While I'm working on my next post, I thought I'd pass on this template that I made. It's a Microsoft OneNote notebook with section groups and sections set up as an implementation of David Allen's Getting Things Done method of personal information management.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
The Specificity Hierarchy of Wisdom's Research Barriers
Writing about different research topics can be challenging for different reasons. Some of these reasons are shared by all research topics, simply by virtue of being research topics. Just like all other types of problems that people solve every day, academic research is constrained by space and time, laws and morals, and similar common restrictions. While I can’t think of any at the moment, there are also sure to be problem solving constraints that apply to all academic research, and yet to no other problem. For now, however, let’s call any factors that impede all academic research global research barriers.
On the other hand, some of the barriers faced by individuals and teams of researchers are shared by various subsets of all researchers in academia. There could be many ways to group researchers and their research difficulties together. For example, Warren Thorngate has discussed different ways of grouping research and research strategies, using the spatial metaphors or length, breadth, and depth. I suppose that people that make decisions that affect a university’s coffers might categorize research programs by how much they cost, or by some measure or other of their success. However, the types of difficulties that this post is about are ones that arise from characteristics of thesubject matter that they pertain to, as opposed to some other difference between difficulties faced by various research topics that arise from factors other than their subject matter.
Some research barriers affect more topics than others do. In other words, those barriers have a greater scope of impact. Given a very specific research topic, narrow enough, say, to be the subject of a short publication, then relationships of scope between it, other topics similar to it, and the barriers that they face can be represented by a simple diagram.
The central region of Fig. 1 represents the publication’s narrow research topic. Let’s call this Topic X. The ring around it represents its research barriers, specifically those that it does not share in common with similar topics. Let’s call this Barrier Set A. Beyond this ring lie other research topics. These topics are not hindered by Barrier Set A, i.e. those barriers that impede progress research on Topic X to progress. However, they are still subject to some other obstacles, some of which they share with Topic X. The second-innermost ring, Barrier Set B., represents those barriers (and only those barriers). The outermost ring represents those factors that impede research in all academic disciplines. This outermost ring therefore stands for a limit case for research barriers that we’ve already identified and named global research barriers. So to keep things consistent, let’s call the ring’s referent the Global Barrier Set.
Collectively, these rings and the area between them represent a Research Barrier Specificity Hierarchy, or RuBbiSH. Note, however, that a specificity hierarchy as I’ve outlined above can only be created for a particular topic. To speak of such a hierarchy, represented by concentric rings and regions, only makes sense if there is a central topic to provide context. The RuBbiSH that this post is about is that of wisdom research. I would like to go over a few important barriers in this hierarchy, starting from the most general and broadly applicable to the most specific.
The most general set of research barriers form the Global Research Barrier Group, or GaRBaGe. This is not static, but changes as the face of academic research progresses. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, we’ve defined the GaRBaGe in a way that includes as its members all constraints that academic research shares with other problem solving activities. That means that general temporal constraints (deadlines, number of working hours available, etc.), and limits on cognitive and attentional resources, for example, are included in the GaRBaGe.
On the other hand, some of the obstacles faced by wisdom research do not belong to the GaRBaGe, and instead are narrower in scope. Even so, other topics might still share some of these research barriers. Chandler provides a specific example.
Attempting to study wisdom, suggests Chandler, has a ‘post-apocalyptic’ flavour to it. What he means by this is that our understanding of the mental realm is not the same as it once was. While our scientific data on phenomena in the brain have become more refined, some other aspects of the study of mind have become more fragmented. In the case of the study of wisdom, researchers might at times find themselves feeling like archaeologists and historians, piecing together texts and practices from the past. When most of your resource materials are ‘from’ the past, interpretation could become as important as observation.
This barrier is one of the most general that applies to wisdom research, and I’d like to call it the barrier of Discontinuity. Large gaps between periods of research on a topic make older texts more difficult to interpret. Historical shifts in language and context alone can make an already challenging manuscript appear completely intractable, should intervening dialects and contexts become inaccessible. Texts that discuss wisdom are from times and places different enough from the twenty-first century, global, capitalist socio-economy that I see outside my window that their meaning often and unsurprisingly slips from my grasp. While much of the advice of ancient sages is timelessly excellent, some of it was appropriate for their own milieu, but doesn’t transfer well to ours. Also, even the apparently eternal and ever-applicable advice of ancient texts (which are probably more similar to what we mean by wisdom than context-specific advice anyway) might be presented and explained using examples that are wholly unfamiliar to an intelligent, well-informed person of today. An example might be advice on business ethics from the past that illustrates its point by using some curiosity of slave trade as an example. This is just one way that Discontinuity hampers research.
Another constraint that applies to wisdom research is the barrier of Immateriality. This is an obstacle that it holds in common with all other mental phenomena, as well as with some other fields of study outside of the arts and sciences of mind. Mathematics, many topics in philosophy, and many disciplines in the arts and humanities deal especially with intangibles. Symbolic Logic might be a paradigm example, but Information Studies, some sub-disciplines of Linguistics, and even Economics often face the barrier of Immateriality.
Immateriality makes it more difficult for observers to come to a consensus about the ‘object’ of attention, precisely because what is being paid attention might not be an object at all. John Locke famously noted the difference between publicly accessible, measurable features of the world, such as mass, length, or shape, and other features that seem to reside in the observer as much as they were located in the world, such as colour, scent, or sound. This difference between what Locke called primary and secondary qualities is one example of a specific aspect of Immateriality (i.e. subjectivity) that can trouble researchers. If there is nothing of your subject matter that can be directly measured, sensed, or observed, then coming to agreement regarding its nature is often a tricky business.
