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Occasional Publication of Think-Link, a New Zealand Network of Independent Christian Thinkers.
October, 1995/Issue 3A
This issue, I want to take a look inside the human mind and talk about decision-making, not theologically as in earlier discussions, but in terms of how it works. I'm afraid the approach is a bit technical, since we don't discuss this stuff every day, and so don't have familiar everyday concepts for it. I had to make some up, which are explained in a glossary. The first occurrence of a word is linked to the glossary item.
Before that, more interestingly (perhaps) and more practically (for sure), is a look at approaches to discussion and change, the advertised topic for this Symposium. It's an attempt to summarise several books with quite a lot of new things to say, so it's necessarily a little sketchy, but I hope we can build a discussion on it.
Mike McMillan
Contributing Editor
by Mike McMillan
The main sources for the following discussion are:
All of these authors present, in different ways, an idea which could be summarised as: If a discussion is set up to have a winner and a loser, it is set up to have two losers.
I have long been uncomfortable with the traditional form of the 'debate'. Initially, this was because people are asked to argue passionately and convincingly a case which they may not have any particular opinion on beforehand, or which they may even disagree with, which offends my sense of the importance of truth and integrity. But more recently I have come to dislike the form even more because of the idea that the positions are to remain absolutely entrenched and inflexible, that no point of the 'opposition' is to be acknowledged as a good or useful one. (If it's too good to attack, you try to ignore it and attack something else, possibly the arguer rather than the argument.) Harmless enough, perhaps, when debating the kind of topic which debating societies usually employ: 'That the best is not good enough' or some such nonsense. But this same technique is used in our courts of law, our parliaments, our international conflicts, and our public discussions about issues of concern. And, as de Bono points out, it is usually utterly inadequate to bring about solutions or even resolutions which are satisfactory even to one of the parties, unless one party has overwhelming strength to force its views on the other without modification (in which case a discussion is at best for show).
Stephen Covey has, as three of his seven habits, Think Win/Win, Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood and Synergize. These are what he refers to as the habits of 'public victory'.
'Win-win' is the idea that 'we can both come out of this with something.' As applied to discussions, it is the idea that we will both learn something, we can both modify our positions (even if we end up still disagreeing), rather than one of us having to convince the other or overpower them with the force of our argument.
An essential of this is to seek first to understand the other person's point of view. As the authors of Getting to Yes put it, you should be able to explain it to them better than they can explain it themselves. This is not a caricature or distortion of their viewpoint, used to score debating points, but an understanding of it which they themselves will accept as fair and adequate.
This is part of another piece of advice in Getting to Yes: be soft on the person, hard on the issue. They refer to 'hard' negotiators and 'soft' negotiators; the former will sacrifice the relationship between the parties for the sake of winning the position, the latter vice versa. This means that two hard negotiators will typically end up stalemated and alienated, a soft negotiator will give undue concessions to a hard negotiator and the hard negotiator will not be liked or trusted by the soft negotiator, and two soft negotiators will attempt to avoid the issue and give way to one another. The best possible outcome of all this is compromise, which as everyone knows is a situation in which nobody is really satisfied.
This is how the game works, and the advice of Getting to Yes is simply, 'If you don't like the way the game is played, play a different game.' Being soft on the people but hard on the issue means 'principled negotiation' - not only do you not use dirty tricks, but you make it clear that the other person cannot either, for example. Everyone understands that it is a game and has rules, and (usually without discussing them) you can signal which rules you are prepared to play by. This is something we all learn in the school playground. The key is that it is a game where we are working together for a solution - Stephen Covey's 'Synergize' habit. This is also the main theme of de Bono's Conflicts, in which he proposes working together to design a beneficial outcome (with the help of a third, neutral party who can see things and take attitudes that the two parties in conflict cannot), rather than using the 'fight' idiom with all its accepted rules which limit thinking and tend to result in two losers.
