“Assuming that we wish to clear up our controversies, we need to be sure that agreed criteria have been established and that these criteria are adequate to their job. This means that we must query the existence of adequate and agreed criteria even in fields where it is usually taken quite for granted. Sometimes this will involve winkling out assumptions which are ordinarily hidden behind implicit agreements andâto that endâquestioning the grounds upon which statements are taken to be âobviousâ by nearly everybody. But I think that such apparently captious enquiries will usually turn out to be justified; the obvious notoriously obscures the true.”
(Rupert Crawshay-Williams: Methods and Criteria of Reasoning, 1957)