Are We Art or Are We a Reflection of It
Decades before Carl Sagan published his at present-legendary Distortion Detection Kit for critical thinking, the great philosopher, psychologist, and instruction reformer John Dewey (October 20, 1859–June 1, 1952) penned the definitive treatise on the subject field — a subject area all the more urgently relevant today, in our historic period of snap judgments and instant opinions. In his 1910 masterwork How We Think (gratuitous download | public library), Dewey examines what separates thinking, a basic human faculty we take for granted, from thinking well, what information technology takes to train ourselves into mastering the fine art of thinking, and how we can channel our natural curiosity in a productive manner when confronted with an overflow of information.
Dewey begins with the foundation of reflective thought, the defining quality of the fruitful, creative mind:
More of our waking life than we should intendance to admit, fifty-fifty to ourselves, is likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential trifling with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope…
Reflection involves not merely a sequence of ideas, simply a consequence — a consecutive ordering in such a fashion that each determines the next as its proper outcome, while each in turn leans back on its predecessors. The successive portions of the reflective thought grow out of ane another and support one another; they do not come up and get in a medley. Each stage is a stride from something to something — technically speaking, it is a term of thought. Each term leaves a deposit which is utilized in the next term. The stream or flow becomes a railroad train, concatenation, or thread.
Thought, Dewey notes, besides denotes belief, which he defines as "real or supposed knowledge going beyond what is straight nowadays," which is "marked by acceptance or rejection of something as reasonably likely or improbable." But that process of acceptance or rejection is also where we brush up against one of the most quintessential human flaws, the same i responsible for the "backfire outcome" — our tendency to construct our beliefs based on insufficient knowledge and understanding, then to cling to them blindly, rejecting all evidence to the opposite. Stereotypes and prejudice are amidst the products of such thinking. In that sense, our "thoughts" are not based on truthful reflection but on crippling cognitive shortcuts, often borrowed from society rather than arrived at by our ain headwork. Dewey writes:
Such thoughts grow up unconsciously and without reference to the attainment of correct conventionalities. They are picked up — we know not how. From obscure sources and by unnoticed channels they allude themselves into acceptance and become unconsciously a part of our mental furniture. Tradition, instruction, imitation — all of which depend upon authority in some course, or entreatment to our own reward, or fall in with a strong passion — are responsible for them. Such thoughts are prejudices, that is, prejudgments, non judgments proper that residual upon a survey of bear witness.
To truly think, Dewey argues, nosotros ought to consider not simply the origin of our beliefs just as well how they touch our actions, which they inevitably do:
Thinking in its best sense is that which considers the basis and consequences of beliefs…
To think of the globe every bit flat is to accredit a quality to a real thing as its existent belongings. This conclusion denotes a connection among things and hence is not, similar imaginative thought, plastic to our mood. Conventionalities in the world's flatness commits him who holds it to thinking in certain specific ways of other objects, such every bit the heavenly bodies, antipodes, the possibility of navigation. It prescribes to him actions in accordance with his formulation of these objects.
Dewey defines reflective thought, our single most strong antidote to erroneous beliefs:
Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of noesis in the lite of the grounds that support information technology, and the farther conclusions to which it tends, constitutes cogitating thought… It is a conscious and voluntary effort to establish conventionalities upon a firm footing of reasons.
This ground of reasons, Dewey argues, is a relational framework for how dissimilar bits of knowledge connect to and validate ane another. To recall well is to construct fruitful linkages:
[The] function by which one thing signifies or indicates another, and thereby leads us to consider how far one may be regarded as warrant for belief in the other, [is] the fundamental factor in all cogitating or distinctively intellectual thinking… Reflection thus implies that something is believed in (or disbelieved in), not on its ain direct business relationship, but through something else which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground of conventionalities.