A role-play is a specialised kind of game (one in which there are typically no losers and in which people work together), and de Bono also uses the role-play metaphor. His 'six thinking hats' are different roles which give acceptability to different ways of expressing yourself which might not be acceptable if we weren't playing this game. They make the logical-critical way of thinking, the main one we usually employ in discussion and argument, only one of six tools for exploring ideas together. This is the 'black hat'; the others are the 'white hat' (bald facts without interpretation, as much as possible), the 'red hat' (emotions, which need not be justified or defended), the 'yellow hat' (positive, looking for all the good aspects and things that would work about a proposal - the converse of the black hat), the 'green hat' (lateral thinking - a phrase de Bono coined - which is creative, casting up possibilities), and the 'blue hat' (an overall directing role which keeps the discussion on track and keeps any of the hats from being over- or under-used).
Lateral thinking is a big emphasis in de Bono's writing, and one of the important points he makes about it is that it need not be right at every step. Often a lateral thinking idea is randomly generated (using, for example, a word out of the dictionary). It can be a provocation, perhaps using the word 'po' (which is neither yes or no, an idea for consideration to see what it yields). One of his favourite examples of a provocation is 'Po polluting factories should be downstream of themselves.' This led to the idea that a factory by a river should have its water intake downstream from its outlet, thus giving it a motivation to reduce pollutants released into the stream. A provocation can produce an 'intermediate impossible': something which doesn't work itself but leads to something which does, which wouldn't otherwise have been reached. This idea will be logical in hindsight, but it could not have been reached by the normal logical process of fitting one thing to the next. It needed a leap outside that process, which is what lateral thinking is about.
None of this, of course, can be produced in the traditional debate/conflict idiom. If I propose an 'intermediate impossible' it will never live to become a useful idea, but will be shot on sight by my opponent, who is also likely to use it as an example of how poor a thinker I am and therefore how all my other ideas are wrong. But if we are working together, not as opponents but as interlocutors (meaning 'people who are talking to each other'), we can look at it together and both play with it and build on it to see where it leads in our discussion. Perhaps it will give us something which neither of us had thought of, or could have thought of independently, which has a bearing on the issue we're discussing.
All of this recognises a central fact of the human condition, namely that we cannot change anyone else's mind. 'A man convinced against his will, is of his own opinion still,' the old saying goes, and it's true. All we can do is create conditions in which people are prepared to change their own minds, and part of this is that we need to show genuine willingness to change our minds if this is warranted. We need, in other words, to go beyond 'I am right, you are wrong'.
The difficult part is to reach the point where we feel secure enough to do this. Paradoxically, if we are unsure, deep down, that we are right, we are more likely to resist the idea that we might not be. Only a mature and secure faith will allow us to reach the point where we can examine our own position as critically as someone else's, and someone else's as positively as our own. John Cleese and Robin Skynner, in their book Life and How to Survive It, have a very interesting chapter on the relationship between mental health and spirituality which develops some of these themes.
A word about gender. All the authors I have been quoting happen to be male, and so do I. Reading Deborah Tannen's books on communication style differences between males and females (You Just Don't Understand and Talking from 9 to 5), I realise that the tendency to choose conflict over co-operation is more of a male than a female thing (though women also use this approach, and many prefer it). When I invited a female acquaintance to a Think-Link discussion on the role of women in the church, she declined on the grounds that these discussions tended to degenerate into arguments that didn't achieve anything. Perhaps because she had alerted me to the danger, the discussion was not in fact like that, but I think I understand why it could have been. In fact, one man present did become strongly negative about women (in an extreme enough way that everyone realised he was 'thinking with his tears' and didn't take the content of his statements too seriously).
