104 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING
a connection between more than one idea. What we know is best thought of as a
network of interrelated claims—a series of potential, unexpressed arguments and
explanations in our heads and in what we read and observe. Hence, knowledge is
about relationships: our reasoning compared to, drawn from, contrasted with, and
generally taken together with the reasoning of others. One of the best ways to
understand how 'finding things out' involves various analytical processes is to
consider how questions (which can be used to guide our research) are, in fact,
deeply implicated in reasoning.
Reasoned analysis as questions
It is usually thought that the key to scholarly, intellectual work is finding the
answers. Well, it is not. Critical academic work about any topic is designed, first
and foremost, to discover the right questions to ask; the answers come later, once
those questions have been determined. While smart thinking is usually more
pragmatic than the reflective work done by intellectuals, the same general rule
applies in developing our analysis. Thinking first about questions is much smarter
than trying to think first about answers.
We can understand the significance of questions by thinking about their
relationship to the basic process of reasoning—the linking of claims. For example,
if I ask 'Does the historical racism of white Australia towards Asians still interfere
with Australia's diplomatic relations with Malaysia?', then I am tentatively making
the claim 'the historical racism of white Australia towards Asians still interferes with
Australia's diplomatic relations with Malaysia'. The answer to my question will, in
effect, be a judgment of the acceptability or otherwise of this claim; the evidence
that I gather and the arguments that I read and create in trying to answer the
question become premises for my eventual conclusion (which either confirms or
rejects that initial claim). A question, then, can be seen as a conclusion-in-prospect:
a proposed relationship between ideas that needs to be tested. The question 'What
caused Australia to become less reliant on the United Kingdom in economic and
political terms following the Second World War?' is different in that it presumes
that Australia did become less reliant and that the answers will show how that
occurred.
So, questions are a way of unlocking and understanding the relationships
between ideas. Although we might think of the answers that flow from them as
being isolated, individual 'facts' (claims), it is much more accurate to characterise
the answers as relations between claims and, within a claim, between ideas and/or
events. To ask a question is always to call on some existing knowledge and to seek
the connection between the answer and that existing knowledge. We want to
develop these relationships so that they can form our claims, as well as the links
between premises and from premises to conclusions, in our analytical structures.
Every stage in the process of analysing an issue can be thought of as one of
questioning or interrogating. Questions provide the underlying 'glue' that binds
together the initial formulation of the topic or problem about which we are