Critical thinking in higher education: taking Stiegler’s counsel on the digital milieu

ABSTRACT

Critical thinking is embedded in national university graduate outcomes and included in international bodies’ statements on higher education. At the same time, there are tensions surrounding critical thinking in higher education, such as its commodification, Eurocentrism, and relationship to rapidly digitalising cultures. Drawing from the philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s writings on human originary technicity, this paper argues that critical thinking takes different forms according to technical and cultural milieus. For Stiegler, human originary technicity makes prosthesis the human condition: we are biological and technical, both organic and inorganic matter. Reasoning, reflection, and evaluation are relative to the technologies of memory that form everyday and intellectual culture. Stiegler’s analysis articulates how digitalisation threatens and protects reasoning and reflection, enabling the demonstration of how critical thinking takes specific forms in digitalised societies. The paper proposes prosthetic critical thinking as a practice that can embrace differing understandings of critical thinking, namely as skills and dispositions associated with reasoning and as the practice of critical pedagogy. The resulting understanding of critical thinking shows it to be a plural, inclusive, and contingent practice relevant to higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical thinking
• higher education
• digital
• Stiegler
• technology

Introduction

Critical thinking is embedded in university graduate outcomes and included in international bodies’ statements on higher education. At the same time, critical thinking needs to negotiate tensions within its practice, such as its role as an educational commodity, legacies from European philosophy, and its position in rapidly digitalising cultures. Drawing on the work of Bernard Stiegler on human originary technicity, this paper proposes that we can understand critical thinking as taking different forms according to technical and cultural milieus,¹ allowing us to reconstrue it as a plural, inclusive and contingent practice in higher education. For Stiegler, human reasoning, reflection, and evaluation processes are relative to the technological environments that form everyday and intellectual culture. Human originary technicity makes prosthesis the human condition: we are biological and technical, both organic and inorganic matter. Shaped by cultural and institutional practices, critical thinking takes specific forms in digitalised societies. This discussion develops an understanding of critical thinking, termed prosthetic critical thinking, suitable for curriculum developers and teachers in a contemporary university.

To examine the relationship between critical thinking, digitalisation, and cultural milieu, the paper begins by contrasting its position with the widespread view that critical thinking is a remedy for the information overload and unreliability of the digital age. It then presents Stiegler’s conceptualisation of the relationship between thinking and digital and other technologies, drawing ideas from his work that are of particular significance for the practice of critical thinking: grammatisation, mnemotechnics, noesis, symbolic misery, disautomisation, and attention. Following this is an outline of contemporary understandings of critical thinking: the analytic approach (reasoning, argument, judgement; dispositions; critical being) and critical pedagogy. Finally, the paper re-figures various approaches to critical thinking from the perspective of prosthetic critical thinking relevant to higher education. Critical thinking traditions are reconsidered in light of Stiegler’s thought, situating them within a future practice of prosthetic critical becoming.

Critical thinking as a remedy

Critical thinking is interwoven with the aims of higher education (Dunne 2015, 89). Despite the imperative that universities in the United Kingdom and Australia focus on employability in producing graduates (Davies and Barnett, 2015, 2), critical thinking remains associated with higher education and is included in study programs directly and indirectly (Bezanilla et al. 2019). UNESCO has declared the development of critical thinking in graduates an objective of global higher education (de la Fuente 2009). It is perceived to be a vital part or outcome of higher education in Europe (European Commission 2012); the USA (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2015); Great Britain (The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education 2008); and Australia (Commonwealth of Australia 2021). Critical thinking has long been associated with higher education, and Stiegler is one of many who think education should cultivate critical skills and public debate (2008, 41–47). In contrast to disciplinary or professional critical skills, general critical thinking ensures that higher education fulfils its role in promoting social development, preparing students to analyse and respond to social change (Redding 2017), and making students better participants in democracy (Davies and Barnett 2015, 317). It also improves students’ knowledge absorption and analysis and renders them more employable (Davies and Barnett 2015, 98 and 574).

A diagnosis of a crisis of truth, primarily driven by networked digital technologies and social media (Mcintryre 2018, 87, 118–122), adds urgency to the teaching of critical thinking. Almost anyone can post on the Internet, and information is easily manipulated for political and commercial purposes so that an enormous amount of unreliable information is circulated (Halpern 2014, 250; Mcintryre 2018; 87, 118–122; Higdon 2020). The distribution of false information (deliberately and otherwise) is frequently automated (for example, via Twitterbots, see Shao et al. 2018). Consequently, advocates of critical thinking, such as Halpern (2014), argue that critical thinking must be taught so people can evaluate information circulated via the Internet and social media. Misinformation is a challenge to contemporary democracy (Higdon 2020) because accurate knowledge is vital for the informed decision-making essential to democratic participation.

