Alternatives to Critical Thinking?

This comes up because I was uneasy with that part of Mara's presentation on Taoism in which she said we could survey the claims and arguments of Taoism but still there is something--she did not quite say ineffable--wise or important we have not yet got.

Consider the following description of a procedure to follow in the face of issues (we mentioned some different kinds of issues and examples--sciency issues and evaluations of scientific research, moral controversies, looming individual choices, political issues, relationship problems), questions in the face of which disagreements are possible. We could call this a description of the Critical Thinking model, but that is misleadingly au courant, since it describes something much older than work under that label. It describes the work of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, maybe all serious investigative work not run by hidden agendas--but that's part of what's at issue. Here’s the model:

              I. Articulate the issue clearly. (As philosophers, we have a particular interest in that “clearly.”)

              II. Articulate all the relevant arguments and all the relevant objections to those arguments. Worry about the completeness of these articulations and use the help of others. It will often be especially helpful to seek out others who disagree with positions which tempt us. Provide the best objections to all arguments on our own if they have not been supplied by others.

              III. Array the arguments with their objections. Worry about the issue and its clarity again. Go through the arguments and worry about all of them, following the good arguments wherever they lead as best we can.

Now, consider the question (using Anne’s help with wording),

              Are there other ways to access wisdom than by using the procedure above?

              One first response (Matt’s) suggested that emotions and contradictions may be of use to us in accessing wisdom, so yes, there are other ways not included in the model. The example Matt offered was Heraclitus’ aphorism: “Nothing is permanent but change.” He also mentioned another, “One cannot step in the same river twice.” I was at first puzzled by this, until Max’s question, whether the model above is supposed to be the model for rationality, helped me see that Matt was thinking of the model above as given to us by logic or at least consistent with logic. I provided an answer to Max’s question, that there are tensions in the discipline of philosophy between those who would give a restrictive account of rationality which does indeed stress logic and formal considerations on the one hand, and on the other those who would endorse a larger and more flexible account which stresses the openness of the concept of reasons and arguments. For the former rationality is logic (we asked whether Tolstoy might be thinking this way when he works on limits of rationality); for the latter it is a concern for arguments or reasons.

              The italicized model above is not about logic. Among many things the model does not include from logic, there is no prohibition against contradiction, only an implied warning that contradictions may provide, maybe even probably provide, openings for objections which will be weighed against them. Paradoxes, or apparent contradictions which reveal deeper insights, will be welcomed within the process. Also, it’s not clear that Heraclitus is contradicting himself in these aphorisms even though he deliberately is flirting with the possibility--”but change” in Greek and English both may be equivalent to “except change,” and the logical grammar of that is different from saying nothing is permanent and change is permanent.

              Further, regarding emotions, I reminded the class that a few weeks ago we had a discussion of the place of emotions in arguments--those who think that values, emotions and feelings have no part in rationality are clearly not giving a result generated by using the model above but instead are insisting on a rule at the beginning. Therefore, they have some alternate source for that rule, and when we look at their arguments (I talked earlier about Hume and assumed Cartesian dualism) it seems they are being guided by abstract categories (the problem of facts and values, whether an is can ever imply an ought, whether moral judgments or aesthetic judgments can ever be justified by the facts) which do not hold up in the face of examples of actual issues. For example, Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” addressing the issue of whether the protesters should have allowed the new city administration more time to act, to address long-standing injustices, offers descriptions of children facing exclusion from Funland because they are black and asking their parents why, black salesmen having to sleep in their cars because motels accept only whites, and descriptions of others in similar situations, set up so readers find it easy to understand the emotions or feelings of those described, and easy to identify with the situation which those described face. The arguments, as King’s often are, used feelings as support for a claim, in this case for the claim that action now is justified, and at the same time used them as a way to bring arguers and audience together because the audience can recognize those feelings in themselves.

              I suggested that Matt’s point can even help distinguish the model above from a model of formal logic which would perhaps be attacked by his argument. But without prohibitions from formal logic against contradiction or against emotions, the model already incorporates their possible use in arguments, and so the claim that they lie outside the model is based on confusing the model with a more restrictive logical model. Emotions may play a role in our work described in the model above, and so may contradictions. (And we have to be careful not to say that formal models totally abjure the use of contradiction--mathematical induction and reductio ad absurdum arguments depend on the use of contradictions, though that use is indeed a narrow use.)