To generalise (and the nature of a generalisation is that it is generally true, though not true in all cases): boys' games are about winning; girls' games are about co-operating. Boys cannot show weakness, or they are put down; they have to pretend to strength whether they have it or not. Girls often show weakness (also whether they have it or not) in order to create solidarity. The rules are different. A girl who puts herself at a lower level is helped up, or her companions put themselves down to the same level. (A girl who puts herself up is also brought down very quickly.) But a boy who puts himself up is up until someone else is able to put him down, while if he puts himself down he is down, and will stay down until he puts himself up again. As public speech is traditionally male speech, the ways we do public speech (including the resolving of disagreements) tend to be male ways, even when practised by women. We need to develop an idiom in which we can safely step down or back down without being taken advantage of, one in which this kind of move will be met with a corresponding graciousness on the part of the other person.
In case you thought I was going to ignore Scripture altogether, here is the Apostle Peter's summary of what the New Testament teaches about discussions.
'But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behaviour in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.' (1 Pe 3:15-16.)
A truly excellent book on resolving conflict and controversy in a Christian context is Gareth Jones' Coping with Controversy. It is a biblical and humble look at a number of difficult topics, and makes the point that when controversy arises between Christians over things not central to their commitment to Christ, separation and isolation are the wrong response. Humility, gentleness and vulnerability, an openness to learn and to admit mistakes, are what we are taught to adopt in Scripture, and Professor Jones brings this out skilfully and positively. It is more of a reminder of how to approach conflict scripturally than a presentation of new ideas, so I will not summarise it further, but I strongly recommend reading it. It is available in Christian bookshops and from the author at 37 Garden Place, Glenleith, Dunedin.
In summary, then, we need to decide what is really important to us, what we want to achieve in a discussion. Do we want to win, even if it alienates the other person (hard negotiation)? Do we want to stay friends with the other person, even if it costs us concessions we should not make (soft negotiation)? Or do we want to explore, being soft on the people but hard on the issues, wanting to end up with a good relationship and something closer to the truth (or a solution, or whatever) than either of us had before?
I'll now discuss how I believe people make decisions and change their minds, in case that's helpful. It may be necessary to consult the glossary quite a lot, as I am using certain phrases with specialised meanings.
There are two parallel and closely connected processes involved in making decisions.
The DIF Machine takes a complex and essentially analogue input of facts, feelings, past decisions, mood, etc, feeds it through a processor in which established values play an important role, and produces a simple, digital output - a 'yes' or 'no' answer to the question 'Does it fit?', 'it' being the proposed decision. In more complex cases the eventual decision is a compromise, a new version, or an alternative to the original proposition, but these decisions still have to go through the DIF Machine.
The R Machine could also be called the Yes, Damn it, It Fits Machine. It is the device by which we justify our decision, once arrived at, to ourselves and others. At its simplest it is the reverse of the DIF Machine. It takes the DIF Machine's output as its input and produces all or many of the factors which were initially fed into the DIF Machine as reasons for the decision/mindedness, because it has access to them. People who have made their DIF Machines more of black boxes than they might, or who feel they have something to hide from the person they are presenting to (themselves or someone else), don't always allow the R Machine access to the real reasons, and it has to generate some of its own using a set of values which may be called the Second Values. The First Values are the values (and associated motivations) which were actually used in the decision; the Second Values are the values which are presented as having been used. The two are not necessarily the same, in fact rarely are, since the human mind cannot resist telling stories. (Stories are often true, but rarely in the sense of literal fact.) The effect of the R Machine is to reinforce the decision which the DIF Machine produced, since this decision is one which either has been acted on, will be acted on, or at least is perceived as one which ought to be acted on, even if it never will be, and even if the person concerned is aware of this. There is therefore an investment in this decision which must be protected by the operation of the R Machine.
External and internal conditions both change over time, and if there is a sufficiently large shift the Run-it-again Threshold will be exceeded. This is the amount of change in internal and external conditions which, however briefly, is sufficient to overcome (externally) or weaken (internally) the R Machine's justifications, and cause the DIF Machine to be used on the situation again. At this point the original decision may be either reversed or reinforced, depending on the outcome of the DIF Machine's working and the relative effectiveness of the R Machine.
