TWO PATHS TO KNOWING

TWO PATHS TO KNOWING

By
Bill Cottringer

“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” ~Ansel Adams

A few years ago, my youngest daughter Abigail asked for some help writing a research paper as a requirement for transferring credit from her Epistemology class to a new high school for graduation. The question is probably the most important one behind accurately judging the real impact of education on the quality of thinking and knowing, as it results in varying degrees of success or failure in life. The question was: “How do you know what you think you know for sure, to really be so?"

There are literally libraries of books addressing this question, but there are two particular modern ones that clearly and completely explain the two diverse paths of knowing—"The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" by Richards J. Heuer Jr. and available free on the Internet, and "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, and available at a great discount at book stores. These two books are must reads for any serious student of truth or social problem-solving.

Last month I gave a talk about the realities of the enormity of change going on today and how to swim or sink in the overload, ironically to the "International Association of Dive Rescue Specialists." Unfortunately, I fell prey to an typical affliction common to educators, trainers, speakers and writers—the mistake of over-embracing a full half-truth, because that is the way the conscious brain works. What is shameful about this is that I know better!

The object of quality thinking, deciding and acting to get the best results today can be greatly improved when we get rid of the untruthful Often inaccurate and incomplete), more efficiency-oriented way we consciously think, becoming aware of and controlling the cognitive biases and other distortions that lead us astray. This is the basis of Heuer’s book, "The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis," which is actually an instructional manual for CIA analysts to answer the question my daughter Abby asked me to help her with.

But this is really only half the picture. For as long as I can remember, I have always held the unshakable belief that all really good scientific research did was to prove the "Bell Curve Theory," the ultimate truth of which is known mostly through intuition, or 'direct" knowing. Or put another way, the end result of months of quality critical thinking and examination is always just the articulation of something you already know, but just couldn’t prove or speak clearly enough to get beyond reasonable doubt. But then again this idea is not new at all. It was very well explained in the earlier book "The Tao of Physics," which concluded that genuine, absolute truth was in the resting space between convergent scientific reasoning and divergent spiritual mysticism. Imagine that!

Now what is somewhat strange about this very natural, continuing evolution in my own thinking about my daughter’s central graduation question is that I picked up "Blink" before it started its sling-shot ride to the best-seller’s list a few years back, read a few pages, and rejected it. Why? Well after finally reading this book on the way back from my talk on "Carefully Crafting Change" at the IADRS annual conference in Fairfax, VA, I realized why I rejected it—because it was addressing information that I had learned to dismiss earlier in being a student of critical thinking CIA style!

Plus this book was talking about the intuitive, unconscious adaptive way we know the truth of something, in a very rational, scientific and systematic way. I suppose I intuitively sensed this contradictory incongruence in the few pages I scanned in 2005, just like the book talks about. All this “new” information didn’t quite fit into what I “knew” for sure to be so, but fortunately I finally realized what I knew was only 180-degrees of knowing reality.

At this point I wish I was back in psychology graduate school tasked with the noble challenge of scientifically investigating and critically thinking about the other path of knowing—the intuitive, adaptive unconscious brain process that is probably our default way of knowing, that we really don’t know that much about. Now I can intuitively know for sure, but can’t prove it, that many of the elusive answers to the critical problems of today’s overloaded world, have to be found in combination to somewhere along this other foggy default path of knowing on the way to the resting space in between the two paths of knowing.

I am currently using this more complete picture of knowing, understanding and using the complete truth in doing my small part in helping another professional family member, Christine Dobson of Lawrence Kansas, expose and correct a serious problem occurring with youth today. But we have to use both parts of the brain—conscious critical thinking and unconscious instincts to be sure about the truth of what we are trying to discover and communicate, in order to explain it well enough for others to understand and get busy doing something about it. Stay tuned as you will surely hear about this project shortly.