In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on June 1, 2010

In my last post, I talked about critical thinking and noted that one of the problems I have been seeing recently lies in the communicative nature of thinking / research.  I wanted to expand on this idea a bit, and look at some of the issues surround what, for want of a better term, we might call “social thought”.

“Social thought”, at least as I am envisioning it, is subtly different from the concept of a paradigm or a dominant discourse.  For one thing, I would argue that social thought is a constant dynamic of communication as well as negotiation that operates at the micro (aka small group) level (both paradigm and dominant discourse tend to be used at a population level).  Another thing that differentiates “social thought” from the population level concepts is that it relies on immediate attempts at constructing mutual analogs.  Let me pull that apart….

If two people are talking and really trying to communicate, they will tend to run an evaluation process on how what they say is “understood” by the other person.  You look for body language, eye movement / focus, tonality, etc.  So, when you are trying to get an idea or perception “across” to the other person, you constantly start looking for commonalities on which to draw – common experiences, common signs, etc. – and use these commonalities as the basis for drawing analogies and making arguments.

In many cases, this process involves story-telling which, BTW, is the basis of folklore and mythology (but that’s another post).  These shared stories, then, become a common ground for communications.  For example, I don’t have to make a logical argument with statistical probabilities showing that an intelligence analyst who is always predicting dangers will be “blocked out” by most of their audience.  All I have to do is say that they are a Cassandra, which has the interesting effect of not only conveying a story ending, no one listened to her, but, also, of tying in an emotional reaction.

I have been reading a copy of Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis that I got at the IAFIE conference, and what truly strikes me about it is that the methodology that Moore is proposing is designed to counter analogic thinking (the story telling I have been talking about) at the individual level, but not at the social level.  So one has all of these wonderful tools available to “purify” one’s thinking, and none available to communicate the results of that thinking.  Brilliant!

What is missing in a large part of the discussion is this process of social thought that I mentioned.  So, what would a form of critical social thought look like?

What is the process?

The first step in any form of problem analysis is, IMHO, to ask “what is actually happening right now”?  Not that I believe anyone will every truly “know” with a 100% accuracy,  but we can certainly pull out particular patterns of action and interaction (which,m BTW, is why I try and teach my students some stuff about rhetoric).

As I see it, there are three main processes involved in social thought.  The first is to establish a common symbol system; some form of shared “meaning structure”.  This is done both by language and by establishing shared experiences, including shared stories.  The second process is to construct a set of “rules of engagement” or “communications rituals”.  Think of this process more along the lines of establishing emotional responses to how we communicate.  In terms of teaching, we find a number of these already in place – lecture, seminar, bar discussion 9aka Socratic dialog), etc., along with the social conventions of action and interaction.

The final process is, loosely, rhetorical, and has to deal with the focal point for a communicated understanding.  Again, this needs to be pulled apart.  In classical Greek, there are three forms of “knowledge”: logos, gnosis and thumos (loosely transliterated).  Logos translates roughly as “authoritative word”, and is the root of the English ending
-ology.  Gnosis, leaving aside the theological implications of it, refers to knowledge from personal experience or enlightenment.  Thumos is sometimes translated as “passions”, but has some pretty strong connotations to “body knowledge” or “gut knowledge”.  Very roughly, the three types could be listed as intellectual, experiential, and behavioural (sub-conscious) forms of knowledge.

Now good, effective rhetoric hits all three of these types of knowledge.  If you don’t believe me on this one, try thinking about the last time you changed someone’s mind about what they believed based solely on logic without tying that into their personal experiences and emotional beliefs.

There are, however, what we might call conventions of rhetoric which define the focal point of arguments; the place at which we are aiming our arguments, and these focal points can be the audiences mind, their experience and/or their emotional beliefs / reactions.  These conventions of rhetoric are often wrapped up in ritual settings, social events with prescribed (at least culturally) rules of engagement (hence the second process I mentioned).

Using these processes to establish a critical social thought

Critical thinking, as it shows up in a number of forms, tends towards a focal point of the individual, but there are some social components to it, the main one being the idea of Devil’s Advocate.  The use of Devil’s Advocacy is a particular social ritual which, as with all social rituals, contains a rhetorical convention.  Red Teaming is another social component, although it is not as well developed as Devil’s Advocacy (there are too many different meanings of Red Teaming).

Critical social thinking, unlike critical thinking, must, however, be aimed at communicating perceptions and the desirability of certain actions.  This means that the intended audience must be “read” and, in a word, rhetorically manipulated.  Aah, the 2 ton elephant in the room appears – “manipulation”.  Shudder! Horrors! Against free will and individualism!  Anti-democratic! Well, get over it.  Every time we communicate we are, by design or not, attempting to “manipulate” our audience.  In certain social roles – academic, politicians, religious leaders, used car salesmen and parents all come to mind – the ability to manipulate a selected audience is the sine qua non of their existence.  The same sine qua non exists for intelligence analysts and researchers: the goal is to manipulate a selected audience.

The thing about 2 ton elephants is that people react to the parts of them that they see, and they react emotionally; that’s thumos for you.  Most North Americans tend to assume that “manipulation” is a negative, it’s a “Baaaaad thing!!!!!!”  Well, unless you are doing it “for their own good”, “in a culturally acceptable manner” and, although this is rarely voiced,  with a “politically correct goal”.  Manipulation, after all, is the basis of both education and training, and the social right and obligation to manipulate certain specific people is the basis of many (if not most) social institutions.  As I said, get over it.

So, what does all of this have to do with critical social thought? Well, first of all, it is usually a good idea to try and work with an existing process as opposed to against it.  This implies that as much thought should go into the application of rhetoric as goes into the control of biases and perceptual limitations.  Another implication, and this comes out of social role theory, is that there must be a set of conventions, a “rules of engagement” as it were, on the application of rhetoric in communicating intelligence / research.  It is not, however, enough to merely have such conventions; they must be examined and thought about such that the appropriate convention or ROE can be used.

I think I’m going to leave it at that for the nonce.  At present, I am doing a lot of thinking about one particular form of critical social thought – Red Teaming – and I want to work through that before writing much more on the topic.

Category: Communications Theory, Epistemology, Uncategorized
Tags: Critical Social Thought, Critical Thinking