What follows naturally from this is the idea that to retrieve is also to embrace dubiety and harness the ability of not-knowing:
Thinking … is defined accordingly as that functioning in which present facts suggest other facts (or truths) in such a way as to induce conventionalities in the latter upon the ground or warrant of the quondam. We do not put behavior that residuum but on inference on the surest level of assurance. To say "I recollect so" implies that I do not every bit yet know so. The inferential conventionalities may later be confirmed and come to stand as certain, but in itself it always has a certain element of supposition…
[There are] sure subprocesses which are involved in every reflective functioning. These are: (a) a land of perplexity, hesitation, doubt; and (b) an act of search or investigation directed toward bringing to light further facts which serve to corroborate or to nullify the suggested belief.
Much like getting lost helps usa find ourselves, existence uncertain drives us to reverberate, to seek knowledge. The spark of thinking, Dewey argues, is a kind of psychological restlessness rooted in ambiguity — what John Keats memorably termed "negative adequacy" — which precipitates our effort to resolve the unease by coming to, by way of reflection and deliberation, a conclusion:
Thinking begins in what may adequately plenty exist called a forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives. As long as our activity glides smoothly forth from one matter to some other, or as long as we let our imagination to entertain fancies at pleasure, there is no telephone call for reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way of reaching a belief brings u.s.a., all the same, to a pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically climb a tree; we attempt to discover some standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may determine how the facts stand related to one another…
Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steadying and guiding factor in the entire process of reflection… This need of straightening out a perplexity besides controls the kind of enquiry undertaken. A traveler whose stop is the nigh beautiful path will await for other considerations and will examination suggestions occurring to him on some other principle than if he wishes to notice the way to a given urban center. The problem fixes the cease of thought and the finish controls the procedure of thinking.
This is where the art of critical thinking becomes crucial. Like the scientist, whose chief responsibility is e'er to remain uncertain, so the thinker must cultivate a capacity for not simply welcoming but seeking out doubt:
If the suggestion that occurs is at in one case accepted, we have uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection. To turn the thing over in mind, to reflect, means to chase for additional evidence, for new data, that will develop the suggestion, and will either, as we say, bear it out or else make obvious its absurdity and irrelevance… The easiest manner is to accept any suggestion that seems plausible and thereby bring to an end the condition of mental uneasiness. Reflective thinking is e'er more or less troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept suggestions at their face up value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance. Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful… To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry — these are the essentials of thinking.
Just equally chiefly, Dewey argues, cogitating thought acts as an antitoxin to autopilot — it "affords the sole method of escape from purely impulsive or purely routine action." But similar the use of any tool, thinking "may go wrong equally well equally right, and hence … needs safeguarding and preparation." Dewey admonishes against the assumption that ane'southward intelligence prevents the functioning from going incorrect — if anything, the relationship betwixt creativity and dishonesty suggests that the most intelligent people are often those well-nigh deft at rationalizing their erroneous beliefs and the resulting behaviors. Dewey writes:
Natural intelligence is no barrier to the propagation of error, nor large but untrained feel to the accumulation of fixed fake behavior. Errors may support i another mutually and weave an ever larger and firmer fabric of misconception.
Perchance the greatest gift of idea, Dewey notes, is that it allows the states to imagine things not nevertheless experienced, based on what nosotros know in and about the present — it grants usa the power of "systematized foresight," which enables united states of america to "act on the basis of the absent and the hereafter." And even so therein lies one of the most perilous potential pitfalls, equally well as the greatest potentiality of learning the art of reflective thought:
The process of reaching the absent from the present is peculiarly exposed to error; it is liable to be influenced by almost whatsoever number of unseen and unconsidered causes — past experience, received dogmas, the stirring of self-interest, the arousing of passion, sheer mental laziness, a social environment steeped in biased traditions or blithe by false expectations, then on. The exercise of thought is, in the literal sense of that word, inference; past it one thing carries us over to the idea of, and belief in, another thing. Information technology involves a bound, a leap, a going across what is surely known to something else accustomed on its warrant. Unless one is an idiot, one just cannot help having all things and events suggest other things not actually present, nor can ane help a trend to believe in the latter on the footing of the erstwhile. The very inevitableness of the jump, the leap, to something unknown, just emphasizes the necessity of attending to the atmospheric condition under which information technology occurs then that the danger of a false step may be lessened and the probability of a right landing increased.
