The axis diagram revisited

The concerns of the criticality movement arose, as we have seen, in reaction to the narrow emphasis of previous accounts of critical thinking. These previous accounts view critical thinking in terms of individual skills, dispositions, and abilities. While proponents of the criticality dimension certainly do not eschew these important individual facets of critical thinking entirely (indeed, they endorse their importance), the criticality perspective adds something

Figure 0.3 Axis diagram: The critical thinking and "criticality" movements (Davies 2015).

new. It adds the dimension of action to the mix. This is represented by the addition of the social-cultural axis (the "X" axis) of critical thinking shown in figure 0.3, and here depicted as "critical doing."

However, there is more to it than action. Unlike the views of critical thinking as adumbrated by proponents of the critical thinking movement (CTM), for the criticality theorists the ethical dimension is also important to critical thinking. Ethical decisions are, of course, usually (if not always) accompanied by ethical actions. This is represented by the critical virtue axis below. Note in the diagram that the CTM, with few exceptions, does not include the action and morality dimension.