In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on May 28, 2010

I just finished attending the IAFIE conference here in Ottawa, and a lot of the discussion was on the subject of “critical thinking”.  Based solely on the presentations there, it became rapidly apparent that the problems many of the presenters were having with critical thinking were the exact opposite of the problems my students have been having with it.

Since 2005, I have been teaching a course in the Directed Interdisciplinary Studies program at Carleton University which has been focused on the research process; basically, how to go about building a research project and communicating the results of that project.  I frequently refer to it as a course in “applied epistemology”.  A major component of this course has been centered on constructing a setting whereby my students develop the habit of recognizing the social context of research and, in particular, how to communicate it to selected audiences.

The vast majority of the DIS students I have worked with have been an absolute joy: bright, interested, opinionated, argumentative and, above all else, “inquiring”; everything I like to see in my students!  The problems I have seen with their thinking processes were twofold:  first, they sometimes took what I refer to as a “theological stance” to the world, and, second, they frequently did not consider research to be an act of communications.

In the first instance, the “theological stance”, they would approach their research as if they already “knew” what they would find and how they would interpret it.  As one saying goes, “to a hammer, all problems look look like nails”.  This problem has, as its root, the belief that the touchstone of validity lies in a metaphysical model of the world, i.e. an assumption that the map is the territory.  It is also a problem that was shared by many intelligence analysts which, for the past 9 years or so, they have been struggling to overcome (more on this later).

The second problem, research as a communicative act, is somewhat trickier and can be encapsulated by mangling an old conundrum: “if a researcher analyzes a problem and no one understands and applies their findings, is it still research?”.  In terms of the epistemological map-territory problem, this one concerns what may be called the “mapping conventions”; the coding system used by a mapping convention.  If you want a more down to Earth example, think of the last time you tried to understand the technical jargon (or acronym soup) coming out of some organization of profession that you weren’t a part of.

As with the first problem, the second has a metaphysical basis as well.  In the first instance, the “map” is assumed to be a “True” (in an absolute sense) representation of “Reality”.  In the second, the coding system is assumed to provide status validation for the action.  Let me pull this apart, since I just used some technical jargon.  Using a particular coding system, a “language” to describe a “problem” and its “resolution”, communicates a certain meaning, part of which is that “I”, the researcher, am using “insider language” (technical jargon) from a group that is socially recognized as being “authoritative”.  It is, in Weberian terms, a reliance on some form of “traditional authority”.  The touchstone of validity lies in the researcher speaking as a member of a group which has the social authority to make pronouncements on that problem area.

But what if the audience you are trying to influence does not accept that social authority?  What if the very concepts contained in the coding system are either “meaningless” to the audience or, even worse, your audience considers them to be “invalid”?  What if the very structures of logic that are used by that group are rejected?  This is where we move out of the realm of the individual and their “thinking processes” and into the real of “social thought” or, in other words, communications.  And, as with most of these problems, there is a branch of philosophy that deals with them; in this case, it is called “rhetoric“.

In its simplest form, rhetoric is the communicative act of translating one person’s perception of some part of reality such that another person understands that perception well enough to act on it.  In this simplest case, it has three parts: the coding of the message, the medium of communication, and the probability of inducing action on the part of the recipient.  Think about a 2 month old baby crying; the “code” is simple (and often very frustrating!), the medium is sound, and the impetus to action is constructed both from the medium, the limitations of the code (“Damn, I’ve tried everything to get them to stop crying! Oh, they just want to be held!”) and the relationship between the two involved.

Of course, by the time people get to be adults, the coding gets a lot more complex!  One of the best articles I have come across on the subject was written by Joel Best called Rhetoric in Claims-Making: Constructing the Missing Children Problem (Social Problems, Vol. 34, No. 2. (Apr., 1987), pp. 101-121. JSTOR).  One of the reasons that I call it one of the “best” articles I have come across (pun only partly intended), is that it lays out a pretty simple methodology for analyzing rhetoric in action without using too much technical jargon.

But let’s get back to “critical thinking” and the IAFIE conference….

When I teach my students “critical thinking”, I spend a lot of time on rhetoric and on helping them to figure out what structures (logics, coding systems, etc.) will make sense to their audiences and, by extension, they become aware of the influence of logics, coding systems, etc. on their own thought processes.  For many of the speakers at the IAFIE conference, their concern with “critical thinking” was on reducing analyst bias.  Admittedly, that is definitely part of critical thinking but, on the whole, I was rather disturbed by an implied metaphysics that came through most of the presentations: that it was possible to have a totally objective analysis, at least as an ideal, that could be communicated and understood if only the “right” tools were applied.

Well, I suppose that the shift in emphasis from “this IS the Truth” towards “this is the process of achieving a better picture of the Truth” is a heartening sign, but it is still worrysome to me.  My concern was also heightened by one speaker who blithely referred to the “Scientific Approach” to critical thinking as being solely composed of deductive logic; obviously they have not studied the history of science and have probably never read Bacon (that’s not “science”, it is “theology” in the pejorative sense).  My concern was locked in place when the same speaker stated – with pride! – that his institution had achieved “full buy in” on teaching every student this particular model of “critical thinking” in every course.  Lovely;  I can hear the chorus of 14th century Dominicans cheering in the background accompanied by massed blocks of students listening to the pronouncements of “True Thought”, cheered on by a pick-up band of AQ.  As I commented snarkily (and sotto voce) to an acquaintance, “well, you can’t think outside the box until you define it”.

What was missing in most of the discussions on critical thinking was hard to define.  Some of it was that there was no consideration of communications, while another part was a lack of thought about the metaphysical, epistemological and ontological implications.  But at a more basic level, one of the things that truly bothered me was the attempt to apply an assembly line model to the production of “intelligence products”; to construct all of them in an “objective” manner.

This over-emphasis on “objectivity”, along with the metaphysical assumption that one can achieve “Truth” by stripping away anything that is not “objective” (or by denigrating the same), is, I believe, at the heart of why many of our intelligence agencies cannot understand the people they are studying.  If only “objective forces” are responsible for “radicalization” (e.g. poverty, “oppression”, etc.), then one will never see the clues that are in front of our eyes as to why so many people become “radicalized”: they are searching for “meaning”.  But the quest for meaning is “subjective”, not “objective” (at least as it tends to be communicated to intelligence agencies) and, as such, must be seen as “invalid” (back to rhetoric….).

I think that, if I attend next years’ IAFIE conference, I will present a paper on rhetoric and why intelligence agencies must consider subjectivities.

Category: Communications Theory, Epistemology, Teaching
Tags: Critical Thinking, Epistemology, IAFIE, Rhetoric