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Critical thinking and disciplinary

thinking: a continuing debate
a b
Tim John Moore
a
Faculty of Higher Education, Lilydale , Swinburne University of
Technology , Melbourne, Australia
b
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics , Monash
University , Melbourne, Australia
Published online: 03 May 2011.

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 Higher Education Research & Development
Vol. 30, No. 3, June 2011, 261–274

Critical thinking and disciplinary thinking: a continuing debate

Tim John Moore*

Faculty of Higher Education, Lilydale, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne,

Australia; School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University, Melbourne,
Australia
(Received 18 November 2009; final version received 4 May 2010)
Taylor and Francis
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10.1080/07294360.2010.501328
0729-4360
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2011
30Article
30
Dr
tjmoore@swin.edu.au
000002011
TimMoore
&
Education
Francis
(print)/1469-8366
Research &(online)
Development

I report a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking across three disciplines:
Philosophy, History and Literary Studies. The findings point to a diversity of
understandings and practices, ones that suggest the limitations of a more generic
approach. I argue that a more useful conception of critical thinking is as a form of
‘metacritique’ – where the essential quality to be encouraged in students is a
flexibility of thought and the ability to negotiate a range of different critical modes.
Keywords: critical thinking; disciplinary discourses; graduate attributes

For the learning of every virtue, there is an appropriate discipline. (Bertrand Russell)

Introduction
Writing more than a decade ago, Dwight Atkinson (1997) in an influential article, A
critical approach to critical thinking’, described critical thinking as ‘one of the most
widely discussed concepts in education and education reform these days’ (p. 71). It is
fair to say that, 10 years on, interest in the issue shows little sign of waning. Indeed,
in the intervening years we have seen the term become more and more a part of higher
educational discourses. The concept, for example, continues to figure prominently in
discussions and policies around the notions of generic skills and graduate attributes.
Recent years have also seen the emergence of a significant number of stand-alone
critical thinking courses in institutions, often run under the auspices of university
philosophy programs (e.g. van Gelder, 2005). Also appearing on the scene have been
a range of tests purporting to test students’ acquisition of critical thinking, in Australia
seen most notably in the DEST-sponsored Graduate Skills Assessment (ACER, 2010).
In debates about critical thinking, there is perhaps one single point on which virtu-
ally all agree, this is that teaching students to be ‘critical’ in their studies is an intrinsic
good and that it is this, perhaps more than anything else, that should be the goal of a
higher education. The possession of a critical outlook is seen not only as an essential
part of engaging with knowledge in the academy, but also crucially to being an
engaged citizen in the world (Barnett, 1997). But beyond consensus around the basic
desirability of this quality, there is – one must concede – a good deal of disagreement
and dispute. A central issue is the question of what critical thinking is exactly and

*Email: tjmoore@swin.edu.au

ISSN 0729-4360 print/ISSN 1469-8366 online

© 2011 HERDSA
DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2010.501328
http://www.informaworld.com
 262 T.J. Moore

