Miscellaneous notes
He starts out with a quick example of General Eisenhower, and his decision on whether or not to delay D-day. He explains that Eisenhower followed the rules of critical thinking:
“he got all the information he could, weighed it carefully, and had avoided decision by indecision”.
He explains that the ability to critically think, and the creation of procedures for good thinking, is what spurred the development of science. He accepts that human problems can’t be subject to rigorous controls, and some of the procedure do not(Or cannot) be applied to human problems. He still argues that this development in thinking has a lot of value, with evidence behind it in the cases it can be tested.
This begs the interesting question to me, that he doesn’t seem to explore (Probably very reasonably because it’s outside the scope of the book — or perhaps, it’s just not fitting in this part of the book). “If these procedures are new, and are being argued as a new useful way to think about ‘human problems’, what is the old way to think about human problems? Was it effective?“.
It seems to me if we’re supposed to be taking up an alternative way of thinking, we should be well informed about the other options. Weighing options was just suggested as an important part of critical thinking, after all. Or does that beg the question? Meta-thinking is weird.
1. Decision Making
1. Creative and Critical thinking
Here he seems to overview and define the subjects of the book.
Firstly, creative and critical thinking are distinct, and he defines them:
- Creative thinking may be defined as the formulation of possible solutions to a problem or explanations of a phenomenon
- Critical thinking as the testing and evaluation of these solutions or explanations
He compares these to offense and defense in sports, that both are essential in all areas of human activity. In general, ideas must be ‘created’ to exist, and ‘tested’ to be useful.
This is the basic process, he argues, of the manufacturer, detective and physician.
He also says the modern scientific methods (Notably, he puts it as “The methods of modern science” instead of the usual ”the Scientific method”. This begs a few questions) is both creative and critical, with the creation of hypothesis and the evaluation of them. Yet, he continues, scientists and laymen alike tend to be careless about these aspects of thinking.
2. Phases of Decision Making
He recognizes 5 phases involved in applying creative and critical thinking to any problem. These are not ‘steps’ as is, “In practice you may go back to an earlier phase or work on several phases simultaneously”, but all of them must be completed at one point. He gives some time to each phase, but I will list all of them here and elaborate afterwards.
- Recognizing and defining the Problem
- Gathering Information
- Forming Tentative Conclusions
- Testing Tentative Conclusions
- Evaluation and Decision He notes some important aspects of these.
About the 1st, “Recognizing and defining the problem”, he says that a poor definition is common, and it’s very possible unless you’re careful, you’ll define the wrong thing as the problem and solve that instead.
Suppose, for example, that near the middle of your first term in college an instructor tells you that you are likely to fail his course. You may react in characteristically human fashion by resenting this instructor who is thwarting your wishes, and you may without realizing it define your problem to be getting even with this instructor. You may succeed in solving this problem, only to realize too late that the real problem was how to pass the course.
Or that your definition may be too broad, or too narrow; A too broad focus and it’ll be unsolvable or unknowable, too narrow and it’ll miss important things. Best to break up big problems into smaller ones, he says, and to expand small into bigger ones.
He notes of the 3rd, that it ought to be wholly creative. That critical thinking is to be applied in the next phases, but that in this phase, the more tentative conclusions the better.
Of the 4th, he points out that
In order to know that a conclusion is true you must know that (1) the evidence used is in itself reliable, i.e., known to be true; (2) all inferences involved are flawless.
And of the 5th, he makes what I consider to be a very Aristotelian point:
The minimum degree of reliability you should have before accepting or acting on a conclusion varies with the circumstances. A juror in a murder case who believes that convicting an innocent defendant of murder would be a tragic error should demand the high degree of reliability known as true beyond reasonable doubt. A housewife trying to decide which is the better of two boxes of cereal can afford to settle for a much lower degree of reliability, since little is at stake.
3. The Personal Point of View
He divides the personal point of view into three components:
- Frame of Reference
- Values
- The Self-Concept
The frame of reference seems to be the same as what Mortimer Adler and his like would call “Schema”:
the organized body of accumulated knowledge and experience with which one interprets new experience and guides his behavior. One’s frame of reference embraces his whole realm of experience, including the physical world and how to get along in it, and other people and how to get along with them.
He explains the problems that occur as a result of lacking knowledge, but I think it’s enough to say that lacking knowledge causes problems. Anyone sufficiently creative can think of a hundred or two examples of that on their own.
Something I did particularly enjoy was this little argument, even though he disregards the trivium in favor of popular usage of the word:
when you select one experience you automatically exclude other experiences. You cannot afford to stock your frame of reference with trivia. The information in your frame of reference has much to do with the kind of person you are and will become. Clearly, therefore, you should select your knowledge according to the kind of person you want to become.
How well put, I think. He goes on to explain how this relates to acquiring technical knowledge, a liberal education, knowledge of society and culture and any science related to laws you may indirectly vote for.
As he continues to describe values(Very much the way I would expect — not much notable there) and self-concept, he says the following of self-concept:
The Self-Concept. The third major component is the self-concept, i.e., one’s picture of the kind of person he is. The motivation for most thinking stems from a basic need to develop and maintain a satisfactory self-concept. To a person living alone in a wilderness all his life, the self-concept presumably would be less important than physical safety and comfort. But in a complex society, where the necessities of life are usually acquired without great difficulty, maintaining a satisfactory self-concept becomes for most people the focal point of endeavor. To maintain it most people will go without food or sleep. If necessary, they will even risk life itself.
