I agree that you can't reliably reveal things as false, contradictory, or misleading without knowledge of the domain - but I think you absolutely can 'question', doubt, and maintain a healthy scepticism.

To use the economics example, you can think things like 'well hang on, how did they measure that'; 'is that really related to or indicative of that'; 'this author has a lot of similar things to say on this topic, some other motive perhaps'.

Answering those questions may require more reading, acquiring some domain knowledge, but you don't need already to have domain knowledge on every subject that you want to read about thoughtfully.