whether we can ever hope to define it in some simple and unproblematic way. Does it
mean, for example, as Iago in Othello suggested, a propensity to see fault in whatever
one is considering? Or is it something more akin to a method – what an analytical
philosopher has in mind when he sets out to teach his students the skills of critical
reasoning. Or alternatively is it better seen as some ethical quality – of the type, for
example, suggested in the Marxian concept of critical consciousness. The term is, as
Raymond Williams (1976) has suggested, a ‘most difficult one’ (p. 74).
But underlying these difficult definitional issues is arguably a more basic question
– this is whether critical thinking should be thought of as some universal and abstract
category, or whether it is really just a ‘catch-all’ term that takes in a wide and disparate
variety of modes of thinking. Protagonists in this part of the debate have tended to fall
into two groups – generalists and specifists. For the former group, critical thinking can
be distilled down to a finite set of constitutive skills, ones that can be learned in a
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systematic way and which have applicability across all academic disciplines (e.g.
Ennis, 1992; Facione, 1990). The rival specifist position is skeptical – indeed ‘critical’
– of such an approach. This is for the reason that critical thinking, they say, is always
contextual and intimately tied to the particular subject matter with which one is
concerned (Atkinson, 1997; Clinchy, 1994; McPeck, 1992). While the terms of this
controversy, on the face of it, may seem arcane and with little obvious relevance to
the experiences of teaching and learning on university programs, the outcomes of the
debate do seem important. This is because, as a number of scholars have noted, the
ways in which key attributes like critical thinking are understood and conceptualised
in our institutions are likely to have a major bearing on the shaping of university
curricula and of higher education policy as a whole (Barnett, 2004; Barrie & Prosser,
2004; Taylor, 2000).
In this article I wish to review some of the ideas that have been advanced in this
debate – including recent contributions made both by the editor of this issue, Martin
Davies, and myself – before presenting some findings from a recent study that inves-
tigated ideas about critical thinking across a number of discipline areas. The study’s
findings point to a diversity of understandings and practices, ones that suggest the
limitations of a more generic approach to critical thinking. But, it does not necessarily
follow that our efforts should be directed towards teaching students to be expert in a
range of different types of thinking. I argue instead that a more useful conception of
critical thinking in the academy is as a form of ‘metacritique’ – where the essential
quality to be encouraged is a flexibility of thought and the ability to negotiate a range
of different critical modes.

The generalisability debate

Two of the more active protagonists in this debate have been Robert Ennis and John
McPeck – indeed, in the good spirit of critical inquiry, it seems that a fair amount of
their published output has been devoted to the critiquing of the other’s position. For
Ennis (1987), critical thinking is at heart a universal and generic quality – what he
defines as ‘reasonable, reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do’
(p. 10). Because it is general, Ennis believes critical thinking can be taught as an inde-
pendent area of study in itself, quite separate from any specific discipline-based
content. A key element of Ennis’ theorizing has been to compile a systematic list of
discrete skills which not only describes, he says, what an accomplished critical thinker
does, but also suggests what it is exactly a novice thinker needs to be taught. These
 Higher Education Research & Development 263

skills – which include ‘grasping the meaning of statements, judging ambiguities,

assumptions or contradictions in reasoning, identifying necessary conclusions’ (p. 12)
– are proposed then as the basis for ‘stand-alone’ generic thinking skills courses.
Importantly, Ennis believes that such skills, once acquired, are readily transferable to
a multiplicity of domains.
For McPeck (1981), critical thinking is not some universal quality, but one that
exhibits a good deal of variation and which is shaped irredeemably by ‘the particular
problem area under consideration’ (p. 7). McPeck believes strongly that there is a
discipline basis to such variation:

Just as the rules of a particular game do not necessarily apply to other games, so certain
principles of reason may apply within certain spheres of human experience, but not in
others. A principle in business or law may be fallacious in science or ethics. (p. 72)
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McPeck (1992) does concede that there are limited general thinking skills of the type
proposed by Ennis, but is sure that ‘they offer little to get excited about’ (p. 202). This
is because, he suggests, the more general is the skill, the more trivially obvious it
seems to be – like ‘not contradicting one’s self, or not believing everything one hears’
(p. 202). For McPeck, the truly useful thinking skills tend to be limited to specific
domains or narrower areas of application. The implication for teaching of the McPeck
‘specifist’ position is that the development of students’ critical abilities is always best
pursued within the context of their study within the disciplines.
The issues covered by Ennis and McPeck have also had some airing in recent times
in the pages of HERD in an exchange conducted between myself and Martin Davies
(Davies, 2006; Moore, 2004). In my article, ‘The critical thinking debate’, I sought to
subject the generalisability hypothesis to some scrutiny by analysing a sample of ‘crit-
ical thinking’ texts taken from a range of disciplines. Whilst the limited sample size
used in my analysis precluded the drawing of any firm conclusions, the evidence of
these texts was that the function of critique can take a variety of forms and involve
quite a range of different judgment types. Significantly, it seemed to me that some of
the judgments evident in these texts – especially those with a more literary or aesthetic
dimension to them – were quite alien from the ones that typically feature in critical
thinking taxonomies such as Ennis’. The conclusion drawn from this small study –
very much a provisional one – was that whilst there is unlikely to be any harm for
students participating in general thinking programs, it is probably misplaced to imag-
ine that ideas about critical thinking promoted in them can provide a comprehensive
foundation for the many different problems and contexts students will encounter in
their studies.
Davies’ response was a spirited defence of the generic version of critical thinking.
Whilst accepting that there is certainly variation at the edges, Davies (2006) holds to
the view that underlying any diversity is a set of core thinking skills, which he
suggests ‘can be applied to the forms of discourse of the disciplines’ (p. 181). For
Davies, these core skills mainly consist in students being able to ‘understand patterns
of general inference’ (p. 190). Davies endorses the Ennis approach and also quotes at
length a more recent generic program – that proposed by Ikuenobe (2001, p. 21),
covering such putative skills as:

