Early sailors used maps of the night sky and the known world to find their way, along with other navigational devices: compasses for direction, astrolabes, and later sextants, to determine latitude. While crude or inaccurate by modern standards, those instruments worked well enough for millennia, enabling navigators to guide their ships at sea. (And navigators on American bombers used sextants to cross the Atlantic as recently as World War II). Similarly, the tools of critical inquiry enable us to navigate the natural and symbolic worlds with greater precision and success until better ones come along. And most of the ones we use have served for thousands of years.
Beyond these tools of intellectual rigor, critical inquiry is boundless; there are no fixed rules governing its ever-expanding inquiries and conversations. The roster of organizing concepts and buttressing ideas I’ve proposed is partial and contestable; in the end, they may simply be convenient ways of carving reality “at the joints,” as Plato suggests. They are not shortcuts or substitutes for specific knowledge of the way things are, what things mean, or how things work. Rather, they are tools for intellectual navigation that turn students into critical thinkers and citizens.
In equating critical inquiry with rationality and critical thinking, and using the metaphor of navigation, I might be accused of excessive linearity. The world isn’t made up of lines, rules, or formulas, just as it isn’t made up of maps; the world is fuzzy, fragmented, interconnected, and in flux. Everything is connected, but some things are more connected than others and all is subject to change. Any sound definition of critical inquiry must encompass other forms of cognition: association, observation and data collection, memory, opinion, emotion, imagination, and all the rest. As Leonardo Da Vinci observes in his Notebooks, lines don’t exist in nature; rather, they are abstractions that artists, architects, cartographers, navigators, and others inscribe on flat surfaces to depict or represent nature, and thus to reach (imperfect and changing) accommodations between the world and the mind.
Like words, however, lines – straight or otherwise – are indispensable for modeling the world. They tell us where the horizon is, when Monday becomes Tuesday, and where Colorado ends and Wyoming begins. But lines are not just connections between points. They are also bifurcations (they have two sides; and while it’s either Monday or Tuesday, and you’re either in Colorado or Wyoming, such binary thinking is inadequate in many contexts). Like the artist, architect, or mapmaker drawing lines on paper, we use black and white words and sentences to depict gray zones and layers of complexity.
Model vs. reality, map vs. world, binary vs. nonbinary: critical inquiry has the power both to create and to bridge such dichotomies. It insists on the continual accommodation between thought and the world, not the predominance of either domain. The only metaphysical assumption is that the mind and the world are always distinct, and always connected.
Critical inquiry might therefore be better described as curvilinear: it uses lines to map the world in all its curves, depth, shading, and variety. The map isn’t the territory, yet we can’t dispense with maps. And to be useful, any map – or any sentence, diagram, graph, chart, photograph, recipe, checklist, playlist, and so on – must somehow represent the territory it identifies. That’s its job. We think with words and images and ideas, not with objects or actions. But our representations are seldom perfect or final.
This modeling process is central to higher learning because it’s central to all thinking; and thinking is ultimately, and necessarily, a process of blending similarity and difference, and of reconciling the linear geometry of the mind with the disorderly curves of the world. That’s how we make sense of things, simultaneously adapting to and organizing the flow of conscious experience so that we may act upon it with greater efficacy.
That process isn’t a triumph over nature or our emotive or imaginative selves, but their complement. It isn’t an exalted or ennobling activity, and it isn’t for an elite few. It’s just what we do, as best we can, to grasp the bigger picture, the smaller picture, the more granular or more integrated picture, the more elusive or unobvious picture, the changing picture, the other person’s or other culture’s picture, as the case may be. It’s what distinguishes us as a species, making us better learners, creators, and decision-makers – in short, better citizens. It helps to explain why we have books, cupcakes, carpools, museums, and indoor plumbing, while baboons do not. (Robots may have some of these soon enough, but they are products of human thought.)
Thinking, in sum, is quintessentially a process of relating: facts, ideas, things, events, processes, people, institutions, the general and the particular, hither and yon, past and present. It is the product of the tools and methods we have devised for modeling the world, making it more coherent and, to the extent possible, more manageable. It’s seldom a perfect fit, because thoughts, like maps, are essentially linear, static, and partial maps of a dynamic universe. Yet we muddle through because thinking isn’t useless, experience isn’t incoherent, free agency isn’t entirely illusory, and what is complex isn’t inscrutable. Besides, what else have we got?
Thought and action form an endless looping series of semi-coordinated, error-prone initiatives, accommodations, recognitions, resignations, course corrections, risks, hedges, guesses, and little triumphs and disasters as we navigate our daily lives. What’s clear is that learning to think more clearly, deeply, broadly, and flexibly helps in almost everything we do, except perhaps in love – and flexibility helps there.