Thus viewed, critical thinking is an antidote to the information practices of digital cultures. However, the situation is more complex than this due to various other relationships between digital practices and critical thought. Firstly, people are combatting problematic aspects of digital culture by developing new digital tools and practices tools that teach (Ennis 2018, 178–180; Davis and Barnett 2015, 209–225) and shape new forms of critical thinking (Knochel 2013; O’Halloran, Tan, and Marissa 2017). Secondly, digital technologies can adversely affect the skills and dispositions required to think critically. Researchers have expressed concerns about various digital technologies’ effects on human memory (Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner 2011; Dong and Potenza 2015), attention (Firth, Torous, and Firth 2020), reading and analysis (Casey 2019; Wolf 2022) and navigation (McKinlay 2016). This is not to say that there are no intellectual benefits to using digital technologies (for example, visual intelligence, cognition in the elderly, cognitive offloading), but that perhaps the impacts are not yet fully understood. Finally, the software, code, and data used in education itself can be considered a kind of ‘hidden curriculum’ that shapes the knowledge and norms presented to students (Edwards 2015), including those of critical thinking. Evidently, critical thinking is not a straightforward antidote to the digitalisation of information because digitalisation alters our capacities and practices of reflection and reasoning.

Stiegler’s account of human originary technicity enables analysis of how critical thinking changes with its associated technological milieus. Digital practices can be understood to have positive and adverse effects or, in Stiegler’s terms, they act as a pharmakon—a remedy that may become poisonous (Stiegler, 2013 1–7). Understanding critical thinking as a prosthetic practice admits this dual nature of technology, the first step in considering how technologically embedded critical thinking can be life and knowledge-enhancing. The discussion below examines Stiegler’s account of how humans and technics are bound together, presenting the most salient aspects of Stiegler’s account of people’s intellectual activity as fundamentally organological, that is, as comprising both organic and inorganic elements. This approach draws attention to the technological, temporal, collective, embodied, and already automated dimensions of reasoning and critical thinking, developing the idea of prosthetic critical thinking.

Human originary technicity

Stiegler’s understanding of human originary technicity lies in a Heideggerian tradition of the philosophy of technology that sees humans and technology² as co-constituted (Stiegler 1998, 4–14). Organological life – including human life – has organic and ordered inorganic dimensions (Stiegler 1998, 17). In the case of humans, the technological, inorganic aspects of our life include prostheses that, at least since the Palaeolithic era, function as mnemonic devices: cave drawings, writing, audiovisual media, and computational devices (Stiegler 2018, 156–7). Extending and revising Derrida’s logic of supplementarity, Stiegler sees mnemotechnics as including the recording of human thoughts and behaviour in media and computational devices in addition to words and writing (Stiegler 1998, 136–138; 2015, 7; 2016, 19–20). These techniques allow memory to be recorded and conveyed over time so that culture and knowledge pass on inter-generationally. Employing terms from Plato’s discussion of writing in Phaedrus, Stiegler writes of how hypomnesis (external, technical memory support) enables a remembering of knowledge or anamnesis (thought within its own medium) (Stiegler 1998, 1–4; 2013, 18–19). His point is that exosomatic hypomnesic devices do not simply prompt or support what would otherwise be thought but form how and what we remember, understand, imagine, and reason.

According to Stiegler, knowledge is a question of remembering, a synthesis of what we are experiencing with remembered experiences via a third, integrating element of mnemotechnics. There is a circuit between conscious experience (primary retention), memories (secondary retentions) and the exteriorisation of memory (tertiary retention) (1998, 245–248). Memories filter our conscious experience and decide what we attend to and remember, fashioning what and how we think. For example, people will interpret an image differently depending on how their past experience guides their attention in the present, and artefacts and practices like writing, archives, and audiovisual material inform our inner life.

Human originary technicity means they have always depended on external devices that automate intellectual and bodily processes (Stiegler uses the example of our unconscious movements when driving a car, see 2016, 127). In addition to communication mediums, external memory supports may call upon non-representational forms that embed collective cultural memories, like the built environment (Stiegler 2018, 120). From this perspective, we can understand how the automatic does not only refer to technologies themselves but also the intellectual, physical, and collective habits associated with them. The automation that digital technology enables is not entirely novel, so questions about the effects of digital culture are not about automation per se but about the particular forms that automation takes and the social embedding of digital technology.

According to Stiegler, the automation of thought and action is not opposed to human autonomy but are the conditions under which it comes into being (1998, 229–230). This conflicts with the understanding of autonomy prominent in the analytic critical thinking tradition that understands autonomy in the Kantian sense of following a rational will that authors the laws it follows according to the transcendental categories of reason (Kant 2011, 89). For Stiegler, synthesis does not follow a priori principles of reason but instead depends on social, cultural, and technological practices. The autonomy enabled by reason is not independent of external influence but comprises a questioning from within ‘technical heteronomy’ (2016, 78), a suspension of the influence technicity and culture have as the conditions of possibility of thought.³ To be autonomous requires the integration of automatic processes, so it is not automation per se that Stiegler protests but the loss of noesis⁴ as intellect and spirit occurring with hypercapitalist digital technologies (2016, 114–117).