● understanding concepts of argument, premise, conclusion, propositions

(statements),
 264 T.J. Moore

● identifying statements from non-statements, and isolat[ing] premises and

conclusions,
● understanding the concepts of truth and validity, soundness and fallacy, and
● identifying fallacies in inferences and explain why they are fallacious.

The type of program envisaged by Davies, what he calls an ‘infusion’ approach, is in

two parts: in the first part, students are trained in the type of ‘inferencing’ skills,
outlined above, in the second, they seek to contextualise these skills to the particular
content domains of their studies. It is the assumption that such skills are transferable
– and indeed have demonstrable relevance – to a range of disciplinary contexts that
the specifist position finds contentious (McPeck [1981] – see also Salomon and
Perkins [1989] for a discussion of the transfer problem).
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The generalisability debate, which has now run for several decades, has reached –
one must acknowledge – something of an impasse. In such discussions we have
become, as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) might declare, like flies buzzing endlessly in
a fly bottle (p. 103). The problem with much of the debate – including the contribu-
tions cited here by myself and Davies – is that it has tended to occur largely in some
isolated ‘vitrinous’ realm, detached from the domains in which critical thinking actu-
ally needs to be applied – that is, in the ‘lifeworld’ of the courses that students actually
study. Atkinson (1997) in fact suggests that much of the theorising about critical
thinking is really just ‘desiderative and polemical’ in nature, rather than rooted in any
actual educational reality (p. 74). Indeed, one has to admit to a lack of empirical
evidence in many of the claims made about the nature of critical thinking that goes on
(or that it is hoped goes on) in our educational institutions. The study I report on below
is a modest attempt to address this gap.

Critical thinking and disciplinary thinking – a recent study

The study sought to shift the focus away from general theorising about critical think-
ing and to find out how the concept is actually understood by practicing academics
working in the disciplines (see also Jones [2007] for another recent empirical study).
The method used was a broadly ethnographic one, focusing both on how the concept
of critical thinking was talked about by informants in interview and also on how it was
constructed in a range of texts used by them in their teaching. The rationale for such
an approach was the belief that those primarily involved in the cultivating of students’
intellectual abilities (including their ability to think critically) should be thought of as
an indispensable source of knowledge about our elusive concept. And, perhaps more
importantly, it was thought that this group’s particular apprehensions of the concept
are crucial somehow to the meanings it assumes in practice.
The study confined itself to investigating three discipline areas – Philosophy,
History and Literary/Cultural Studies – all from within the one faculty, Arts. This
choice of disciplines was a deliberate one. I wanted to cover areas that were closely
related in an educational sense, ones which students may find themselves studying
concurrently and where any differences in critical modes may be relevant to their
experience of study. Participants in the study were academics working in each of the
three disciplines, with about six representatives from each area. The central question
asked of my informants was what they thought critical thinking meant in the context
of their teaching. They were also asked to elaborate on the types of academic tasks set
for students on their courses and to speculate about how ideas of critique might be
 Higher Education Research & Development 265

similar or different across their faculty (see Moore [2011, forthcoming] for detailed
discussion of method).

Finding 1: so what is critical thinking?

