Another good set of notes

Another good set of notes and recommendations from Phil Agre. (Ignore his dislike of Chicken Run, it's a good movie.) I particularly liked this:

Critical thinking means that you can, so to
speak, see your glasses. You can look at the world, or you can back
up and look at the framework of concepts and assumptions and practices
*through* which you look at the world. Every such framework edits the
world in some way; every such framework has its biases. And no matter
how carefully you think you define your words, most of your framework
of concepts and assumptions and practices for looking at the world
will be inherited from a long disciplinary and cultural tradition.
If you can't see your glasses then you will have tunnel vision your
whole life. Yet you probably won't even notice, because your ways of
looking at the world also define what counts as success, as progress,
as a research result, and so on. Not that critical thinking makes
you omniscient: you're still wearing glasses even when you're looking
at your glasses. This (and not any sort of silly idealism) is what
Derrida means when he says that a text has no outside. But through
scholarship and analysis you can do a lot better than just stumbling
along with the glasses you got in school.