Autonomy emerges as part of how individuals individuate, a term adopted by Stiegler from Simondon (2020) to refer to how entities come into being over time, associated with social and technological milieus (Stiegler 1998, 17–18, 72–78, 93–95). Individuation is an ongoing process that has physiological, collective, and psychic dimensions. For humans, it only occurs in relationship to collectives and their technological and symbolic repertoires, so individuation is simultaneously a transindividuation (becoming part of a collective). Mnemotechnical devices are a vital part of this process. They are collective and institutional and include, for example, the libraries, archives, and databases of a university in addition to its spaces and disciplines. They enable the formation of ‘long circuits of transindividuation, that is, transgenerational circuits’ that are essential for knowledge (Stiegler 2013, 124) and reach from the person through technics to surrounding social, educational, and political institutions. The individual becomes able to make meaning and engage in noesis, the intellectual and spiritual practices of reason and self-reflection (2016, 114). Crucially, the process of individuation is also embodied, and bodily habits and capacities (to sit still, to manage one’s affects) form in cultural and collective milieus. The cultivation of psychic and social attention, careful reflection, is central to this process (Stiegler 2013, 23). Enlightenment or reasoning ‘is not an impersonal power: it is a noetic possibility within each of us, and as such, it constitutes, as a potential shared by everyone but one that must be actualised’ (Stiegler 2015, 2016).

The threat of digitalisation

Despite his view that mnemotechnics and automation are an inevitable part of human life, Stiegler argues that networked, algorithmic, automatic culture threatens human flourishing. Technology is a necessary aspect of human life that can function as both a cure and poison (Stiegler 2013). Broadly and prior to digital technology, global media culture affects individual and collective remembering and, consequently, processes of individuation and anticipation (protention). As a form of tertiary retention, media technologies filter what comes to our attention and what is remembered and imagined. When individuals, for example, watch a global television broadcast, this synchronised consciousness forms a memory that, in turn, shapes the imagination of future experiences. In such circumstances, individuals’ individuation as part of a local collective can be seized by meanings that support commercial interests. This impoverishes people’s capacity to signify – make meaning – for themselves as individuals within a locality and a collective (Stiegler 2014, 1–14). Singularity or difference is lost in this process (Stiegler 2018, 41).

Digitalisation has intensified and transformed global media culture. Intensification occurs because digital technologies have an unprecedented reach into our lives via mobile phones and ubiquitous computing. Most importantly, unlike other forms of recorded memory, computational technologies can, on a large scale, outpace our retentional processes through their retention, anticipation, suggestion, and decision (Stiegler 2016, 112, 135, 231). An often-discussed example of this is the process of typing a query on Google search, which suggests a query before it has been entered. The algorithmic recording and processing of prior behaviour enables the system’s anticipation of the query and shapes the search. In this flattening of language and automation of thought, humans have no time to form their own thoughts in a self-reflexive fashion. Stiegler writes, ‘In the epoch of the algorithmic implementation of applied mathematics in computerised machines, there is no longer any need to think: thinking is concretised in the form of algorithmic automatons’ (2016, 49). Critical self-reflexivity, in which the self converses with itself about an experience or thought as it occurs, is suppressed by mass digitalisation.

Digital practices offer an unprecedented power over behaviour readily enlisted for others’ interests, a kind of industrial control of memory that enables the transforming of people’s desire for a determinate signifier into a repetitious drive of consumer culture (2016, 19–24). An industrial ‘mnemotechnical system’ (Stiegler 2015, 167) functions as a hyper-capitalist disruption of attention, creating financial profit for big tech (Stiegler 2014, 64–66) but disordering individual and collective noesis and thus decision-making. In its current form, digital practices threaten individual and collective futures. Institutions and texts that pass on collective memory are jeopardised, including educational ones (Stiegler 2015, 204). This situation leaves individuals – and Stiegler is particularly interested in young people – in symbolic misery and unable to attend with care and make meaning and value, lose aesthetic and intellectual attachments to objects and symbols (2014, 1–13). Retentional circuits of transindividuation, which require and form attention, are bypassed, resulting in a disindividuation that strips the individual of their moral and cognitive autonomy.

The intensity of the threat Stiegler considers digitalised culture to pose to intellectual life and reasoned decision-making is seen in his notion of algorithmic governmentality (2016, 22–44, 2018 46, 154–171). Adopted from Antoinette Rouvroy and Berns (2013), the term refers to a new form of social control in which commercial and government decisions about people’s futures are made by automated systems processing data in real-time using statistical methods in probability to produce knowledge (machine learning). In contrast to past practices in which norms of social categories are visible, Rouvroy, Berns and Libbrecht argue that algorithmic governmentality has a normative effect without producing norms as visible social categories (2013, 9). Algorithmic decision-making outpaces and circumvents human noesis, restricting reflection and decision-making about the terms of social analysis. Meaningful terms in machine learning can only be seen in retrospect after they have taken effect, if at all (Burrell 2016). For Stiegler, these methods inaugurate a regime of ‘non-truth’ rather than, as Rouvoy and Bern conclude, a new regime of digitally mediated truth (Stiegler 2016, 98; Crogan 2019). Algorithmic governmentality undermines prior conditions of knowledge and governance practices that supplement human bodies and minds – institutions such as universities and political bodies – without establishing revised knowledge practices appropriate to current technologies.