The first point to make is that, without exception, all informants in the study thought
the idea of being ‘critical’ absolutely central to their teaching and to their academic
outlook generally. Thus, for example, one of the philosophers described critical thinking
as ‘absolutely our discipline’s bread and butter’, for one of the historians ‘the demon-
strating of a critical approach’ was the quality, more than anything else, that ‘separated
out the really successful students’ and for an informant from Literary Studies it was
teaching students to be ‘critics’ that ‘we’re basically on about in this discipline’.
In their attempts to give an account of what critical thinking means, a key theme
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to emerge from the interview discussions was that it always somehow involved the
‘making of judgments’. The following are examples of some of the more generic
statements from each of the three discipline areas (italicized phrases show my
emphasis):

Critical thinking always means judgment and the making of distinctions of some kind.
(History informant 1)

Being critical is about the rendering of verdicts. … To convey [this idea] I like to say to
students, ‘Would it profit you to read the entirety of Aristotle’s work, and form no view
whether it’s bullshit or not?’ (Philosophy informant 1)

Being critical, it’s about taking a stand. You have to commit as a critic. (Literary Studies
informant 1)

But whilst there was agreement at this more general level, when asked about the
nature of the judgments that students need to make, some clear divergences emerged.
The predominant view among the philosophers, for example, was that such judgments
needed fundamentally to be evaluative ones, as suggested in the following accounts:

In explaining what being critical is, I say to my students ‘if someone is talking to you
and they’re saying this is my argument. And what they give you is not an argument, you
should be able to pull them up and say that was not an argument. What you’ve given
doesn’t support the conclusion’. (Philosophy informant 2)

In general terms, I would say [critical thinking is] the capacity to cut through accepted
ideas and beliefs … to recognise and evaluate them. (Philosophy informant 3)

I say to students … you want to [learn to be critical] because it will in fact make you
sharp. You will be the person past whom people cannot push bullshit. … You’ll be the
sharpest knife in the drawer. (Philosophy informant 1)

In such statements, we can see that an important part of being critical here is the adopt-
ing of a skeptical – even agonistic – view towards the knowledge and ideas one is
presented with. Such a view is evident in the dominant metaphors used in these
descriptions, ones of being ‘incisive’ (even ‘surgical’); for example, ‘cutting through
ideas’ or ‘being a sharp knife’.
From my informants in the other disciplines, the accounts took on a different
flavour. Several of the historians, for example, thought that to be critical in history did
 266 T.J. Moore

not so much involve the ‘rendering of judgments’ on the arguments of others, as the
ability to draw on various sources and materials to develop one’s own arguments. An
interesting contrast with the philosophers was the use of a quite different type of
metaphorical language in their accounts – not one of ‘cutting down’, but of ‘building
up’ (‘constructing’, ‘assembling’, ‘putting together’):

[Being critical in History] is concerned … with the sources and the way in which you
use them. It’s building on the sources, or organising them in a particular way to construct
a particular … picture of the past. (History informant 2)

In my course [critical thinking] is mainly about trying to hear from one’s sources and
then to assemble something from that. (History informant 3)

Several of my history informants said they found it necessary in their classes in fact
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to emphasise this more constructive mode over an explicitly evaluative one. In their
view, this latter mode was one that many students were too readily inclined to fall into,
and was, in their observations, the ‘easy’ part of being critical:

[students] can’t sit back and say how clever I am, I dismantled ‘x’. [I say] ‘well that’s
great … now you’ve got to put it back together again, that’s the really difficult part’.
(History informant 3)

When quizzed about these different senses of being critical, one of my historian infor-
mants believed that they could be traced, in fact, to basic differences between histo-
riographical and philosophical modes of thinking:

It seems to me that philosophers are interested in the processes of argumentation. As I

see it, the historian is less interested in judging the logic of an argument than in whether
what has been put together is an historically-documented case. (History Informant 2)

My informants from Literary Studies were also inclined to play down the role of
explicit evaluation. According to one, judgments of these kinds are often made a
priori, as it were, before the commencement of a course, when staff decide on the list
of texts to be studied:

… we are less obviously critical about the texts we study. In selecting them for a course,
we have in a sense given them the benefit of the doubt. I’m never totally uncritical, but
if I’m teaching a Shakespearean play, we’re not going to say ‘Shakespeare was a defi-
cient playwright, wasn’t he’. Instead the questions we ask is: ‘why do such texts have
value as literature?’ (Literary Studies informant 2)

For the Literary Studies informants, the preferred critical mode thus was not one of
standing in judgment of texts per se, but, rather, for students to develop their own
particular interpretation of them. The types of metaphor typically invoked in their
commentaries were ones of ‘making connections’ and thinking in some ‘lateral’ way.