Paying attending, essentially, means understanding the context in which an idea occurs and the weather nether which it is given credence — in other words, knowing why nosotros believe what we believe. That, Dewey argues, is a function of critical thinking, the effect of which is proof — something without which we tin can't exist sure that what nosotros believe is truthful:
To prove a thing means primarily to try, to test it… Not until a thing has been tried — "tried out," in colloquial language — do we know its true worth. Till so information technology may exist pretense, a bluff. But the thing that has come out victorious in a test or trial of strength carries its credentials with it; information technology is approved, because it has been proved.
(How brilliantly this applies not only to the pursuit of capital-T truth, but also to the basic textile of our wants and desires — so often nosotros dismiss something as unworthy without having tried it out. To dismiss experiences and ideas in that way is, then, a profound failure of cogitating thinking and of our highest man potentiality.)
In testing our inferences, Dewey argues, it's crucial to discriminate between "behavior that residuum upon tested bear witness and those that do not" and to be mindful of "the kind and degree of assent yielded," both of which require a rich library of knowledge and experience against which to test our beliefs.
This notion strikes with particular resonance: I founded Brain Pickings around the concept of combinatorial inventiveness, the idea that our capacity to create — which is, essentially, a function of fruitful thinking — is predicated on a vast and various puddle of insights, impressions, influences, and other mental resources.
Dewey captures this elegantly in considering "the factors essential to thought":
Thinking involves … the suggestion of a conclusion for acceptance, and too search or inquiry to test the value of the suggestion before finally accepting it. This implies (a) a sure fund or shop of experiences and facts from which suggestions go along; (b) promptness, flexibility, and fertility of suggestions; and (c) orderliness, consecutiveness, appropriateness in what is suggested. Clearly, a person may be hampered in any of these three regards: His thinking may exist irrelevant, narrow, or rough because he has non enough actual material upon which to base of operations conclusions; or considering physical facts and raw fabric, even if extensive and bulky, fail to evoke suggestions easily and richly; or finally, because, fifty-fifty when these ii atmospheric condition are fulfilled, the ideas suggested are incoherent and fantastic, rather than pertinent and consequent.
We stock our "shop of experiences and facts" via one of the greatest human faculties — our inherent curiosity, a "desire for the fullness of experience":
The near vital and significant factor in supplying the main cloth whence suggestion may issue is, without doubt, curiosity… The curious listen is constantly alarm and exploring, seeking material for thought, every bit a vigorous and healthy trunk is on the qui vive for nutriment. Eagerness for experience, for new and varied contacts, is establish where wonder is constitute. Such curiosity is the only certain guarantee of the acquisition of the main facts upon which inference must base itself.
Dewey explores curiosity at its most natural and uncontaminated — in the kid'due south heed. Children not only offer a model for fruitful adventure-taking and overcoming the fear of failure, but their boundless marvel, he argues, is precisely what we demand to reawaken in ourselves in seeking to cultivate fertile thought:
In its starting time manifestations, curiosity is a vital overflow, an expression of an abundant organic energy. A physiological uneasiness leads a child to exist "into everything" — to be reaching, poking, pounding, prying… The most casual notice of the activities of a young child reveals a incessant display of exploring and testing action. Objects are sucked, fingered, and thumped; fatigued and pushed, handled and thrown; in curt, experimented with, till they cease to yield new qualities. Such activities are hardly intellectual, and yet without them intellectual activity would be feeble and intermittent through lack of stuff for its operations.
From this springs the adjacent developmental phase, the what/why stage that often exasperates parents and teachers just provides the foundation for critical thinking:
A higher phase of curiosity develops under the influence of social stimuli. When the child learns that he tin appeal to others to eke out his shop of experiences, so that, if objects fail to answer interestingly to his experiments, he may call upon persons to provide interesting material, a new epoch sets in. "What is that?" "Why?" get the unfailing signs of a child's presence… Nevertheless there is more than a desire to accumulate just information or heap up disconnected items, although sometimes the interrogating habit threatens to degenerate into a mere disease of language. In the feeling, however dim, that the facts which directly meet the senses are non the whole story, that there is more behind them and more to come from them, lies the germ of intellectual marvel.