Cultivating attention and disautomising thinking

As a thinker who conceptualises people as co-constituted by technology, Stiegler’s response is not to reject or seek to escape intellectual processes’ dependence on technology. Instead, he argues that reasoning, reflection, and experimentation can transform digital practices to form a new ‘system of care – a technique of the government of self and others’ (Stiegler 2016, 206; see also 2015, 175) that exercises the knowledge of how to live (savoir vivre) (Stiegler 2016, 19–21; 2015, 130). Exercising such self-care enables people to attend deeply and cultivate themselves as mindful and technological beings. As both poison and a remedy, the harms of technology can be transformed into a beneficial force, harnessed to promote deliberation and bifurcation in future paths. There are numerous dimensions to this project, but of relevance here is the idea of intermittence,⁵ which is a space of time for cultivating skills that are not for direct financial gain but for non-financial wealth (Stiegler 2016, 68–85). These activities cannot be evaluated by calculation, for example, the immeasurable thinking, dreaming, and self-reflection that occurs intermittently within an overall length of time. Intermittence creates spaces for us to contribute in a non-monetary way to our communities and environments. The mindless drives incited by commercially driven technologies can be transformed into desires for consistencies (deliberated on and evaluated goals).

Exploration and analysis of new processes of grammatisation enable the reconstruction of cultural memory – the hypomnesis of disciplinary frameworks, texts, archives, libraries, and spaces that form (tertiary retentions). New practices and institutions of externalising and transmitting memories across generations need to take shape to reconstruct deep attention (Stiegler 2016, 99; 2015, 170–71). This includes the ‘universities of the future’, a kind of mnemotechnical external apparatus capable of intergenerationally communicating standards of knowledge and reasoning that resists automated hypercapitalism (Stiegler 2015, 160–171).⁶ They are part of reconstructing the noetic circuits of transindividuation bypassed by algorithmic automation and enabling the careful attention that forms knowledge (Stiegler 2018). This is a disautomisation, a practice of thinking anew and reforming one’s living habits in a process by which people eschew engaging with digital technologies in a way that causes symbolic misery and disindividuation. As Stiegler’s later work focuses on, this care of the self generates noesis and a capacity to create meaning of urgent relevance in the Anthropocene (2018, 206).

Cultivating critical thinking as a self-reflexive practice of reasoning, the exercise of autonomy within technical heteronomy is part of Stiegler’s project of reasserting noesis and reconfiguring the relationship between universities, knowledge, and students. However, his project is a larger one than the question examined here,⁷ which centres on what his ideas mean for practices circumscribed as critical thinking in higher education institutions. It is to these understandings of critical thinking that discussion now turns.

Approaches to critical thinking

Broad accounts of critical thinking contend with different notions of what is meant by ‘critical’, the status of reason, the role of higher cognition, and the place of action and social and political arrangements. Of necessity, the discussion here simplifies a complex landscape while aiming to capture the main currents in contemporary approaches to critical thinking in relation to which Stiegler’s ideas need exploration. It distinguishes between analytical traditions – described by James McGuirk as a ‘Crypto-Enlightenment’ (2021) tradition – and critical pedagogical traditions and is informed by Davies and Barnett’s (2015) account of critical thinking as diverse practices in higher education. Analytic approaches to critical thinking emerge from the analytic philosophical tradition and centre on reasoning skills, often supplemented with metacognitive skills such as judgement and dispositions. They overlap and sit in tension with understandings of a second approach to critical thinking that sees it as critical pedagogy and emerges from the work of Paulo Freire (1973) and Henry Giroux (1994). Influenced by European critical theory, critical pedagogy examines the social and political arrangements associated with ideas.

The analytic approach to critical thinking, present at its inception and remaining widespread, sees it as involving a group of cognitive skills adapted from philosophical logic, in particular, the skills of reasoning and inference-making (argumentation) (Ennis 1987, 2018; Facione 2000). These skills enable a thinker to assess the logical relations between ideas, the soundness of assumptions, and the reliability of assumptions and evidence. This tradition empowers people to independently assess information, statements, and arguments, employing what may be conceptualised as universal reason (Ennis 1987; Siegel 1988). Such thinking is also often characterised as autonomous as part of a Kantian legacy of understanding autonomy as existing when a person acts according to apriori categories of reason so that they are the source of their thought and action. For example, in the context of analytic critical thinking, Dearden writes, ‘autonomy … is the development of a kind of person whose thought and action in important areas of his life are to be explained by reference to his own choices, decisions, reflections, deliberations – in short, his own activity of mind’ (1972, 70).

