When we criticise an argument, our attention is directed towards something we believe to be wrong. We identify a weakness, expose an assumption, or point out what the person making the argument has failed to consider. Our task seems straightforward: to examine the argument and determine whether it stands up to scrutiny.
Yet there is another question we might ask. What makes this particular weakness so conspicuous to us? Why does this omission matter, while others pass unnoticed? What expectations have led us to recognise a flaw here rather than somewhere else?
These questions do not invalidate our criticism. They turn our attention towards something that ordinarily remains in the background: the circumstances that make an assessment possible.
Consider two people examining the same explanation. One admires its simplicity, seeing in it the achievement of identifying a fundamental principle beneath a confusing array of phenomena. The other objects that the simplicity has been purchased by excluding precisely the complexity that needs explaining. Each may have good reasons for their assessment. They may even agree about the facts. Yet they disagree about what those facts demand of an adequate explanation.
The difference is not necessarily one of knowledge. It may lie in what each person expects an explanation to accomplish.
We tend to regard such expectations as standards we bring to an argument, rather than as things that might themselves require examination. We ask whether the explanation meets our standards, seldom asking how those standards came to matter to us, or what they might prevent us from seeing.
A criticism reveals something about the object criticised, but it may also reveal something about the person making it.
The second revelation is more difficult to recognise because the critic is ordinarily looking in the opposite direction.
The advantages of being right
There are good reasons for concentrating on other people's arguments. Arguments can be assessed against evidence, their conclusions can be tested, and their assumptions can be exposed. Some criticisms are demonstrably justified; some interpretations are better supported than others. The fact that an assessment arises from a particular history or perspective does not make its conclusions merely subjective.
The difficulty begins when we assume that our own assessment is explained entirely by the evidence, while the other person's position requires an explanation in terms of their assumptions, interests or intellectual commitments.
We may attribute our opponent's error to the limitations of their framework, while attributing our own success to our superior grasp of reality. We scrutinise the assumptions underlying their reasoning but treat our own as the self-evident foundations from which reasoning must begin.
This asymmetry can persist even when we are sincerely committed to intellectual honesty. Indeed, the more confident we become in the standards by which we judge others, the less likely we may be to notice that those standards also organise our own understanding.
There is no need to suppose that we are deliberately concealing anything from ourselves. What we take for granted is often precisely what we have the least reason to notice. Our assumptions may be so thoroughly incorporated into our ways of thinking that they appear not as assumptions at all, but as features of the world itself.
We encounter the world through distinctions that help us make sense of it. Those distinctions allow us to recognise patterns, identify relevant differences and formulate explanations. Without them, understanding would be impossible. But they also influence what becomes salient, what seems significant and what we are inclined to dismiss.
The very resources that make criticism possible can therefore limit what criticism reveals to us.
What the mirror conceals
Suppose we criticise an explanation for reducing a complex phenomenon to a single underlying cause. We may be right to do so. Yet we should also ask whether our preference for complexity has become an assumption that we no longer examine. Are we attending to complexity because the evidence requires it, or have we begun to treat complexity itself as a guarantee of explanatory adequacy?
The reverse possibility is equally important. Someone who prizes simplicity may be identifying a genuine explanatory achievement, or may be overlooking features that resist simplification.
Neither preference settles the question. The evidence must still be examined, and the competing explanations must still answer for what they claim.
But the mirror reveals a further possibility. The standards by which we criticise an explanation can themselves become objects of criticism. We may discover that a standard which illuminates one aspect of a phenomenon obscures another, or that a distinction useful for one purpose becomes misleading when applied to a different question.
The problem is not that we have standards. It is that we may mistake the usefulness of a standard for its universal adequacy.
Nor can we escape this difficulty simply by becoming more self-aware. Our attempts to examine our assumptions will themselves employ distinctions, expectations and standards that we have not wholly examined. Reflection does not deliver us to a position outside our own understanding, from which everything can finally be seen as it really is.
It does, however, make further questions possible.
The second question
Perhaps we should add a question to those we ordinarily ask when assessing an argument.
We can ask whether a criticism is justified, whether its evidence is adequate and whether its conclusions follow. We can also ask what makes the criticism intelligible to the person making it. What does their way of understanding bring into view? What does it make difficult to see? And would they apply the same scrutiny to their own position that they apply to the position they oppose?
These are not questions designed to neutralise disagreement. They do not require us to regard competing explanations as equally valid, or to suspend judgement indefinitely. Nor do they imply that every error can be explained away by reference to the circumstances in which it arose.
Their purpose is different. They allow us to investigate not only the object of an assessment but also the conditions under which that assessment takes shape.
Sometimes this investigation will strengthen our original judgement. We may discover that our criticism survives the examination of its assumptions, and that the opposing argument fails for precisely the reasons we first identified. At other times, we may find that our assessment was partly organised by an expectation that the phenomenon itself does not satisfy. We may need to revise our judgement, or to recognise that a disagreement we regarded as fundamental concerns different questions being asked of the same object.
There is no predetermined outcome. The point is to keep open the possibility that examining our own orientation might change what we are able to understand.
And perhaps the most revealing test is whether we can extend this inquiry to positions we find congenial. It is relatively easy to identify the assumptions that distort an opponent's reasoning. It is harder to recognise the assumptions that make our own preferred explanation so satisfying.
Yet if our purpose is understanding rather than merely victory, the second task is at least as important as the first.
We cannot remove the mirror from every act of criticism. We can, however, learn to notice that it is there.
And when we do, another question becomes possible: not only whether we have seen something correctly, but what our way of seeing has enabled us to see—and what it has left beyond our view.
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