Curiosity rises above the organic and the social planes and becomes intellectual in the caste in which information technology is transformed into interest in problems provoked by the observation of things and the accumulation of fabric. When the question is not discharged by beingness asked of some other, when the child continues to entertain it in his own heed and to be alarm for whatever will assist answer it, curiosity has become a positive intellectual force. To the open up mind, nature and social experience are full of varied and subtle challenges to look further.
Once again, Dewey reminds us that this unique man gift is predicated on our fragile willingness to befriend uncertainty and welcome the unknown — something nigh of us relinquish by mid-life. Lamenting the ease with which "the open-minded and flexible wonder of childhood" is lost, Dewey writes:
If germinating powers are not used and cultivated at the correct moment, they tend to exist transitory, to die out, or to wane in intensity. This full general constabulary is peculiarly true of sensitiveness to what is uncertain and questionable; in a few people, intellectual curiosity is and then clamorous that nix will discourage information technology, but in most its edge is hands dulled and blunted.
In a sidebar annotate on the notion of dullness, he considers the very metaphors we use for the quality of the mind in a rather lyrical passage:
The common classification of persons into the dull and the bright is made primarily on the basis of the readiness or facility with which suggestions follow upon the presentation of objects and upon the happening of events. As the metaphor of deadening and bright implies, some minds are impervious, or else they blot passively. Everything presented is lost in a drab monotony that gives nothing dorsum. Merely others reflect, or requite dorsum in varied lights, all that strikes upon them. The dull make no response; the bright flash back the fact with a changed quality.
But Dewey's most prescient point has to do with how information overload — a malady undoubtedly far worse today than it was in 1910, yet one each era bemoans past its ain terms — muddles the clarity of our view, hindering our power to think critically and reflectively:
And then many suggestions may ascent that the person is at a loss to select among them. He finds it difficult to reach any definite conclusion and wanders more or less helplessly among them… There is such a affair as too much thinking, as when activeness is paralyzed by the multiplicity of views suggested past a situation… The very number of suggestions may be hostile to tracing logical sequences among them, for information technology may tempt the mind away from the necessary but trying job of search for existent connections, into the more congenial occupation of embroidering upon the given facts a tissue of agreeable fancies. The best mental habit involves a residue between paucity and back-up of suggestions.
In today'due south culture of exponentially growing "multiplicity of views," Dewey's admonition exposes with great urgency both meanings of critical in "disquisitional thinking." (30-five years later, in 1945, Vannevar Bush would propose a complementary solution to the predicament by predicting the emergence of "a new profession of trail blazers" — essentially, knowledge sherpas who "find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common tape.")
For Dewey, the solution was in large part a thing of depth — how deep nosotros are willing to penetrate the bottomless pit of information. It is our capacity for depth that determines the richness and fruitfulness of our thought — something of as urgent importance today, when the information web is dominated by bite-sized stance riffs and "How Cat Are You?" quizzes. Deep-diving, according to Dewey, is something that tin can and should exist taught:
One human's thought is profound while another's is superficial; ane goes to the roots of the matter, and another touches lightly its about external aspects. This phase of thinking is perhaps the nigh untaught of all, and the to the lowest degree acquiescent to external influence whether for improvement or damage. Yet, the conditions of the [person's] contact with subject-thing may be such that he is compelled to come to quarters with its more significant features, or such that he is encouraged to bargain with it upon the basis of what is lilliputian. The common assumptions that, if the [person] simply thinks, one thought is just as proficient for his mental subject field as some other, and that the cease of study is the amassing of information, both tend to foster superficial, at the expense of significant, thought.