               Max pointed out that arguments can help set up the reasonableness of taking a leap of faith, can help prepare us for taking that leap. We saw Tolstoy do something like this--since we are not going to get to the meaning of life by this way or that way or that other way, and not this other way either, and since only faith is left, then we have given arguments, offered a rational basis, for doing something irrational, for taking a leap of faith. I didn’t worry about the assumptions that the search for a meaning of life is legitimate or necessary, or that Tolstoy has dealt with all the alternatives, but granted the point that some arguments like this could be strong. We made the observation that it is at the moment of the leap of faith that we have leapt outside the model given above. It is also at that point that we no longer have an answer if it should occur to us to worry whether we are fooling ourselves. That is, arguments provide a way of addressing the question suggested by Freud of whether we believe what we do on the basis of desire rather than on the basis of, well, argument.

               The issue I raised above in the boldface question is in part the question of whether, once one has gone past critical thinking into faith, one may still have access to some kind of wisdom. Max declined when asked whether he would endorse the idea that faith is required in order to access wisdom or to answer the question of the meaning of life. Alex (this might have been a little later--my notes are sketchy here) pointed out that one possibility not yet articulated is that the model above in fact does not itself produce wisdom, though we might be assuming it does, and that one could perhaps believe that one has to step outside rationality and critical thinking before they can get access to any real wisdom. This possibility helps to underline the urgency of the issue. What methods are there for getting access to wisdom?

              At this point several of you wanted to know what we are talking about, anyway, wisdom? Are we talking about knowledge or about something else? I couldn’t tell whether I was surrounded by sharks smelling blood or not, but it seemed pretty easy to me to give some preliminary comments on what we mean by wisdom without falling into that trap of attempting a doomed definition, and now I think of some more things I’d urge us to think over. First of all, wisdom is as Socrates describes it, a self-awareness that includes acknowledging what we do not know. It may result from examining your own life. It may include being teachable. Humility is a key and philosophy had better have something to do with humility. I acknowledged the paradoxicalness of finding good philosophers who endorse humility and then, like Socrates, ram it down our throats. Still, humility is a main ingredient. After class, sitting and transcribing notes from the whiteboard, I added a couple of phrases. I expect that being wise means being moral or good in a way that can be shared with other people. And I’m not sure it has much to do with being smart or being knowledgeable. The blood in the water seemed to dissipate, the sharks gave off circling.

              I miss Brian Whitmer in this discussion. I don’t know if he still would make this kind of case, but at one time he would have maintained that mystical experiences can be a source of knowledge or of wisdom. I should leave him out of the rest of this, I suppose, since otherwise I am likely to be unfair to his support. I think some others in the class could have endorsed or supported this view--perhaps you can still weigh in and climb into the ring. Some have maintained that mystical experiences carry an absolute irrefutability. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, calls this their “noetic quality,” their power to convince the person having the experience of its truth to such an extent that the person cannot conceive of questioning the validity of the experience. The person may then resent having others ask about the validity of the experience, and may insist that others too grant it status as knowledge. The problem with all this is that their support is invisible or allegedly ineffable, raising again the question of whether the person claiming knowledge on the basis of mystical experience is only fooling himself or herself. I commented weeks ago on the varieties of claims made on the basis of mystical experience, from George Fox’s insights into the fallibility of political and religious leaders (which sometimes sound as if he is channeling the common sense of somebody’s cynical grandmother) to Joan of Arc’s conviction from her visions that she was swinging God’s sword and so could not be defeated (and it is may be her remarkable success which helped insure that we know about her now, unlike those other medieval maidens who heard voices and believed them and claimed to be God’s avenger but immediately got slapped silly and sent home). If I report to you that God has started speaking to me in a still, small voice from a burning bush, or that it was given to me in a vision that Humboldt County is shortly going to be taken up into Heaven with Garberville the site of God’s Throne of Judgement, please do me a favor and call my shrink--if I don't beat you to it.. If I say on the basis of some mystical experience something more plausible, that the Green Party candidate for state representative is going to be defeated or that there will be a huge undercount for governor, please sneer and say, “Duh.”

