Why is reflection central to a systemic and critical stance?

Because if perception is filtered by your own history, the only way to loosen the filter is to turn attention back on your own thinking — that's reflection.

In a worldview where you can't get a clean, observer-free view, you can't fix bias by "just being objective." What you can do is reflect: notice your assumptions, your imprints, the perspective you're standing in, and the loops you're caught up in. Reflection does the work that "objectivity" can't:

• It surfaces the mental models quietly steering your reading of a situation.
• It opens space for other perspectives by relativising your own.
• It supports the systemic ideal of looking without judgement (wertfrei) — observing dynamics before rushing to evaluate them.

So reflection isn't a soft add-on; it's the engine that turns the systemic premises (interdependence, construction, multiperspectivity) into actual better thinking instead of just nice slogans.