Introduction
Here he lays out the general purpose of the book: to introduce a deliberate and definite process for creative thinking, just as there is one for critical(“vertical”, as he puts it) thinking. Early on, when talking about ideas, he says the following:
The only available method for changing ideas is conflict which works in two ways. In the first way there is a head on confrontation between opposing ideas. One or other of the ideas achieves a practical dominance over the other idea which is suppressed but not changed. In the second way there is a conflict between new information and the old idea. As a result of this conflict the old idea is supposed to be changed. This is the method of science which is always seeking to generate new information to upset the old ideas and bring about new ones. It is more than the method of science — it is the method of human knowledge.
I find this to be a particularly interesting insight. I have come to the conclusion through multiple different means that the scientific process is also more generally a description of how conscious learning comes into effect. I’m not so sure about the first one, though — how to categorize it, how to paraphrase it. “suppressed but not changed” begs questions to me; is it to say that you still ‘think’ you believe one way, but act another? That appears to be the description, and I think it’s reasonable to say that this happens. Getting people to believe things without their own realizing it is a tool of propaganda, but it also happens in less nefarious contexts. The chicken example comes to mind.
The chicken example
(I’m not sure where the source of the chicken example comes from. I heard it from word of mouth, but research I ought to look into that)
In the chicken example, a mother makes chicken in a specific way, that includes some preparations, and then, eventually, cutting a certain piece of meat off the chicken, and then continued preparations. Her daughter is watching her do this, and being curious and astute, asks why she cut the piece off. The mother realizes she doesn’t really know why, and it’s just how she was taught by her mother. Being curious herself, she asks her own mother the same question, and she answers again that she isn’t sure; she was taught that way by her own mother. Finally, she asks her grandmother why cutting it was an included step, who laughs and explains that the oven she had was too small to fit the whole chicken.
When left unquestioned, traditions can be kept up which are extraneous, or even harmful, even when they come about for good reasons(A too-small oven is perfectly fine reason to cut the chicken). There is another story (The “old roman village”) which does a good job at explaining the counterpoint: Just because a tradition looks extraneous doesn’t mean it is. Don’t abandon them too early.
I believe this is the kind of thing he means by “suppressed but not changed” — although it’s interesting to consider why cutting rather than not cutting is ‘practically dominant’. It seems plausible, though, to make the argument that to question everything learned without challenge(Either because it’s tradition, which again, is often reasonable, or because they were too young to properly question it) as a child would be incredibly impractical(Impossible, even).
Now that that’s sorted
Next he goes into a sort of meta-problem. See, ideas are not just pieces of information devoid of interpretation or meaning. They can’t be. This point is made well in The 7 Habits(but I haven’t written this point there yet, out of pure ignorance that it’d be one of the things worth saving).
The point is this: If you take a drawing, the lines are ‘objective’. The colors are objective. But what those lines depict is not. Someone in the 20th century and someone in the 15th century may look at the same piece of art and take completely different meanings from it — and both be right. After all, the “old woman, young woman” illusion allows the same drawing to have two wildly different interpretations, neither wrong.
The same way, new information is understood and interpreted and becomes an idea from there. But the way we see things is a sort of idea itself, what Stephen Covey(And Thomas Kuhn before him) calls the “paradigm”. And in cases where the paradigm is incorrect, Edward de bono says new ideas will strengthen it through implication when interpreted through the paradigm’s lens:
The conflict method for changing ideas works well where the information can be evaluated in some objective manner. But the method does not work at all when the new information can only be evaluated through the old idea. Instead of being changed the old idea is strengthened and made ever more rigid.
Immediately after, he suggests an alternative:
The most effective way of changing ideas is not from outside by conflict but from within by the insight rearrangement of available information. Insight is the only effective way of changing ideas in a myth situation — when information cannot be evaluated objectively. Even when information can be evaluated objectively, as in science, an insight rearrangement of information leads to huge leaps forward. Education is not only concerned with collecting information but also with the best ways of using information that has been collected.