… the most exciting thing is when in a sense students move sideways – where they make
a connection between the text that you’ve given them and something else – either
another text from elsewhere, or some literary concept, or their own personal experience.
It’s the lateral thinking that counts. (Literary Studies informant 3)

… so you always seek to create something positive out of your critical engagement
with a text. Students need to look and see if there is some interesting element here that
 Higher Education Research & Development 267

they could pick up and run with, to head in a different direction. (Literary Studies
informant 4)

As with the historians, some of the Literary Studies academics noted the tendency for
some students to equate being critical simply with being negative:

Recently I’ve found myself calling on students to be less damningly critical … too many
assume [that their chief task] is to do a hatchet job on all these misinformed writers from
the past. (Literary Studies informant 4)

This particular informant was keen to point out that in Literary Studies, or at least in
some strands of it, there is increasingly a rejection of overly robust forms of critique;
what she thought should be encouraged instead, was a more empathetic engagement
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with one’s subject matter – an ‘understanding’:

The hatchet job motive is referred to in some quarters, especially in feminist quarters, as
a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. … So the point is not to condemn, but to try and under-
stand the legacy of a certain way of thinking which became predominant under particular
circumstances at a certain time. It’s not a matter of judging, but of understanding. (Liter-
ary Studies informant 4)

Finding 2: what do students need to be critical about?

Out of the interviews came a variety of understandings of being ‘critical’ – and as we
have seen, also certain critiques of some versions of it. It could be argued that such
variety merely reflects the particular preferences and predilections of the particular
academics who took part in the study. On analysis, however, there would appear to be
a systematic disciplinary basis for some of the variation observed.
John McPeck (1981), in his account of thinking processes, makes the telling point
that thinking, of its nature, always needs to be directed at some kind of object of
inquiry. As he states:

Thinking, by definition, is always thinking about something, and that something can
never be ‘everything in general’ but must always be something in particular. (p. 4)

McPeck goes on to suggest that it is the nature of these ‘things in particular’ – what
we might call the ‘objects of our inquiry’ – which goes some way to fashioning the
nature of the thinking that is to be made. In my study of critical thinking in the disci-
plines, an effort was made to pursue this line of inquiry – that is, to investigate what
it is exactly that students need to make judgments about (the objects of inquiry of their
study), along with the types of judgments that need to made (the content of that
inquiry). This was done by asking my informants to provide samples of assignment
tasks typically set for students in their subjects, and to get them to elaborate on the
nature of the object (and content) of inquiry in each case. The following are some
sample essay topics collected for the three different disciplines, ones whose rubrics
were in a sense prototypical for each of the three areas (Figures 1, 2 and 3). In each
example, the main ‘object(s) of inquiry’ is shown in bold.
Whilst all the topics shown in Figures 1, 2 and 3 require students to make judgments
Figure 3.
2.
1. Sample essay topics in Literary
History. Studies.
Philosophy.

in some form, what it is that needs to be judged in each case suggests a good deal of
variation. Much of this variety would seem to be attributable to the particular intellec-
tual concerns of the discipline in question. A comparison here between Philosophy and
 268 T.J. Moore
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Figure 1. Sample essay topics in Philosophy.

Figure 2. Sample essay topics in History.

Literature is instructive. In the Philosophy topics, the object of inquiry is typically a

philosophical work or works – characterised in each sample as an ‘argument’(or variant
‘view’), for example the ‘argument’ of Aquinas’ Third Way or the ‘views’ of certain
animal rights proponents. The type of critique that needs to be made in each case is in
fact a judgment of the relative success of these texts, as seen in such evaluative terms
as ‘persuasiveness’ (P.1), ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ (P.2) ‘validity’ (P.3). This pattern
fits very much with the account given by a number of Philosophy informants of the
discipline’s basic, underlying purposes. Thus, according to one:
 Higher Education Research & Development 269
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Figure 3. Sample essay topics in Literary Studies.