Possessing skills of reasoning and argument allows for the exercise of higher cognitive skills in judgement (Lipman 1988, 39), which in turn may motivate action. An emphasis on action is found in the notion of criticality, which sees critical thinking as a way of being (Barnett 1997; Barnett in Davies and Barnett 2015, 63–76; Dunne 2015). As critical being, criticality is not periodically practiced or restricted to professional or educational settings but runs through all intellectual and everyday activities (Siegel 1988; Dunne 2015, 92). It occurs when a person is ‘appropriately moved by reasons’ rather than by power when making decisions about problems of everyday life (Siegel 1988).

Some accounts of critical thinking add to reasoning skills a list of the dispositions or traits that a person requires if they are to think and act critically. For example, Paul and Elder (2012) state that a responsible critical thinker is fair-minded with a solid grasp of ethics, morality, and other values. Other scholars have included being truth-seeking, habitually open-minded, cautious, judicious, analytical, systematic, and confident in one’s reasoning (Facione 2000). The dispositions required to think critically may include being willing to engage in dialogue and argument; seeking clarification when needed; and desiring to identify, understand and fix one’s mistakes (Barnett 2015; Ennis in Davies and Barnett 31–48). A broad list of such traits resembles a list of intellectual virtues that manifest care for the truth and avoidance of error.

However, analytical approaches to critical thinking do not exhaust the meaning of the term ‘critical’ nor the practice of independent thought. Critical thinking may also be understood in terms of critical pedagogy (McLaren and Hammer 1989; Burbules and Berk 1999; Davies and Barnett 2015, 18–21; McGuirk 2021), which focuses on uncovering assumptions in one’s own and others’ thinking. A term initially used by Paulo Freire (1973) to refer to an educational philosophy grounded in neo-Marxist critical theory, it today incorporates a variety of critical social theories, including postmodernism and post-colonialism (McLaren and Hammer 1989; Brookfield in Davies and Barnett 2015, 525–543). It draws from the European philosophical tradition of critique and the practice of concentrating critical thinking on beliefs and values associated with particular social and political arrangements in the hope of attaining greater freedom (Davis and Barnett 2015, 21; McGuirk 2021, 5). The project of critical thought is to identify and analyse hegemonies and ideologies, for example, how a particular ethical argument harbours specific ideas about reasoning that marginalises non-European cultures. Although existing in tension with analytical approaches to critical thinking that are potentially ideologically inflected (which in turn might question critique’s assumptions), critical pedagogy employs many of the same reasoning skills and practices of truth-seeking. Nevertheless, part of critical pedagogy is the interrogation of critical thinking traditions themselves – particularly analytic ones – for the ethnocentric Western ideology that sees itself as intellectually superior to other traditions and is implicated, for example, in a colonialist enterprise (Song 2016; Liyanage, Walker, and Shokouhi 2021) or masculinist traditions (Danvers 2018).

Although the practices of critical thinking in analytic philosophy and critical pedagogy often sit uneasily beside each other, both can be granted a productive role in prosthetic critical thinking. In turn, prosthetic critical thinking propels analytic critical thinking and critical pedagogy in certain directions. The discussion below examines how Stiegler’s work extends and revises these two approaches to practicing critical thinking.

Reconstruing critical thinking

Stiegler’s organological diagnosis of the threat posed by the automation and digitalisation of social processes has implications for critical thinking practices in the analytic and critical pedagogy traditions. Today’s universities may have limited space for critical thinking, and neoliberal market forces increasingly understand it as career-oriented training, but it remains a widespread goal and practice. Employing Stiegler’s ideas to extend conceptions of what it means to think critically makes the practice robust for the twenty-first century, addressing its relationships to digital technologies. Further, prosthetic critical thinking addresses some crucial questions about critical thinking in a global context, such as the character of its autonomy and reasoning and how it might address cultural, racial, class, and gender biases.

The conceptualisation of critical thinking as a set of skills in reasoning and inference cultivated by analytic traditions is vital to Stiegler, with these skills having long been held a part of intellectual practice. Ancient Greeks considered humans to be logical and rational beings. Aristotle’s notion of logic is enormously influential in Western philosophy and saw noesis—comprehension or insight – as the basis for knowledge and including the laws of logic. The practical use of logic—logos—builds on this (Aristotle 2014 Posterior Analytics, II. 19; Nicomachean Ethics, IV.6). In promoting noesis, Stiegler does not dismiss reason, but he does want to combat its limits and dysfunctions – its ‘rationalisations’. His project of cultivating people’s noesis and the capacity for self-reflexivity would thus incorporate developing skills in argument and reasoning taught by the analytic tradition of critical thinking. In today’s digitalised culture, the injunction to approach practices, ideas, and values with scepticism and follow one’s own lines of reasoning to reach conclusions (embedded as they may be in a technological milieu) is a powerful tool. This is how automated and predictive algorithms can be questioned, coercive corporate behaviours challenged, and the faulty reasoning so often present in digitally circulated information detected. However, crucially, Stiegler understands this questioning as occurring from within and conditional upon technology and culture, exercised as a moment of self-reflective questioning of their influence rather than from an entirely independent position.

