A Way of Thinking: Perspective Produces Questions

Mallorca Image by Hans Bischoff from Pixabay

This blog post and the next two which will follow in the weeks to come will take the components of our thinking apart.

We all approach situations with a default mindset that starts with our point-of-view. How are we looking at the situation—that is what lens are we looking through? There are multiple perspectives through which any situation can be viewed. Why have we adopted our favored perspective? This gets into the issue of motivation. What do we hope to gain by adopting this perspective? What questions are appropriate to ask—appropriate in that I believe my perspective is properly situated to provide good answers.

What I’ve just outlined is the hidden, gut-level aspect of our thinking. It is seldom examined, but it should be. It is what I call the core of our way of thinking. When I say “a way of thinking” I mean a structured system of belief. Being a Libertarian is a way of thinking. Thinking like a microbiologist—which is my default—impinges on many situations and isn’t widely shared or understood as the Covid pandemic has revealed to me.

The accompanying podcast, Perspective Produces Questions discusses this core logic of any way of thinking. An approximate transcript is found below.

Every area of human endeavor is an outworking of a way of thinking. We all default to a particular way of thinking. It is not mandatory, however, that we embrace and show facility within only a single way of thinking. Learning at its deepest and most satisfying is learning multiple ways of thinking.

When I speak of “a way of thinking” I am not talking about accumulating inert facts about a wide variety of topics. The goal is not to be a walking encyclopedia. I would go so far as to say that encyclopedic knowledge is for encyclopedias, or Wikipedia. We invented these collections to house information. Information is not knowledge. Humans were designed to embrace the pursuit of knowledge in all its forms; knowledge is justifiable belief. The quality of our justification narrative shows whether we are repeating what we were told, or whether we have made the logic our own. A high-quality justification narrative is durable—it is not derailed by questions. Questions actually push the narrative to deeper and more satisfying levels of explanation.

The learning theorist Jerome Bruner put it this way in 1966, “Knowing is a process, not a product.” (Toward a Theory of Instruction, p. 72) The process of becoming knowledgeable about something starts from a point-of-view. We purposely adopt a perspective. We can switch between perspectives, but at any one time we can only indwell a particular perspective. This is a limitation of our finite humanity. The writer Madeline L’Engle said it succinctly “I have a point of view. You have a point of view. God has a view.” (https://quotefancy.com/quote/999924/Madeleine-L-Engle-I-have-a-point-of-view-You-have-a-point-of-view-God-has-view)

Maturing as a learner means being able to look at the same situation from different perspectives, one-at-a-time. The net result of such facility is to see with greater clarity—closer to reality. Unfortunately, many adults are stuck in a single perspective and unable (or unwilling) to consider alternative ways of looking at the same issue. We’ve all heard the truism “if the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, every problem is a nail.” Truth be told, many of us wield our hammers on problems that would be more likely to yield to a screwdriver or a pair of pliers.

I witnessed this hammer and nail fixation last summer when I conversed with an Englishman who was on holiday in Scotland. He was intrigued to be talking to an American and even more delighted when he found that metrication has never really succeeded in the USA. Metrication, if you’re not familiar with the term, refers to converting systems of measurement to the metric system. My Englishman couldn’t understand why we needed meters when we had a perfectly good unit called the yard, or why we needed kilometers when a mile had stood the test of time. This exchange went on for a while and his wife was a bit embarrassed by it all. On one level I sympathized. After all, I had to do a bit of mental juggling in Scotland where distances are in kilometers and gas is sold by the liter. Unlike my Englishman, however, I am a scientist, and I can give ample justification for the benefits of metric units of measurement in the lab and in field work. I can look at this issue from different perspectives and it keeps me from being a dogmatist.

Point-of-view is the most basic aspect of a way of thinking. In a real sense it determines or influences everything else about that way of thinking.

With some types of problems point-of-view may allow a person to opt out of thinking at all—at least for people who are tied to one perspective. For a person who cares nothing for football and has no desire to learn, the journey of little TCU to the college football championship against the Georgia juggernaut is irrelevant and so is the January fascination with who will contend in the Super Bowl. There will be no appetite in such a person to talk about quarterbacks, running backs, or receivers, nor whether defense or offense will be decisive in a particular game.

The recent near fatal cardiac arrest of Damar Hamlin during an NFL game has generated renewed discussion about the violence of American football. Various stakeholders have spoken out from different perspectives. The NFL has been in damage control mode and has sought to express a concerned humanity which extended to the cancellation of the Bengals vs. Bills game on January 2, 2023. Some question whether football can be made safer as well as whether the NFL is really interested in this question. My point here is not to debate the question, but to point out that the various stakeholders operate from different points-of-view that puts them on a path to very different conclusions on the same question. (see footnote) There are also outsiders who have no special interest in the question.