Decisions which are frequently reinforced contribute more strongly to a person's general mindedness. The idea of mindedness is based on the Greek verb phroneo - 'to exercise the mind, entertain or have a sentiment or opinion; by implication to be (mentally) disposed . . . in a certain direction.' (Strong's Concordance). The Greek would be phroneosune. A mindedness is a combination of attitudes, values and decisions. English expressions employing the general idea include: 'if you've a mind to,' 'do whatever you're minded to do,' 'I've half a mind to,' 'to my mind . . .' and 'like-minded'. These express the underlying bundle-idea of intention, tendency, opinion and viewpoint and make it a named-idea.
Mindednesses need not be developed systems of belief, such as Christianity, Marxism, New Age (or rather their various subsystems) or Logical Positivism, for example. However, they can be. One of the most powerful means of forming a mindedness is through introduction to a fully worked-out system of belief. The running of the two decision machines is time-consuming and difficult work, and a well-worked-out system of belief allows access to the work already done by many other people. It is much easier to install these already constructed systems in the machines than to create one's own in all its particulars. This is not necessarily mental laziness (though it can be) but mental practicality. After all, I would not want to have to train as a computer programmer, and then write my own (probably inferior) word processing programme, in order to be able to write articles.
Among the many important benefits these systems offer are sets of values, which can be incorporated into the machines either as First or Second Values - often Second Values, at least to begin with. The nature of thought systems is that they operate in communities, which reinforce the systems with their very powerful communal DIF and R Machines, and part of this is that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to present one's decisions to other members of the thought community. I was interested, though unsurprised, for instance, to read in Diane Benge's Reality article on the 'Toronto Blessing' (Reality issue 11, October/November 1995) that a number of people are going along with the various manifestations of Toronto meetings because they feel they must, and feel also that they can't communicate disagreement in an acceptable way. (During my now long-ago charismatic phase, I several times fell down in meetings, not because I could not remain standing, but because I felt it was expected.) Diane writes, 'One young man reported that he fell when prayed for because it was “the only polite option open to me”. Another woman said she was unable to share with the group praying for her that her laughter was not “holy laughter”, but that she was laughing because it seemed so strange to hear them praying for her in such an excited manner when absolutely nothing was happening for her!' (p 13). I recently made an excuse to a young man in my church who is going on a summer missions trip, and asked me for financial and prayer support. I told him that I was still setting up my business and hadn't had any work yet (which was true, but not the main reason I wasn't supporting him), and tried not to say anything committal when he assumed that I would, however, pray that the rest of the team's support would come in. For various reasons, to do both with my beliefs about prayer and my attitude to short-term missions and the organisation concerned, I am not intending to do so, but I judged that it was not worth attempting to explain this to him. I did not believe that he owned any thought-forms in which this would make sense.
Acceptable thought-forms are often couched in jargon, which is a set of prefabricated thought-forms for use in the decision machines. Jargon (in this sense, not in the sense of technical words for named-ideas which cannot otherwise be manipulated) works by reinforcing certain thought-forms and forbidding others, not only by the words' individual content, but also by their permitted and forbidden combinations. Jargon systems typically provide no positive vocabulary for things which the system disapproves of, and no negative vocabulary for things which it approves of. There are therefore things which are literally unthinkable without going beyond the jargon into a wider language. 'Political correctness' is an advanced version of this phenomenon. This is also one reason that children from religious homes often 'lose their faith' as a consequence of higher education. (The loss will be permanent - at least, the loss of that form of faith. You can't un-think the unthinkable.) They have learned a new language - not infrequently, a new jargon - which permits (and forbids) a different set of thought-forms, so that for the first time they are equipped to question (in fact, encouraged to question) the 'faith' with which they grew up. This 'faith' was in fact more of a mindedness, and held largely at the level of Second Values. It is possible that if they allow themselves to be placed in a position to learn yet another set of thought-forms, they will adopt these at the same level. Given that the nature of higher education is to provide economic security and a mindedness, at some level, to consider oneself superior and in control, it will only rarely be the case that people with higher education permit systems of thought to reach the level of First Values without some precipitating crisis - a spectacular violation of the Run-it-again Threshold. More frequently they will construct their own set of First Values to reinforce the mindedness they already have. This tendency is present in all humanity, since a drive for security tends to be incorporated in most systems of First Values at a foundational level, almost by the nature of being human. However, obviously the mindedness that they are in control (that this value is satisfied), at least at some level, is much more prevalent among those who do in fact have power, which tends to be the educated.
