Page 185 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

17 2 ANSWERS, DISCUSSION, AND FURTHER ADVICE

effective part of our analysis, we need to think about the questions that will help us
to understand our sources of information, as well as what they contain. Put simply,
these questions help to reveal what lies in and behind the text, and to orient our
research towards what we intend to do with the information once we have it.

Exercise 8.4

While we are usually more than capable of taking single claims and whole
arguments or explanations from what we read, and probably are learning the art of
coming away from research with more questions, the third and fourth categories are
tricky. Summarising an entire piece of written work does not involve noting down
individual bits and pieces ('key points', facts, main conclusions) but requires that
you understand the entirety of the work and then, in your own words, write a short
argument that sums up what the author is saying (perhaps using the analytical
structure format). Identifying the assumptions and values that underlie a text is
equally tricky and demands, at the very least, that you think carefully about the
sorts of questions covered in exercise 8.3.

Chapter 9

Exercise 9.1

The main aim of this exercise is to make you think about the following crucial
philosophical idea: how you study a topic (for example, the methods used, your
definitions and founding assumptions about the nature of that topic, the way that
the topic is 'isolated' from other possible topics, or other possible ways of studying
the topic) will always influence the results you get. We tend to think that knowl-
edge becomes objective when we put aside our personal biases, assumptions, and
beliefs, and seek the truth in a 'disinterested' manner. However, the main external
influence on our reasoning is not our emotions or subjective prejudices, but the in-
built 'bias' of the methods and theories we use. Of course, that said, many
disciplines (especially in the sciences) work from a different philosophical assump-
tion: that the methods used are 'neutral', that they have no influence on the
outcome of the research and analysis, and hence that knowledge is not intersubjec-
tive. Find out for yourself just what sort of philosophy of knowledge your
'discipline' or profession works within.

Exercise 9.2

The sorts of internal questions you might ask are, by and large, determined by the
methodological, definitive, and theoretical frameworks in which you are operating.
Moreover, because questions are always about the relationships between knowledge,
any question you ask to find out information or knowledge will be based on
something you already know. The trick to being a smart thinker is to know enough