When a problem is presented that does intersect a person’s training and interest, there is a tendency for that to result in an unhelpful tunnel vision. In some individuals there will be superficial recognition of other perspectives, but not necessarily understanding unless there is an empathetic desire to see what the other person is seeing. Take as an example the emergence of generative A.I. in the form of ChatGPT. ChatGPT can produce polished paragraphs of information and logical argument based on a simple prompt. To Luddites there’s nothing to see or, alternatively, it confirms that computers are intrinsically evil—full stop. To many teachers it represents an almost uncontrollable form of plagiarism.  It produces essays and even computer code submitted by students that they didn’t write at all. There are other voices urging educators to alter their instructional and assessment methods to give place to a technology that isn’t going away. Their argument is that spelling and grammar checkers were once viewed with horror and now they are an accepted part of writing. Nearly everyone lets their smartphone suggest words during texting; e-mails, LinkedIn messaging—they all suggest responses to save us time. Chat GPT is just a much more sophisticated form of the same thing.

Viewpoint sets the direction of the thinking, but it is allied with and reinforced by motivation. Why is the individual looking at a question or problem from a particular perspective? Perhaps the choice of perspective is due to their training (expertise). Perhaps their viewpoint is unconscious and determined by their upbringing or the culture they are embedded in. We would rightly call this a bias, but is expertise also a bias? Unexamined bias is a hindrance to truth-seeking. I say unexamined bias because we are all biased; we all reflexively look at an issue in a certain way. Bias is something to recognize and to attempt to balance through a disciplined attempt to see the issue from other perspectives, especially those with which we disagree. Fair-mindedness seeks to understand how our opponents view an issue; what motivates them to see it that way, and what the logical structure of their arguments is. Fair-mindedness means we can explain to an opponent their perspective, motivation, and logic in terms that they would agree with and not in an oversimplified caricature. If we can do this and we still believe our perspective and position is stronger and closer to the truth, so be it. Sometimes, however, fair-mindedness will reveal flaws in our thinking, and we may actually change our minds. That’s what learning is all about. Learning is conceptual change. Doubling down due to bias is a sure recipe to ensure that we do not change because we will not learn.

In the NFL situation I mentioned a few minutes ago the NFL has a vested financial interest in maintaining the game in a form that fans have already shown their loyalty to. Baseball may be America’s pastime, but football commands a far larger fan base. Football generates billions of dollars more yearly revenue than baseball. With strong revenue comes a strong desire to maintain the status quo. This includes looking the other way or foot dragging regarding the violence of the game—so say even some football diehards including some coaches. Money and power are strong motivators, but so are upbringing and political affiliation.

In the ChatGPT situation there is also a money and power motivation. OpenAI, the parent company that produced ChatGPT, is largely financed by Microsoft and runs on Microsoft’s hardware since AI requires enormous computing resources. Microsoft has a deal that will allow them to use ChatGPT in a future implementation of their Bing search engine. Although Google currently has about 85% of the worldwide search engine market, this possibility has motivated Google to call back its retired founders to push the development of their own AI initiative. Don’t expect any of these players to second guess themselves in seriously considering the downside of AI; they want to make AI more powerful!

The downside of AI is a concern of educators who are trying to teach students to think and who use student writing as a significant developmental tool. Ethicists are also stakeholders who are concerned with issues like plagiarism, intellectual property rights, and propaganda and manipulation. Could it be that AI will be the new tool of choice to replace existing search engines which merely point to URLs? ChatGPT’s output is in succinctly written paragraphs that summarize the answer to a user prompt. Maybe ChatGPT style answers will become the new standard. It’s too early to tell. It’s important to look at the artificial intelligence issue from as many perspectives as possible and to consider what motivates each viewpoint. What is each mindset trying to accomplish? That sums up what I mean by motivation.

Learning progresses through a focus on good questions. That’s really the essence of this whole season of podcasts, but it’s central here at the very outset. Good questions direct thinking, challenge thinking, improve thinking. Each perspective or mindset has been adopted to try to answer a group of questions. Motivation is really an impulse that seeks clarifying answers to those questions.

It is crucial here to discard inappropriate questions. Inappropriate questions may be very good questions; indeed, what makes them inappropriate is that they belong in someone else’s thinking domain.

Most university faculty have neither the expertise nor the interest to ask questions about how AI works. That’s a question for the computer programmers. People who write code want to know how to improve code. AI is trained on a large group of documents. The larger the better, so the thinking goes. But it has already been demonstrated that ChatGPT sometimes uses fringe viewpoints within that document base to produce propaganda and even pornography. Should AI training materials be inclusive of all viewpoints, even vulgar and repulsive ones that society would condemn? Who gets to say and on what basis? Those are ethical questions, but they are also practical questions that a variety of different viewpoints have some motivation to answer. The issue then becomes whether a given knowledge domain is really equipped to add substance to a multi-dimensional answer.

Probably all my listeners claim one or more areas of expertise whether by dint of formal training or years of practical experience. Each of these represents a way of thinking that you find satisfying because it provides good answers to questions that you care about. The fact that you care is your motivation and, I hope, your passion. Passion should propel you further to leverage additional knowledge domains to provide deeper answers. Passion coupled with curiosity is what catalyzes life-long-learning.

In the case of physical safety within the NFL, some significant stakeholders who are in a position to address the problem of injuries and their prevention include: physicists (studying forces generated by colliding players), physicians (especially cardiologists, neurologists, and orthopedists), materials scientists, engineers (designing shock absorbing pads, helmets, etc.).

This helpful interview with Carolyn Coughlin includes some helpful commentary on the need to learn from the perspectives of others and the guiding role that questions serve. Start at 01:04:50