Another factor in the lesser resistance of the uneducated to systems of thought at the level of First Values is found in the modes by which the decision machines present or are presented with motivations. Among the more common modes are positive emotional, negative emotional, mixed or neutral emotional, factual-logical, pattern-fitting, no-other-way, past-decision, and better/worse.
Positive, negative, and mixed or neutral emotion are obvious, but perhaps underestimated and misunderstood factors in motivation. The readout of the DIF Machine is in terms of these emotions, whether this is readily recognised by the decision-maker or not. The dangers of presenting these emotions to ourselves and others as God's instructions rather than a reflection of our internal values have already been discussed in earlier issues of Symposium, but it is worth telling the story of a friend of a friend who 'learned to hear God' in the following way: First, she prayed about something to which she knew the answer was 'no'. When she had done this a few times, she knew what 'no' felt like. She then did the same with 'yes'. Thereafter, when she prayed, she could tell what the answer was by which feeling she had. This is what I facetiously call 'pyrothoracimancy', which is very bad Greek for 'divination by a burning in the bosom'. Divination is exactly what it is, and like most divination it will give exactly the answer you want at the level of Second Values.
Even people with a mindedness, and Second Values, which do not permit emotion to be invoked may speak of a 'gut feeling' of rightness to a decision, even though they may claim to have arrived at it by logical means (that is, to have used the factual-logical mode). Like those who invoke God, they are claiming an external, objective rather than an internal, subjective source for their decisions. This serves two practical purposes: making their decisions less vulnerable to attack, and making them less vulnerable to blame for the outcome of the decision. It is like the behaviour of middle managers, who will often accept the highest tender within the budget so that when the contractor proves to be no good they are covered: they employed the best, after all. What more could they have done? This is a perhaps excessively cynical view, but it is of course not necessary to believe that people are aware of the payoffs they receive from an approach. It is enough to note that they receive these payoffs and that this may be one reason they resist having their approach questioned. Another reason, of course, is that from within the system is self-evidently right. Unfortunately, it is the nature of systems to be self-evidently right from within.
This is because any system of logic is a form of game, with rules like the game of chess, which provides a limited context and a limited number of entities to manipulate, and permits certain manipulations and forbids others in pursuit of an agreed goal. In 'real life,' everything is much more complex, but the game is a mode which the decision-maker is minded to treat as valid (and which in many contexts produces useful outputs - for example mathematics in the case of formal logic). Among the decisions made before the explicit adoption of the mode are narrowing of the context (the equivalent of the chessboard), limiting of the entities or 'facts' (equivalent to the pieces), and establishment of the rules of their manipulation and interaction, including the important rule which enables winning and losing to be identified. 'Winning' then becomes the 'yes' or 'positive emotional' output from the DIF Machine, and 'losing' the 'no' or 'negative emotional' output. In the factual-logical decision-maker's presentation, facts are the motivators, and the logical system becomes the workings of the black box. By now it need hardly be said that this is rarely if ever the case, since a logical system is inadequate for the demanding job of First Values in everyday life. This is particularly so because of the difficulty of complex emotion/logic translation operations. It is like trying to run a computer which has an electric input and an electric output but a mechanical black box; the operations are limited and slow, and the translation may not be very reliable. A friend of mine had a very logical workmate, who set out to buy a car and carefully weighted all the factors (price, previous kilometres, economy etc) used to reach such a decision, assigning them each a score. According to my friend, he then ignored all of this and bought the car he wanted (showing that his First and Second Values were actually different - including the value regarding the place of logic in decision-making).