              This is not to say all mystical experiences should be discounted. They can convey insights. I commented that in this culture the breakdown of Cartesian dualism may sometimes be felt as a kind of rupture, a sudden and remarkable feeling that the boundaries between a person and that person’s surroundings and between body and mind have dissolved, leaving the person with a consciousness of being at home and being one with the world. I suggested that if we could keep Cartesian dualism from having such a grip on our philosophical thinking, then it might be that such ruptures and such drama would be less necessary and we could take our place in the world without having to pour mystical battery acid on those illusory walls that isolate us. But since dualism does have a formidable grip on our thinking, it may be the only way to get free of that isolation and dissociation will be by finding through meditation and enlightenment a way to get the walls to yield. --Not that the meditation need involve a Zen master with a bamboo cudgel (--and not that dissolving dualisms is the only goal or result of mystical experiences). Sitting zazen may do it for some, drugs for others, or flyfishing, sex, marathon running, expedition climbing, raising kids, school board meetings. Or perhaps you need a commitment to an ideal. The idea of preparing for these experiences brings us to the idea of practice.

              I still don’t quite know what to do with the idea that practice can be a source of wisdom, and I am tempted to think my not knowing is evidence there is something right about it. This still seems so to me even though Tim was surely being at least somewhat ironic when he went on to suggest that if we practice living meaningfully then perhaps we will get better at it (that’s not his wording). Mara’s endorsement of this idea and then her unwillingness to address my question of whether the practice needs to be the right kind rather than the wrong kind, so unlike my daughter’s piano practice during the first couple of years where she was basically just going through the motions in order to get the bribe, and more like her practice after some of her friends got her to think that there might actually be something cool about being able to play the piano--Mara’s unwillingness to accept the relevance of the analogy seemed to me wise, and maybe even wise based only on a cultivated habit of being dubious--practice on her part. And there’s something a little wacko about the idea of just going through the motions of sitting zazen, even though perhaps for every person in the practice there will be times when that idea is a correct description of what’s going on. I mentioned the recent book on critical thinking, with a title something like Sit Down and Play Beautifully, which takes on the fallacy of supposing that critical thinking can be taught quickly without involving practice and without becoming informed regarding the issues involved.

                                           jwp

Part Two:

More on methods and on alternatives to critical thinking

In the discussion so far, we have pointed to several things that help us with access to knowledge and to wisdom. They need to be noted here, even though none of them causes any trouble for the claim that there is no other avenue besides the activities referred to in the critical thinking model for us to use in working toward wisdom.

Some of the helps toward wisdom are matters not under our own control. The pursuit of wisdom is a luxury, for one thing--for most of the world, the pursuit of wisdom is something that has to be deferred until after the pursuit of safety and food becomes less urgent. Our circumstances, as A. J. Ayer points out, are rare, the circumstances of a privileged minority. If we have time to give to the working toward wisdom, that means we are lucky. Philosophical wisdom is like religious wisdom in that those who have been leaders are either wealthy or are supported by a caste system or patrons so that they can give their lives over to its pursuit. (Linda Nochlin, in her influential article, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" points out that in this way the pursuit of wisdom is like the pursuit of artistic greatness, both of them dependent on structures within which only a few are given background, permission, and support for their deep and narrowly focused commitment.) Another advantage, overlapping with this class privilege, is that our parents and our teachers are likely to have done a passable job of interesting us in ideas and in reading and thinking, and a passable job of training us adequately to deal with those ideas, books, and needs for thinking that we encounter. These advantages may enable us to build on the wisdom of other people, wisdom we do not need to achieve on our own so much as just have the ability to recognize the gift and accept it (and sort it out from the lunatic dogmatisms that get handed to us in the name of wisdom in between the gifts of true wisdom, a sorting task for which critical thinking is essential).

              Another class of advantages in accessing wisdom is not social or cultural or training but instead is under the heading of genetic or inborn aptitude. We are not talking about intelligence, since greater intelligence seems in general to make people less wise, but other personality characteristics, such as patience, teachability, obsessiveness, interest in questions and abstractions, may be helps if kept from getting out of hand. It may be that some of these are also results of training rather than really being inborn, which means this category overlaps with the above advantages based on training.

              We also took note of other kinds of luck of circumstances, some of which may be those things to which Nietzsche was referring when he said that "What does not kill me makes me stronger." We may have doubts about how often this is true and still grant that we may sometimes be wiser because of having to endure lessons we would just as soon have avoided at the time. Sometimes we are made wiser because we had our legs amputated or because of a bout with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or epilepsy or because we had to endure terrorist attacks or a vicious divorce or giving or receiving unrequited love or terrifying departmental politics or long-term depression or parenting a Down Syndrome child or hitting bottom as an alcoholic or an extended period of stupid and dissolute living. Often these kinds of things may in fact kill us off, or at least shut us down in our pursuit of wisdom so that they harm us rather than make us stronger, but sometimes they combine with other advantages or strengths of character and help us in our quest.

