Critical reading is a form of language analysis that does not take the given text at face value, but involves a deeper examination of the claims put forth as well as the supporting points and possible counterarguments.
The identification of possible ambiguities and flaws in the author's reasoning, in addition to the ability to address them comprehensively, are essential to this process.
Dorfman and Mattelart later used symptomatic reading as a means of analyzing the presence of imperialist ideology in Disney comics.
Bazerman's book is informed by an advanced theoretical knowledge of scholarly research, documents and their composition.
Hermeneutics (e.g., the version developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer) has demonstrated that the way we read and interpret texts is dependent on our "pre-understanding" and "prejudices".
This situation changed when Thomas Samuel Kuhn published his book (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which can be seen as an hermeneutic interpretation of the sciences because it conceives the scientists as governed by assumptions which are historically embedded and linguistically mediated activities organized around paradigms that direct the conceptualization and investigation of their studies.
Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance and intelligence came into disrepute after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data.
This paper thus demonstrates how critical reading (and the opposite) may be related to beliefs as well as to interests and power structures.