Similarly, understandings of critical thinking that incorporate sets of dispositions are coherent with Stiegler’s view that the self should be cultivated to attend to the world with care. Dispositions can be formulated as intellectual virtues that enable the seeking of truth and avoidance of error in a digital culture. For example, concerning the use of search engines, it has been suggested that the virtues required are curiosity, intellectual autonomy, intellectual humility, attentiveness, intellectual carefulness, intellectual thoroughness, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual tenacity (Heersmink 2018, 3–4). The point is that critical thinking requires a certain kind of character, with Stiegler placing particular emphasis on the practice of care and attentiveness that digital technologies disrupt (2013, 49–65).

Stiegler’s writings on attentiveness emphasise that critical thinking dispositions depend on embodied habits and practices and the social, cultural, and technical environments bound up with intellect. The inclination and ability to reflect and analyse relates to how we exercise, eat, play, sleep, and comport ourselves; how much time we have available; and the media demanding our attention. Digitalised events disrupt sustained attention (notifications, multitasking, disruptive studying environments), encouraging ‘hyperattention’ (Hayles 2007, 187) rather than deep attention. In the Online Manifesto, Luciano Floridi reinforces concerns connecting digitalisation, attention and bodily integrity, writing ‘Respect for attention should be linked to fundamental rights such as privacy and bodily integrity, as attentional capability is an inherent element of the relational self for the role it plays in the development of language, empathy, and collaboration’ (2015, 14). Cultivating attention in the face of disruptive technologies that seek to intensify consumption is part of an embodied practice of critical thinking.

Like Aristotle, Stiegler does not think that reasoning alone grounds knowledge and asks for the broader circumstances of reasoning to be reflected upon. Rationality can be turned to irrationality by hyper-capitalism and reasoning subsumed by instrumental rationalities that do not serve noesis. Logic can be employed as simply a technical tool, deprived of context and judgement. Skills in reasoning and argumentation, and critical thinking dispositions, are necessary for independent thought but must be situated, their conditions of possibility understood. Critical thinking exercises partial autonomy, only accomplished by its dependence on technical and cultural milieu. Understanding reasoning and argumentation skills to be contingent is a crucial divergence from claims that reason’s validity lies in its universality (Halpern 2014). Instead, reasoning, argumentation, and judgement are recognised as valuable but technologically, historically, and culturally specific practices needing to be accompanied by an analysis of their lacunae and social and political inflections. Critical thinking with Stiegler thus incorporates critical pedagogy in a continuation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s legacy that enlightenment must ‘always be defended against itself’ (Stiegler 2015, 17).

A growing body of research in critical thinking examines its racial, cultural, and gendered dimensions, among others, and draws attention to biases in critical thinking practices associated with the Western European philosophical tradition (for example, Danvers 2018; Song 2016; Davies and Barnett 2015, 295–368; Liyanage, Walker, and Shokouhi 2021). Challenging the Western philosophical tradition’s monopoly on critical thinking and recognising it can be associated with multiple traditions is required if it is to avoid being ‘a developmentalist construct’ (Song 2016, 35). In seeking to understand the dangers and conditions of possibility of noesis within a milieu, prosthetic critical thinking supports redressing of Western bias by positioning critical pedagogy as a core part of critical thinking and understanding intellectual practices as tied to social and political arrangements in addition to technical ones. Conceptualising critical thinking as conditional, multiple, and occurring in terms of limited autonomy opens the potential for critical thinking to address its inflection by culture and recognise religious traditions of critical thought (for example, Islamic traditions (Kazmi 2000; Mali in Davies and Barnett 2015, 317–335), Confucian (Tan 2017), Buddhist (Lugli 2015), and Indigenous (Chirgwin and Huijser in Davies and Barnett 2015, 335–350) traditions). As Barnett points out in challenging the assumptions that Chinese culture is not conducive to critical thinking (1997; see also Dong in Davies and Barnett 2015, 351–368), there is an imperative to see non-Western cultures not in terms of deficiency but as a resource for critical thinking. Admitting the contingency and multiplicity of critical thinking is vital for the flourishing of a future inclusive critical thinking community (Liyanage, Walker, and Shokouhi 2021). Redressing biases within critical thinking traditions asks for open dialogues with non-European critical thinking traditions. For example, if the teaching of critical thinking discusses the dispositions or virtues required for critical thinking, then virtue traditions such as Confucianism and Buddhism can be examined for their alternative perspectives and similarities (comparable to Shallon Vallor’s development of virtue ethics for the twenty-first century (2016)). Although epistemological questions regarding how different thinking traditions encounter each other may be difficult or even impossible to resolve, the idea of prosthetic critical thinking suggests that vibrant and productive dialogue about non-Western traditions and their own conditions of possibilities are part of a questioning and global critical practice.