It should be underlined that by 'logic' I do not mean only formal logic, the logic of the academic or scientist (even many academics do not use it). There are many games which those who play them believe to be logics, few of which conform to the rules of traditional formal logic any more than Go conforms to the rules of chess. In saying this, I do not want to imply validation or invalidation of any of the logics, traditional formal logic included. Since Gödel's Theorem it has been well known that a logic is not provable from within itself; it will always contain unprovable assumptions (at least, assumptions which are unprovable in that logic). This is why it is unfalsifiable from within as well. But this is not to say that, considered as a black box, a particular logic may not yield a useful output - whatever we mean by 'useful' in our particular situation. Traditional formal logic is an effective, indeed a brilliant, tool in its proper sphere, which is not, for instance, that of human relationships. Other logics may be 'useful' in more limited circumstances and for more limited purposes, such as facilitating the use of a set of Second Values within a like-minded community, or for a particular individual. Some logics are better for particular situations, while others may be more flexible and adaptable to a wide variety of situations, though they may not always be the best possible logic in a given situation.
The pattern-fitting mode is what Dr Edward de Bono talks about in books such as Water Logic. It is the tendency for the mind to follow engrained channels - like the channels produced by water in a landscape - made explicit and used as a mode of presentation. 'This is the way to do it' or 'We've never done it that way before' (the famous Seven Last Words) are examples of a pattern-fitting presentation. Jargon has a close relationship with pattern-fitting; it not only implies a pattern but claims to indicate whether a pattern (which is held implicitly to be good or bad) has been fitted, and so implies a value by association. George Orwell's Animal Farm provides an obvious example in the slogan which the sheep are taught to chant: 'Four legs good, two legs bad'. But there are many more subtle ones. A conservative evangelical, for instance, can be asked 'are you open to this latest move of the Holy Spirit?' This is like the famous 'Have you stopped beating your wife?' question: a yes or no answer acknowledges the validity of the underlying assumptions, which can only be challenged at a higher level of discussion. But an attempt to move the discussion to this level can be challenged as 'hedging': 'I just want a straight yes-or-no answer.' The question is 'Do you fit the pattern?', and answers which attempt to challenge the pattern will be ruled out as irrelevancies or avoiding the point. The pattern can, of course, be much more complex than in these examples, with a great many factors, and pattern-fitting can be a very effective mode. As the name 'Does-it-Fit Machine' implies, pattern-fitting is basically what is going on as the situation is compared to the First Values. Problems arise, however, if the inevitably simplified pattern is too simplified for the particular decision, or otherwise inappropriate, or if the perception of the situation is seriously inaccurate. These problems can arise again at the level of Second Values.
Past-decision is a form of pattern-fitting, but is also used as the face of values such as 'Faithfulness to existing commitments' or 'Conservatism'. 'Our policy is that we don't do that' is an answer in past-decision mode. Again, we can't just challenge this with 'No, it isn't' (unless we are familiar with the policy and know the person is lying). We have to go to the next level and suggest that the policy needs to be changed, or that this case is an exception allowable under it. It is, again, a moving of the decision to an external force: the person speaking is claiming that their decision is constrained by a past decision (even though in many cases it is a decision they themselves have made). Effectively, they are claiming that at this time they do not have the power to decide, and they may believe this. Of course, they always have the power to decide. However, their decision may be so strongly conditioned in one direction or another that effectively one option is ruled out, for instance, in the example of an employee who must operate in line with company policy or lose his or her job.