              Further, some of these lessons are just about impossible to bear. It may take years to learn them and it may be that we will decide to die instead. In the face of the heroism of a retarded child despite surrounding cruelty, or in the face of the death of our beloved partner or child, life's preciousness may be so burdensome and so much tied up with what cannot be had that we will have to numb ourselves instead of look it in the face. Still, there is a kind of wisdom which is ours when we can bring ourselves to look it in the face, and it will be a wisdom no one can take from you and a wisdom which may help make us unshakeable in the face of lesser disasters.

              That all the above helps are more or less out of our control, though, makes them outside the scope of our investigation into methods for finding wisdom as well. We are not going to try to help ourselves become more wise by having a kid with Down Syndrome or by watching our beloved die. Therefore these things aren't methods for accessing wisdom. Further, they do not reduce the need for us to be active in pursuing wisdom by using even the most terrible lessons well which present themselves to us, since it will be easy for us in the face of such lessons to collapse into fetal position or into drink. None of the advantages, handy lessons, gifts of fate, inborn aptitudes mentioned above automatically come trailing wisdom on leashes. Among those with any or all these gifts, bigoted, deluded, and self-excusing fools still outnumber the wise.

              What if we are not up to the task? What if we are not smart enough or patient enough or are distracted by the behavior of our genitals or our team winning or any of a myriad of other things? What if we can't or won't do the critical thinking in the face of the issues? (Sooner or later it is inevitable we will find ourselves facing our own limitations--we cannot be knowledgeable about everything, and many issues are too complex for us to master them and still work on the other issues which are more important to us.) In these cases, we are forced to use our ability to judge the critical thinking skills of others. But our ability to judge the critical thinking ability or the wisdom of others will itself be a test of our critical thinking ability. All of us will have areas in which we are ignorant and cannot become informed. This does not leave us in complete darkness. I mentioned my own political reflexes, which I have had forcibly demonstrated to me over and over are not trustworthy--it is much better for me to be able to tell when others are more trustworthy than I on those matters, and that means confirming that they are knowledgeable, that they are deeply experienced on those matters, that they are free from biases, that they will, in brief, know the arguments and objections and will follow the good arguments where they lead. Confirming these facts about those in whom I'm going to put my trust will conspicuously be a process that does not involve trust. Instead, I'll worry and check whatever I can check, instead of trusting those I want to trust. Failing to do that, I do wind up trusting, and what I trust will be luck--sometimes this works, or works well enough. But often it does not work at all. It will be wise in such a case to be worried.

              Let us next consider the use of intuitions and reflexes and ability to recognize the right path to take without agonizing about arguments. We would go on to the more radical phenomena of mysticism if we had time.

              For a great many ideas, our having learned them thoroughly results in our having to think about them less. Examples of this might include driving, or skiing, distrusting proponents of housing reform or educational reform, consider hidden agendas in particular newspaper editorials, checking edges to see if furniture is solid or is veneer over sawdust, stopping and inquiring when our partner's facial expression flickers a second. John Searle uses skiing to make the point that you might while learning have to obey the rule to keep the tips together and after you are a proficient skier you don't. (A great deal of blather in cognitive science has resulted from puzzlement about how someone can ski and not obey that rule, with an argument for the claim that really we still do obey the rule being we must, otherwise we don't know how we ski. This is of course just as strong an argument for the claim that we don't know how we ski, we being cognitive scientists.) All we need here though is the recognition that we can with practice understand or recognize or do things without doing the work referred to in the critical thinking model--and admit that sometimes this applies to work on live issues. A beginner at parenting may have to think through the issue before deciding that punishment of some kind is needed, and a practiced parent may (there’s a “or may not” implied in both these occurrences of “may”) only recognize it and do it without much thinking, but that’s because the sorting of reasons and arguments and possible objections has been done in similar situations. In an extended family of smart people, training can take the place of thinking through the long-ago critical thinking, to such an extent that when I parent like my grandmother I may not be aware of the reasons for acting the way I do–but if I have any doubts, then I’d better go back to the business of thinking about the arguments.