Prosthetic critical thinking has the potential to address cultural biases in critical thinking by including in its project the investigation of how it is tied to a particular cultural and technological milieu, scrutinising the power relationships in which it is involved. In addition to the analytic tradition’s focus on epistemological adequacy (avoiding faulty arguments, vague concepts, insufficient evidence and so on), critical pedagogy asks how a particular argument or conclusion functions to transform social relations to address inequitable, undemocratic, or oppressive institutions and practices. The development of argumentation on a particular topic would be accompanied by consideration of how and to what political effect epistemological standards are employed in specific social settings. Burbules and Berk (1999) point out that a thinker in the analytic tradition might argue that such considerations are a different exercise from critical thinking. Fittingly, they respond that such an argument supports the misguided separation of the reasoner from the reasoning process itself that allows the latter to be seen as socially and politically uninflected. By embracing a self-reflexive account of its own conditions, prosthetic critical thinking opens itself to revising its practice and interacting with the various traditions of reflection it encounters.

It is not surprising that Stiegler, who writes from a left-wing perspective, can address the concerns of critical pedagogy. However, in making questions of critical pedagogy important to critical thinking, Stiegler further asks critical pedagogy to review its practice in light of humans’ originary technicity. His reproach to Adorno and Horkheimer is that they failed to diagnose the externalisation of the categories of reason in technical organs (2015, 76). Critical pedagogy needs to – and increasingly does – interrogate contemporary technics and its co-constitution with thought and politics. At one level, this entails paying careful attention to how widespread, everyday automation perpetuates, intensifies, contests, and addresses power hierarchies of various kinds. It means that critical thinking includes a degree of digital literacy that includes at least a rudimentary understanding of computational technologies that enables the identification and response to practices like coercion, lack of transparency and accountability, bias, and manipulation. Part of this digital literacy is the cultivation of scepticism towards the widespread popular notion that data-based practices are independent of human interpretative and knowledge-making practices (Kelleher 2018, 34–37). Replacing this view is the comprehension that data itself is never neutral or objective but the product of epistemological practices that must be subject to critical evaluation. This includes using data, algorithms, and software in educational institutions where they ‘can be considered part of the hidden curriculum’, according to Richard Edwards (2015). In this fashion, issues surrounding the use and meaning of data, for example, algorithmic bias (Noble 2018), can be recuperated from the category of problems to be solved by technicians and made visible as social, political, and epistemological questions. Human originary technicity means that increasingly ubiquitous digitalisation needs to be a focus of critical pedagogy.

However, Stiegler does not think that countering the shortcomings and violence of digitalisation only asks for a consolidation of the reasoning skills that such technologies short circuit. He also advocates transforming contemporary networked computational technologies into positive and cohesive social, cultural, and intellectual practices, like other external organs functioning as hypomnesis (2018, 172). Digital technologies need to be examined – and invented – to support, extend and reinvent reasoning, self-reflection, and critical pedagogy. This is an encouragement for research already underway investigating new techniques of critical thinking arising from digital and networked technologies. It extends beyond technology’s role in teaching critical thinking (for example, pedagogical approaches to using Web Tools to develop critical thinking, Herro 2014) to the expansion of the practice itself to suit a digital, multimedia environment (for example, the development of techniques of multimodal analysis beyond language, O’Halloran, Tan, and Marissa 2017; Aguilera and Pandya 2021) and the use of digital text analysis (O’Halloran 2020). Part of the critical thinking project is identifying new kinds of attention, meaning, interpretation, and reasoning that the digital hypomnesis enables, a practice undertaken in Digital Studies (Stiegler 2015, ff. 269; 2016, 141).⁸ We see relevant practices in creative digital media artwork (for example, the investigation of whiteness in Ryan Kuo’s software artwork OK (2018-2019), but it is also seen in creative digitalisation that makes communities in new ways (for example, commons-based collaborative projects like Free Software, peer-to-peer, Wikipedia, or Stiegler’s own group Ars Industrialis). Beyond simply delivering previously existing content in a new way, these projects engage new politics of knowledge and reasoning, developing the techniques of critical pedagogy in addition to requiring their scrutiny. Similarly, higher education can move away from content delivery to engage inventively with its communities so that teachers and students genuinely contribute to delivering education. This would distinguish tertiary education from ‘culture industries’ (Stiegler 2014, 14–44).

