeling back the strata and substrata to understand how the soil is formed, as well as how it is nurtured. Criticality, critical thinking, discernment, and inquiry—these are the tools we use to excavate.

To note: I don’t personally believe there is such a thing as true objectivity. Our understanding or our practice of objectivity is going to be consciously and unconsciously shaped by what we've learned, and that will shape the biases we've formed about how information is given and received. I think it's fair to say that we can receive and evaluate information without assigning a value judgment or any judgments too hastily, to gather multiple streams of information first before drawing conclusions. But that is the closest I think we can get. Confronting our own biases, lived experiences, positionality, and limitations is a big part of finding solid ground to whatever measure we can.

Overall, I think exercising criticality means we’re not jumping to conclusions. Whatever the material is may be correct, true, or factual; it may be partially any of these; it may be incorrect, untrue, and not rooted in fact. The material may be aligned with our interests, worldview, biases, beliefs, and/or values; or it might stand in direct opposition with these. Any of these circumstances can lead to confirmation bias, which we also have to dismantle to resist forming preconceived conclusions. There are exceptions, of course. But I’m not talking about trying to align ourselves with anything that immediately stands out as being antithetical to our value system, I’m not talking about giving truly horrific and problematic works a chance to interpret the nuance. I'm talking about things you’ll come across most days, whether it’s the news or social media, anything that might pull in the slow creep of antithetical viewpoints and perspectives when we’re not paying close attention. The practice of criticality takes into consideration not only the facts of a thing, but the historical, cultural, and political contexts of the thing. What surrounds it matters as much as anything it says or does.

The word “criticality” is a very sort of academic term—I’ve learned about this term and practice through critical writing and research practices in the visual arts, but philosophy also uses this word, the way the arts do. Terms are regularly coined and employed because specificity is continually identified and applied. So the way I see it is, the word criticality denotes an action that is different from critique, criticism, or even analysis on their own, to sort of combine the actions of all of these practices and methods of evaluation and the discernment of information. It’s really another way of saying critical thinking, but critical thinking that not only intends to make a decision based on assessing information, but also seeks to identify nuance, without necessarily requiring the finality of an answer. To me, the more generative work is in the expansiveness of identifying questions, though it is also true that the lack of definitive answers makes people the most uncomfortable. Still, I strongly feel that is when and where the real work begins. So criticality, as a part of the practice of critical thinking, establishes a framework that continually builds upon itself to be applied across a broad range of instances.

Let me use an analogy that just came to mind. When I was a kid, I wanted to understand the insides of an analog alarm clock—you know, the kind that we see in really old cartoons with the two bells on top and a round face. I took it apart, inspected each part and its neighbor to see how they fit and worked together. I wondered if there were any parts the machine could do without or parts that were critically necessary for it to function, and then I put it back together. Not only did I learn about that clock, but a lot about timepieces in general, as well as the function and characteristics of machinery, to some degree.

So, the analogy here works because once you know how break down something like a newspaper article, a paper, or any kind of text to understand the parts of it that make up a whole—which is why I included George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language in the reading list—you understand the inner workings of a piece and how to put it all back together; and then you can apply that to anything else you read. My interest in this is how we might break down a text to see all of the different pieces of how it works, what its rhetoric is and does, what its claims are and whether or not they’re substantiated, how it applies its defenses. (The worksheet provided for the seminar course kind of shows you a bit of this process, by using question prompts like this) So we apply criticality to determine if the information is believable and what's convincing about it or suspicious about it; do we agree or disagree; you know, is this writing actually saying anything at all or is it just fluff, and full of words that don’t convey any ideas at all?

This is all criticality. And it's different from criticism in the sense that while it is an interrogation to see what fails or what succeeds, the goal is not necessarily—no, the goal is not—to engage the author or the audience in a debate about this or motivate the author to apply the criticism to effect change in some way, or influence an audience to think some way about it. Criticality is a tool we’re using largely for ourselves, to use our discernment and make determinations about the information we receive to draw our own conclusions. That in turn impacts the way we move through the world, the way we share knowledge and information, the way we are able to right wrongs, and how we can establish more reliable methods of interpretation and communication. Criticality is a radical practice of expanding our engagement with the world around us and sharing all that we learn and know, in better ways.

As always, I consider this a conversation with you, not a lecture at you! So let’s take it to the Discord, either in the topic of the month channel, or the criticality channel. And tell me how your own criticality experiment is going—what’s working for you, what’s not working for you? What have you observed in this practice, so far?

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