Wayne Booth wants literary critics to be pluralists, not champions of a single method. A pluralist believes that "two or more conflicting positions may be entirely acceptable" but that many other positions are wrong; truth is plural but nevertheless there is truth. Critical Understanding investigates the criticism of three professed pluralists, R. S. Crane, Kenneth Burke, and M. H. Abrams, to see whether pluralism is possible. Are they, in fact, pluralists, or only disguised monists? Can Booth himself be a pluralist and accept all three on their own terms? He is scrupulous in argument here, shrewdly identifying monistic presuppositions, choices, or conclusions, and he repeatedly encounters an awkward problem: for any two positions the critic must ask "Are they rivals or are they not? If a critic concludes that they are not, can we not say that he is only a monist after all, disguised as a pluralist...