Noel Fitzpatrick describes developing and exploring digital practices that enrich intellectual and creative life as ‘digital hermeneutics’ (2021, my emphasis). It proposes that digital prosthetics carrying memory and producing knowledge are cultivated to multiply and layer meanings rather than simplify them (Fitzpatrick 2021, 154). This would be to ‘generate tertiary retentions with all the polysemic and plurivocal thickness of which the hypomnesic trace is capable’ (Stiegler 2018, 141). Digital hermeneutics is thus a ‘process of deliberation or a conflict of interpretation’ (Fitzpatrick 2020, 358) that exercises the ability to think otherwise. It sees the local and individual as part of digitalisation in addition to large-scale computational processes so that they contribute to new modes and possibilities of digital meaning (Fitzpatrick 2021, 156). It accepts that a person’s style of reasoning and reflection is contingent and limited and proceeds on the principle that there are conflicting interpretations. This is Stiegler’s hope for the next iteration of the World Wide Web (2018, 148) so that it might support local orders that perpetuate human life (2018, 50). The capacity for multiple and complex interpretations is crucial for the formation of political communities unified by their desire for a shared future but not grounded in consensus; an understanding of community Stiegler develops from Arendt and Ranciere (Lindberg 2020, 386). In cultivating new forms of digital hermeneutics, critical prosthetic thinking generates ideas, values, and techniques to counter the opacities of algorithmic automation and influence, commercial and otherwise. For example, in responding to algorithmic governmentality, the notion of transparency may not be adequate for making algorithms accountable (Boyd 2016), underscoring the need to conceptualise new values and techniques in interpretation and analysis.

The approach to critical thinking described here brings together various practices across technological, cultural, political, and social settings. It places value on analytic skills and dispositions while recognising that their cultivation depends on understanding the technical and political contexts that make them possible. The collective tasks of reasoning, critical pedagogy and digital hermeneutics suggest that teaching critical thinking in higher education is a multifaceted and cooperative endeavour. It is local rather than universal, situated rather than abstract, so the focus of critical thinking shifts according to the localities of different higher education institutions. For example, in a post-colonial nation like Australia, there is an imperative to decolonise critical thinking practices. Likewise, in the post-COVID era, in which higher education has increasingly become digitised and automated (Rapanta et al. 2021), students need to cultivate skills that identify and resist the effects of global corporate digitisation on learning, reflection, and decision-making. The pedagogy of prosthetic critical thinking sees it as a contingent practice that is part of individual and collective processes of critical becoming so that critical thinking can be formulated as a prosthetic critical becoming. As such, it exercises partial autonomy to generate bifurcations and alternative paths forward arising from a self-reflexive decision about the present.

For Stiegler, the institution of the university comprises a complex exorganism that establishes and teaches standards of truth and knowledge (2018, 171). In its caring, disautomised form, higher education enables reasoned deliberation on the knowledge, politics, and decisions that automated technologies engender. Stiegler’s future university seems like a utopian and distant possibility in a landscape of contemporary neoliberal higher education but, in its absence, the pedagogy of prosthetic critical thinking offers a way to proceed. Although universities may be deeply flawed, they still harbour transformative possibilities (Smyth 2020). Despite the all-too-frequent commodification of critical thinking as an employment-related skill, students and staff find non-calculative spaces within higher education, intermittences in which they can exercise criticality through socio-political protests, argument analysis, and reflection on their futures (Danvers 2019). As a contingent practice enabled by human originary technicity, critical prosthetic thinking accepts how thought is bound to cultural and technological milieus, bringing people into dialogue with shared terms and forming communities that welcome and respect difference.

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Notes

1. The term milieu is chosen here rather than context to reflect Gilbert Simondon’s use of the term (2020). Milieus and individuals co-individuate at the same time in the process of individuation. In contrast, context is defined by causality and provides a reason for the existence of its elements within it.

2. The term ‘technics’ here translates the French la technique, which, as Stiegler’s translators Richard Beardsworth and George Collins point out, refers to the ‘technical domain or to technical practice as a whole’ and is distinguishable from la technologie (technology) and technologique (technological), which refer to the ‘specific amalgamation of technics and the sciences in the modern period’ (Stiegler 1998, 280–81, n. 1).

3. For Stiegler, there are two ‘epochs’ of a technology as a pharmakon, the first shock of its initial arrival and a second ‘epochal shock’ that suspends the disruption of the pharmakon so that noetic consciousnesses are ‘capable of producing their own disautomization’ (emphasis in original, 2016, 11).

4. Noesis, a term used by Aristotle, among other Greek philosophers, connects to the intellect as the operation of nous or thinking as a creative act of human mind.

5. Intermittence is a term from labour contracts for French cultural workers to recognise that their employment (which may be only for a few hours) is based on a more extended work period (which may be for a week).

6. As is the case with individuals, Stiegler considers the autonomy of the university to be a conditional one enmeshed in technological, political, economic, and other forces (2015, 170).

7. In addition to his commentary on technology, Stiegler’s extensive project includes commentary on aesthetics, desire and drive, the Anthropocene, and political economy in a re-thinking of European industrial society.

8. Digital Studies, as distinguished from Digital Humanities, refers to the impact of digital technologies on all disciplines and not just the humanities disciplines and is concerned with the exteriorisation of human noesis (Stiegler 2015, ff. 269).