When it comes down to critical thinking, really it’s about identifying an argument and
evaluating it … and to evaluate it along roughly three dimensions – whether it is valid,
whether it is sound, and finally, whether it is free from other sorts of logical sins that
detract from its persuasiveness, like begging the question. Being critical [in this way] is
absolutely philosophy’s bread and butter. (017, Philosophy informant 4)

I note in passing that the method and epistemology described here is very much in keep-
ing with the generalist program recommended by Davies (2006) in his article – that is,
one that would have students analyse knowledge mainly in terms of such epistemic
units as ‘arguments, premises, conclusions, propositions, inferences’ and to evaluate
these according to the criteria of ‘truth, validity, soundness, fallacy’ and so on (Ikue-
nobe, 2001, p. 20).
Turning to the Literature topics, although the objects of inquiry here are also
adamantly textual, they are, as one would reasonably expect, of a basically differ-
ent kind – not philosophical works, but literary ones (Orwell’s 1984, Coetzee’s
Elizabeth Costello etc.). And clearly such texts are made up of quite different
constituent units – not premises, conclusions and the like, but narratives, charac-
ters, dialogue and so on, all of which suggest a quite different analytical frame.
Further, it is evident from the sample topics in the two different disciplines that the
type of judgments students need to make are also of a different order – not the
issuing of some definitive evaluation of a text, but, rather, the development of
something far less circumscribed – an interpretation. To be critical here then is not
to weigh the contents of a text against certain prescribed evaluative criteria (e.g.
validity, persuasiveness), but, rather, to draw on certain conceptual categories (e.g.
genre [L.1, L.3], intertextuality [L.1], otherness [L.2]) as a basis for fashioning
one’s interpretation.
This particular version of critique in Literary Studies was elaborated on by
several informants. In the following comments we see, for example, the emphasis
given to the role of ‘theoretical notions’ and ‘concepts’ in the practices of critique
in this field:
 270 T.J. Moore

We stress that what [students] are doing in being critical is using – I mean, we’re quite
explicit about this – they’re using theoretical notions to explore and to interrogate
literary texts. (Literary Studies informant 3)

When asked whether the criteria we saw used in the evaluating of philosophical texts
(such as persuasiveness) might have some applicability in the appraising of a literary
text, the following comment from one Literary Studies informant was telling:

Persuasive? Yes, I operate with the notion of persuasiveness. But, to me, it’s not related
to an argument; it’s related to the way a particular theoretical notion might be applied to
illuminating the meaning of a literary text. But is a literary text itself ‘persuasive’? This
is not a question we really consider. That use of the term is not really a part of our critical
vocabulary. (Literary Studies informant 1)
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Thus, we have here a quite different configuration of critical elements. Whereas in the
Philosophy examples, judgments of persuasiveness were to be made of primary texts
in the disciplines (the arguments of particular philosophers), this is not the case in
Literature. Evaluative judgments of this type, it is suggested, are not relevant to
primary texts per se (i.e. literary works), but, instead, need to be directed at certain
secondary notions – that is those conceptual resources that might be drawn on from
which to build the critique.
In the case of History, the contrast with Philosophy is arguably even more
pronounced. In this discipline area, the focus typically is not on textual entities as such
(e.g. on philosophical arguments or literary works), but on what we might call ‘real
world’ entities, that is, phenomena of various kinds – historical events, actions, states-
of-affair and so on. In the sample History topics, above, these phenomena include: ‘the
conditions of women’s lives in post-Civil War America’ (H.1), ‘the conduct of
government in Periklean Athens’ (H.2) and ‘the actions of students in the political
disturbances of late 1960s France’ (H.3). This focus in History on real world entities
was commented on by one informant:

In History, [students typically need to provide] explanations about events, or an expla-

nation about what the consequences of an event are. [These are] sometimes referred to
as the how, what, and why kind of questions. [They are] the basic historical questions.
(History informant 2)