The better/worse mode is a more sophisticated form of pattern-fitting, in which one thing may fit better than another, though neither need be seen as ideal. Animal Farm again provides an example, the more advanced chant taught to the sheep: 'Four legs good, two legs better.' This mode is typically invoked when emotions are mixed, when the Run-it-again Threshold is quite close. The Japanese apparently have a concept of 'fit' which avoids some of the crudity of better-worse but works in exactly the same way. Something has good 'fit' or poor 'fit', in other words, is appropriate or inappropriate, in a given situation. This allows for a good deal of 'situation ethics', but because Japanese society is so cohesive, and has such strong and universally held second values, the worst problems of situation ethics are usually avoided. In our more individualistic society, 'fit' is much harder to use in practice, as we are more reliant on our own individual wisdom.
This mode is illustrated by Edward de Bono in Practical Thinking (Penguin, 1971). He calls this sort of thinking 'village Venus'. The 'village Venus' is the most beautiful girl in the world to those villagers who have never seen any other beautiful girls. Hence de Bono's Second Law: 'Proof is often no more than lack of imagination - in providing an alternative explanation' (and therefore unimaginative people tend to be most confident of their own rightness). It can also be used by those with a mindedness of being powerless, and also, interestingly, by those who are powerful but are pretending not to be in this case. 'That's just the way it is' is often a face of 'That's just the way I've let it be, and the way I'm going to let it continue to be' - if you like, the boss's equivalent of the employee's 'I'm sorry, it's not our policy to do that'. It is again an appeal to an external, to 'circumstances beyond our control.'
In Practical Thinking, de Bono points out that, for practical purposes (that is, for purposes of people's actions), being right is believing that you are right, and so 'everyone is always right'; although in a wider sense, because nobody ever has all the facts or can interpret them flawlessly, 'nobody is ever right' (about any nontrivial issue).
Based on a psychological experiment performed on a thousand well-educated people, he identified four ways to be right and five ways to be wrong. The four ways to be right are what he calls 'currant cake' (emotional rightness), 'jigsaw puzzle' (logical rightness), 'village Venus' (unique rightness, discussed above), and 'measles' (recognition rightness). The 'currant cake' refers to a number of what de Bono refers to as 'goody-goody words', such as freedom, dignity etc, which correspond to currants. The purpose of the cake is to provide a matrix for the currants, which provide the flavour; the purpose of some arguments is to provide a matrix for these 'goody-goody words', and if enough of the words are put in the argument 'tastes good'. The same also holds in reverse, of course: a negative tone can be built up about the topic through using negative words in the same way. Journalism, particularly television journalism, usually has currant-cake rightness.
'Jigsaw puzzle' is a logical system as discussed above. The pieces all fit together, and if you fit all the pieces together, using the right pieces at each step, this is proof that the whole thing is right. The proof that the whole is right is that you have used all the parts correctly and have none left over. However, the weakness of this is that jigsaw puzzles start out as complete pictures which are broken down into pieces, and by the very nature of this process, they will all demonstrably fit together again. So you start with a picture (a view of the world, which is the meaning of the word 'theory') and use language to cut it up into concepts which only fit together in certain ways. You then show that the pieces fit together in these ways. Lo and behold! You have demonstrated that your picture is the right one. Or you can cheat a little more: start out with some pieces of your own manufacture. When gaps appear, manufacture others to fill the gaps. Eventually, you will make the picture you were aiming at all along. You've proved its correctness! After all, all of the pieces fit. If nobody saw you make them, you may well get away with this.
As de Bono points out, logical rightness is extremely powerful and has led to many great achievements. But it is entirely dependent for its usefulness on selecting correct base assumptions, which is why his concentration is so much on the perception which enables good base assumptions to be selected.
'Village-Venus' rightness has already been discussed, which leaves 'measles' rightness: the rightness of diagnosis (de Bono is a doctor by training). As he points out, this is really the basis of all action, gaining enough 'recognition' of a situation to feel that you understand it and therefore know what to do. But there are a number of drawbacks, including: Once you're sure you're right, you stop gathering information and act, and this may be just the point at which you are wrong; you may get a different diagnosis from a different viewpoint (leading to all kinds of arguments); you have to have an adequate collection of categories of things to recognise; and the fact that you recognise something as fitting one of your categories has no bearing whatever on whether that category is valid.
