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What is critical thinking? It is often thought of as a general and rather vague skill or set of skills. Recent research (Nygren, Haglund, Samuelsson, Geijerstam, & Prytz, 2018) suggests that students that perform well on problems, involving critical thinking in one discipline, do not necessarily perform well on problems involving critical thinking in other disciplines, i.e. it may be discipline-specific. Furthermore, it has been suggested (e.g. Nygren et al., 2018; Walsh, Quinn, Wieman, & Holmes, 2019) that important aspects for critical thinking in physics in particular include systematic investigation, or how one proceeds in an investigation, of a phenomenon. In this presentation, I will draw on results from an ongoing study (Samulesson, Gregorcic, Elmgren & Haglund, preprint) to illustrate some epistemological components important for students’ systematic investigation in an inquiry-based lab activity involving freezing-point depression.