It may be argued, of course, that to arrive at any judgment about an historical phenom-
enon, one must of necessity still be engaged in the critical appraisal of texts – that is,
with the various primary and secondary sources one might assemble around the topic
in question. This is certainly true. However, it needs to be stressed that in such topics,
it is not judgments about texts per se that are ultimately being asked of students, but
instead different aspects of the actual phenomenon in question.
This shift in the ‘object of inquiry’ from the textual to the real does seem a signif-
icant one and is suggestive of the domain difference captured in the field of semantics
between what are known as ‘second- and third-order entities’ (Lyons, 1977, p.). As
Lyons explains the schema, the primary category – first-order entities – refers to enti-
ties which exist in both time and space (i.e. physical objects or beings, typically the
principal objects of inquiry in the physical sciences). Second-order entities are said to
also exist in time, but rather than exist in space they take place or occur within it, thus,
taking in the types of entities noted in the topics above (events, processes, states-of-
affairs). Third-order entities, on the other hand, are said to be unobservable and have
 Higher Education Research & Development 271

no spatio-temporal location, taking in the abstract textual realm of propositions, argu-

ments, facts and so on. A similar distinction between realms is described by the
linguist Halliday (1994) in his categories of ‘phenomena’ (taking in ‘material’ and
‘behavioural’ processes) and ‘metaphenomena’ (taking in ‘verbal’ and ‘mental’
processes). Significantly, for Halliday such differences are suggestive of quite differ-
ent discourse worlds – and, for the purposes of this paper, I would say also that they
connote quite different modes of critical thought.

Language games and family resemblances

The findings from the study suggest a diversity of ways in which students need to be
critical in their studies. What, then, is to be made of our term ‘critical thinking’ and
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how are we to make sense of the diversity we have seen? Wittgenstein has argued that
the origins of many philosophical disputes – such as the type we have seen around the
question of critical thinking – lie in the desire of thinkers to establish some single,
unitary meaning for a term or concept. Wittgenstein was at pains to show that
language simply does not function in this way – that terms are unavoidably polyse-
mous in their meanings, a variety that arises from the diverse ways they are used in
different contexts. Wittgenstein’s (1958) famous example is the word ‘games’. As he
explained:

the phenomena [we call games] have no one thing in common which make us use the
same word for all, but they are related to one another in many different ways. (p. 31)

Wittgenstein goes on to outline the considerable variety of activities described by the

term ‘games’ – ‘board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games’. Such instan-
tiations, in all their variety – some played for amusement, some competitively, some
involving physical prowess, some involving more feats of the mind – cannot be
thought of as being united by some common, Platonic element, their intrinsic ‘game-
ness’. Instead, as he suggests, they constitute a ‘complicated network of similarities’,
ones that sometimes overlap, sometimes criss-cross and other times drop out and
disappear altogether. The expression Wittgenstein uses to characterise such a network
is ‘family resemblances’.
It may be that such an analysis applies to our elusive term ‘critical thinking’. That
is to say, it may be folly to imagine that there is a single core of meaning for the term,
which in turn is reducible to a defined set of cognitive operations. The examples we
have considered above suggest that the term ‘critical thinking’, at least as it is used in
the academy, refers in fact to a multiplicity of practices, ones that are rooted in the quite
individual nature of different disciplinary language (and thinking) games. Thus, for the
philosopher – or at least those working within the Anglo-analytical traditions of this
discipline – the ‘critical thinking’ game would seem to be largely one of analysing the
logico-semantic relationship of propositions. For the historian it is concerned more
with the creative use of sources to construct a picture of past events and phenomena
and for the literary critic, being critical is rooted in the use of certain literary and
aesthetic concepts as a basis for exploring and interrogating texts. In this way we might
say that critical thinking in the university forms a ‘family of resemblances’ and, indeed,
one would hesitate to privilege any particular mode over another.
The problem with the generalist view of critical thinking is that it does not take
sufficient account of this variety and one is left in doubt whether generalist-style
 272 T.J. Moore