Even more important, in our era of snap-judgments and instant opinions, is Dewey'southward point about the slowness and deliberative contemplation inherent to such deep thought:
Sometimes slowness and depth of response are intimately connected. Time is required in lodge to digest impressions, and interpret them into substantial ideas. "Brightness" may be but a flash in the pan. The "tedious but sure" person … is i in whom impressions sink and accrue, so that thinking is done at a deeper level of value than with a slighter load… The depth to which a sense of the problem, of the difficulty, sinks, determines the quality of the thinking that follows.
Ultimately, Dewey argues that thinking is predicated on mapping out the interaction of information and on an intentional organisation of knowledge — something that requires a condolement with uncertainty, a systematic marvel that stocks the mental store of ideas, and a willingness for depth and slowness:
Thinking [is] non a motorcar-like, ready-made apparatus to be turned indifferently and at volition upon all subjects, as a lantern may throw its light as information technology happens upon horses, streets, gardens, trees, or river. Thinking is specific, in that different things suggest their own advisable meanings, tell their ain unique stories, and in that they practise this in very unlike ways with different persons. As the growth of the body is through the assimilation of food, so the growth of mind is through the logical organisation of field of study-thing. Thinking is non like a sausage machine which reduces all materials indifferently to one marketable commodity, but is a power of following upwards and linking together the specific suggestions that specific things agitate.
[…]
Facts, whether narrow or all-encompassing, and conclusions suggested by them, whether many or few, exercise non plant, even when combined, reflective thought. The suggestions must be organized; they must be arranged with reference to one some other and with reference to the facts on which they depend for proof. When the factors of facility, of fertility, and of depth are properly balanced or proportioned, we get as the upshot continuity of idea. We desire neither the dull mind nor notwithstanding the jerky. We wish neither random diffuseness nor fixed rigidity. Consecutiveness means flexibility and variety of materials, conjoined with singleness and correctness of direction.
And yet, he is careful to signal out, it is not a black-and-white matter of tuning out distraction and pursuing absolute concentration — that, in fact, is the very mechanism by which we confine ourselves to our existing beliefs, never leaving our comfort zone of knowledge and stance. Adept thinking, he argues, embraces contradiction rather than shunning it:
Concentration does non mean fixity, nor a cramped arrest or paralysis of the menstruum of suggestion. It means diversity and modify of ideas combined into a single steady trend moving toward a unified conclusion. Thoughts are concentrated not by being kept withal and quiescent, simply past being kept moving toward an object, as a general concentrates his troops for attack or defense. Belongings the mind to a subject is like holding a transport to its course; it implies constant change of place combined with unity of direction. Consequent and orderly thinking is precisely such a change of subject area-matter. Consistency is no more the mere absenteeism of contradiction than concentration is the mere absenteeism of diversion — which exists in dull routine or in a person "fast asleep." All kinds of varied and incompatible suggestions may sprout and be followed in their growth, and yet thinking be consistent and orderly, provided each i of the suggestions is viewed in relation to the main topic.
So why would we ever become through all that trouble in the commencement place, rather than sinking into our comfortable routine? Dewey argues that thinking arises from the need to activity — something undoubtedly evidenced past the history of successful entrepreneurship, wherein many bully inventions came from the inventor's own need for something that didn't yet exist in the world, exist it the Polaroid camera, which Edwin Land dreamed upwardly afterward his fiddling girl asked why she couldn't see a photograph right after information technology was taken, or Instapaper, which Marco Arment congenital out of frustration with how hard it was to read web articles on the iPhone offline. Dewey writes:
Intellectual organization originates and for a time grows as an accessory of the system of the acts required to realize an cease, non as the result of a direct appeal to thinking power. The need of thinking to accomplish something beyond thinking is more stiff than thinking for its own sake. All people at the first, and the bulk of people probably all their lives, attain ordering of thought through ordering of action.
How We Think is a magnificent read in its entirety, exploring everything from the defects and potential reform of the pedagogy system to how nosotros can train ourselves to translate facts and create meaning out of them. It is available equally a free ebook.
Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/18/how-we-think-john-dewey/
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