The five ways to be wrong, briefly, are: The monorail mistake (applying an inappropriate solution because of rigidity, only being able to think in one direction, and not taking all the factors into consideration), the magnitude mistake (for instance, you may be on the right road, but you still cannot walk from Auckland to Wellington after dinner), the misfit mistake (the counterpart of measles rightness, where you've incorrectly recognised something), the must-be mistake or mistake of arrogance (there is only one possible solution - a counterpart of the village Venus), and the miss-out mistake (where you are wrong because you do not have the whole picture - as of course you never do).
I don't know about you, but as I consider how flimsy the ways of being right are, and how pervasive and easy the ways of being wrong are, I am increasingly inclined to be open to the possibility that I am not right about a great many things, and that I need the wisdom of others to help me be right more often.
attitude: a way of perceiving or judging. [back]
black box: a device with an input and an output. The name 'black box' implies that the input and output, not the workings by which it transforms the one into the other, are the important thing for present purposes, and that the workings are unknown, perhaps unknowable. [back]
bundle-idea: a group of ideas which form a whole, but do not yet have a name and hence an identity as a single idea. See named-idea. [Edward de Bono] [back]
conditioned: a decision is conditioned by a number of factors with different 'weights' and directions, like the commonplace analogy of a set of balance scales. There is always a choice, but one option may be so overwhelmingly conditioned that it is as if there were no choice. See also external conditions, internal conditions.
decision: a shaping of the will, typically resulting in behaviours and attitudes. [back]
device: a means by which results are brought about, for instance, the transformation of one thing into another. [back]
Does-it-fit Machine (DIF Machine): A black box which takes complex motivations and integrates them into decisions. [back]
external conditions: factors outside the mind of the person making decisions. [back]
face: the part of something which is presented. This can be the output of a black box, a mode or a Second Value. [back]
First Values: the values which underlie a decision. They may, but need not, re-emerge as Second Values. [back]
internal conditions: factors inside the mind of the person making decisions. These include values, attitudes and the total set of decisions up to the present moment. [back]
jargon: a set of named-ideas which act as prefabricated thought-forms and reinforce certain values and attitudes. [back]
judging: responding to information, one of the two main faculties in Myers-Briggs theory (see also perceiving). [back]
logic: a set of rules for manipulating concepts. [back]
mindedness: the state of being mentally disposed in a certain direction. A mindedness is a combination of attitudes, values and decisions. [back]
mode: a way in which a motivation is presented. [back]
motivations: considerations (internal and external conditions) which influence decisions, forming the input for a Does-it-fit Machine. They have different modes and vary in strength. [back]
named-idea: a bundle-idea which has been given a name in order to allow it to be treated as a single thing with its own features and existence. [Edward de Bono] [back]
perceiving: taking in information, one of the two main faculties in Myers-Briggs theory (see also judging). [back]
present: to offer a description or interpretation of a decision or situation, whether to oneself or to another. This description or interpretation is a face. [back]
Rationalisation Machine (R Machine): a black box which takes the decision arrived at by the Does-it-fit Machine and presents it as the outcome of certain motivations as processed through Second Values. [back]
Run-it-again Threshold: the amount of change in internal and external conditions which is sufficient to force the Does-it-fit Machine to be used on the situation again. [back]
Second Values: the values which are presented as underlying a decision. They may, but need not, overlap with First Values. [back]
situation: a combination of internal and external conditions requiring decisions. [back]
thought-forms: ideas, whether named-ideas or, less commonly, bundle-ideas, which are used as building blocks for attitudes, values and faces. [back]
values: patterns of attitudes which are consulted as guidelines for behaviours. Like motivations, they have both mode and strength, and neither of these is fixed. See First Values, Second Values. [back]
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