programs – at least of the type suggested by Ennis and Davies – can in fact provide a
useful foundation for the many different contexts and tasks students will encounter in
their studies. The problems are apparent, I believe, if we try to imagine how the reper-
toire of critical thinking skills outlined earlier (Ikuenobe, 2001) could usefully be
deployed in some of the sample essay tasks we have considered. Thus, it is not clear,
for example, how the process of seeking out ‘fallacies’ (Ikuenobe, 2001, p. 21) might
help a Literature student needing to explore the literary qualities of a new genre (e.g.
Coetzee’s ficto-criticism) or how a facility in the ‘isolating of premises and conclu-
sions’ might set a History student on a useful path in their examination of how a social
group has been affected by a major event, such as a war (e.g. women in the American
Civil War).
All this is not to conclude, as Taylor (2000) suggests, that the nature of thinking
in different disciplines is inherently distinct, even incommensurable. Instead the
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conclusion to be drawn is that aspects of what we know as general thinking skills

appear to have limited applicability to certain fields of study. It is for this reason that
one would caution against any wholesale instituting of such programs across the
university.

Conclusion
To be an effective critical thinker, according to the generalist position, is to acquire
mastery over a range of critical thinking ‘heuristics’, which one can rationally and
systematically apply to the situation at hand. There is an emerging view in the literature,
however, that this kind of prescriptive approach is simply not adequate in the highly
complex and dynamic world in which we currently live. Ronald Barnett (2004), in an
evocatively titled article, ‘Learning for an unknown future’, stresses, after Bauman
(2000), the ‘fluidity’ and ‘fragility’ of contemporary life, which he says demands from
us new and innovative pedagogical responses. In a world that has become ‘radically
unknowable’, Barnett (2004) suggests, ‘knowledge and skills can no longer provide a
platform for going on with any self-assuredness’ (p. 254). In a view quite at odds with
the aims of many in the critical thinking movement, Barnett (2000) sees the desired
form of intellectual development in students not as the mastery of a prescribed set of
skills, but rather an appreciation of the variability and indeterminacy of things – what
he describes as ‘an increasingly sophisticated relativism’ (p. 122).
In such a view, the key element is often thought to be language. The critical theo-
rist, Raymond Williams (1976), was aware of this when he suggested in his seminal
book of terms, Keywords, that it is an appreciation of the variable meanings (and
indeed inherent ‘confusions’) of individual words and concepts that lies at the heart of
a critical outlook:

What can be contributed [from an apprehension of this variety and confusion] is not
resolution, but … an extra edge of consciousness. (p. 21)

A very similar idea was articulated by one of the informants in my study. This was a
young Literary/Cultural Studies academic, who had devoted quite some effort to
making sense of the idea of critical thinking and what as a generic attribute it might
mean in the context of her students’ learning. When asked about her understanding of
the term ‘critical’, her first thought was that it was tied somehow to knowing the
language of a field:
 Higher Education Research & Development 273

I recognize that we speak a very particular language in our discipline, and that students
have a lot of trouble getting their heads around that. And so when I’m teaching first year,
I actually stand there and gesture wildly while I explain – ‘When we say ‘critical’ … we
mean ‘critical’ in this sort of way’. (Literary Studies informant 5)

For this young academic, the implication of such an observation was not that one’s
teaching should be devoted to training students in the specific methods and discourses
of a particular discipline. What was more important, she thought, was that students be
helped in their studies to develop the ability to move between a variety of disciplinary
modes. For her, such an ability – a kind of ‘metacritique’ (Barnett, 1997) – was about
as good a way of characterising being critical as she could imagine:

So I’ve come to recognize that the crucial part of critical thinking … is being able to
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translate a number of different languages, it’s about being able to move between differ-
ent disciplinary languages. (Literary Studies informant 5)

This kind of wisdom from the disciplines leads one to think that the future of crit-
ical thinking in our institutions lies not in any efforts to skate around difference but,
instead, to embrace it. This represents a rather different kind of approach from the type
laid out in generalist programs – not to run separate programs of critical thinking, but
rather to provide opportunities within the disciplines for students to consider (and to
compare) the distinctive critical modes of their study. In this way, such tuition would
be aimed not at having students learn a pre-determined set of thinking skills but,
rather, to help them become the flexible and versatile thinkers they surely need to be
in these most challenging times in which we live.

Acknowledgement
I am grateful to my colleagues Rosemary Chang and Janne Morton, and also to three anony-
mous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

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