Which I find to be a very interesting assertion. Whether this can be argued to be a reasonable thing, or whether it’s the result of a negative, perhaps even unfairly negative view of modern society is to be seen whenever he elaborates further about what he considers self-concept to be, and where it’s importance comes from.
4. Objectivity
He defines objectivity as: the degree to which we can view ourselves and the world without distortion.
Here he relates to us a fairly common proposition: “Total objectivity is futile”. That given we have limited perception of things, our ability to be accurate is also limited
Because each of us can observe reality only through the lens of his personal point of view, absolute objectivity is impossible. A person may be reasonably objective in one area and highly prejudiced in another, partly because his frame of reference may be adequate and accurate in one area but distorted in another.
He goes on to talk about the pitfalls of distorting the truth when confronted by something that threatens your self-concept. After explaining and giving examples, he comes to this:
In fact, we can formulate a kind of psychological Ohm’s law: the resistance to a new idea is directly proportional to the threat of the new idea to the self-concept.
It seems to me that this ‘law’ describes a habitual mistake in thinking, rather than a fact about it. Something we can make many examples of people doing(Some of which he lists), but that if we look, we can also find plenty of people not following in the slightest.
5. Improving Thinking
Man does not usually strive for a goal once he believes it is unattainable. He may continue to dream about it, but he will not strive for it.
This is contrary to how I imagine people strive for things. I imagine people often orient themselves toward a ‘perfection’, which is presumed to be not completely attainable, but also to ‘steps towards perfection’, which are attainable. They don’t lower their standard, but deal with it both at the “least attainable level”, looking to the sky, and the “most attainable level”, looking forward an inch, and between the two from time to time.
Although I disagree with that, I wouldn’t think that is particularly crucial for the argument of the book. Still, an important distinction to make, I think.
This is the basis for his standards, somewhat more lax than they would be for the unattainable^1 “Perfect thinking” (I’d agree on the unattainability with his description of thinking — at least in mortal life, we simply can’t have enough information to make all the best possible decisions all the time):
- When sound procedures are followed reasonably well
- when the information used is as complete and accurate as can reasonably be expected
The Hypothetical Syllogism
Oh yes, logic. This should be fun.
My initial impression of the first paragraph is that it’s plainly wrong. Let me explain. Here it is:
If the hundreds of decisions we must make every day were as complex and difficult as General Eisenhower’s, most of us would never finish breakfast. The fact that most of us do finish breakfast and do manage to make the decisions required of us is due to our ability to organize our experience and use it in decision making by a mental process known as deductive inference.
Now, I have used deductive inference before. I just don’t see it being used for the ‘hundreds of decisions we must make every day’, nor do I see it saving much time. Nobody deduces what kind of breakfast they will have or where they should get it from. A more accurate description of the processes ‘everyday’ decisions take would probably involve relating the ‘schema’(The store of knowledge, including things like ‘What foods I like’ and ‘where I like the food’) and other related information with habits. We don’t infer we should brush our teeth every morning; we only had to believe it once, do it for a while, until a habit was formed. It is only when a decision is peculiar or complex that we have to actually use deductive inference; if a problem, or something simply unexpected occurs, we see it fit to start thinking on a more substantial level. It is a good idea to question and think about things on a more substantial level regardless from time to time, but it is notably slower, and it would be impractical to try to use it for the ‘hundreds of decisions we must make every day’ This description of ‘bringing decisions to a higher level of thinking when they are problems or unexpected’ has been used to relate the unconscious(Habitual) mind and the conscious(Purposeful, inferential) one. I don’t really want to go into those distinctions, but it’s worth considering.
I do, however, find his following description, building on this one, to be endearing:
Each of us has in his frame of reference innumerable propositions, i.e., sentences that state a relationship between two objects, actions, ideas, or qualities. These propositions cover one’s whole range of knowledge and experience, from traffic laws to value judgments. In many of our decisions we simply connect the immediate situation with one of these propositions and derive a decision by deductive inference.
This makes two small errors, I think, but the may be unrelated to the argument of the whole. Here is why: The errors stated are
- That we ‘store’ innumerable propositions; They’re not confected when we ‘ask’ for them, but the propositions themselves are part of our ‘schema’.
- That after retrieval, they are used, and this is the process of ‘everyday’ decisions. While this has the same error I mentioned before, as disregarding habit in favor of a more impractical description of decision-making, I find it likely unrelated to the point of the book because a habit is created as a matter of decision, and has all of the criteria and parts of decision-making he describes, insofar as it was developed at a time we were willing and able to do that work. That is to say, the decision is still made, it is just made at a different time. The fact we can ‘pull out’ reasons for it isn’t because on some level the decision is inferred and made anew every single time, but simply because we tend to remember the reasons for habits. This tendency fails sometimes, however, and we may do something habitually without knowing why. This seems nonsensical in his view of decision-making; One makes an inference, and immediately forgets the antecedents? Every day? This makes sense in my view; they make the decision at one time, possibly with the help of logical inference, and then after some time forgets, but continues to act based on the decision.