Another issue related to Immateriality is that science is only supposed to operate in the material realm. However, on the other hand, Cognitive Science and its many cognate disciplines aspire to generating naturalistic theories and explanations of mental phenomena. This usually involves taking out an “intellectual loan”, to use a phrase from Dennett, and hoping that the shorthand of immaterial terms that we use to describe mental entities and phenomena will eventually cash out in purely physical terms.
For some, this means that while mental stuff is real, it’s actually all physical stuff. For others, Such as Churchland and Churchland, it means that there is no such thing as mental stuff, and we’re simply too naïve to comprehend this. The hope there is that some day, our knowledge of the mind will have advanced enough to reveal that all lower-level mental phenomena are equivalent to specific physical correlates, and presumably that it will be possible for people to make sense of this bridge between the material and the immaterial.
However, as many people have pointed out, the truth of the mind-matter interface might be incomprehensibly counter-intuitive, perhaps similar to the way that large patches of quantum theory famously are. Is the interface between mind and matter itself material or immaterial?
The last and narrowest research barrier that I’d like to discuss is the barrier of Normativity. Not all non-physical research topics require a normative component to their explanation. Here’s one way to understand this: The three contrasting classes of theories that might relate to a research topic are descriptive, normative, and prescriptive theories. Descriptive theories (or just as well, the descriptive component of a theory) provide support to an explanation of the research topic by recording observations and inferences about the subject matter. This component of a theory is most often a necessity, rather than an optional feature.
On the other hand, only some research topics also include a normative component to their explanations. In contrast to a descriptive theory’s observations of its subject matter’s current or past states of affairs, a normative theory involves claims of evaluation, appraisal, and judgement of these states of affairs. In other words, while descriptive theories target the topic’s ‘reality’, normative theories involve the topic’s ideals. While some research topics disallow or simply do not call for any normative remarks, others might involve many evaluative or similarly qualitative arguments, and some might even fail to appear complete without making normative claims. Ethics and Law are clear examples of a discipline that requires mention of normative phenomena. However, Biology and Medicine are also normative disciplines, since their ideas of development and decline, evolution and ‘devolution’, health and illness, are normative notions.
Normativity is a narrower, stricter constraint on wisdom research than Immateriality. First, the barrier of Normativity certainly appears to apply to wisdom research, since it pertains to human excellence and living a good life. As soon as better and worse enter the conversation, normativity applies. Second, Normativity appears to be a more specific research barrier than Immateriality, since not all psychological phenomena are required to have a normative valence. For example, most people would agree that a person ought not to be held morally accountable for his or her brain’s memory capacity. In this sense, memory does not appear to be a normative research topic.
In another sense, however, it is possible to produce a normative standard of physical memory function, with which an individual’s ability to remember could be compared to the rest of the population. While this type of research undoubtedly deals with evaluative notions, and quite possibly the idea of ideal human memory, no moral blame or responsibility is being discussed. While I’m not sure whether there are names for these two kinds of normative distinctions that an argument or theory could make, the distinction seems to be an important one.
Moral relativism and lack of consensus in normative judgement make normative topics especially tricky. Coming up with some way of explaining the normative phenomenon in question usually requires some normative standard against which it could be measured. Without some acceptable level of consensus about such normative standards, some fields of study become much murkier.
In conclusion, I’d like to mention some challenges that I’ve faced in my own research that probably wouldn’t have arisen had I been studying the Wason Selection Task instead of wisdom. I don’t know how strongly others in my field would empathize with me regarding these difficulties, but I’d be curious to find out. Since these barriers pertain only to wisdom (or perhaps a few other topics most similar to and intermingled with wisdom), they might be thought to reside at the very centre of the diagram of wisdom’s RuBbiSH. While I haven’t been able to come up with generally-applicable, catchy names for these barriers like Discontinuity, Immateriality, and Normativity, I might be able to provide a rough sketch of the often subtle difficulties unique to wisdom research, as I have experienced them, and which have severely delayed this blog’s development.
Ah, yes: development. Development is actually a key concept while studying wisdom. More specifically, wisdom is intimately tied to personal development, i.e. growth, maturation, and transcendental qualitative shifts in a person’s thought, action, and character. For this reason, a researcher dedicated to wisdom can become primed to spot events and phenomena in his or her environment (and especially in people in the environment) that are germane to people’s development. Since the person whose development is most accessible to the researcher is typically his or her own, perhaps others have noticed an increase in self-scrutiny similar to what I have felt since immersing myself in this project years ago.
While increased self-scrutiny is not strictly a barrier to research per se, it produces disruptions in life and thought more generally. Just as describing what one is doing while performing an action usually yields worse results than silently devoting all of one’s attention to the task (i.e. concurrent verbalization negatively impacts performance), being an agent in the world and simultaneously observing oneself being an agent in the world is extremely challenging. The attentional and cognitive overhead is probably considerable. It wouldn’t be so troublesome were it not so automatic for me. When important, life-impacting situations arise for me, it isn’t unusual for me to anxiously struggle to maintain focus on deciding and acting, as I become increasingly absorbed in deciphering the more general, theoretical reasons behind my ability or inability to decide and act well. By becoming captivated by the unfolding and development of one’s own character, one runs the risk of shaping one’s life into something paradoxically autoanthropological. Every time I look in the mirror, I violate the Prime Directive, and it makes me wonder whether Heisenberg had similar flights of fancy while staring at the chin he shaved. Every self-observation shapes a person’s life, and these unavoidable adjustments to one’s character seem to accrue rather quickly when the self-observer is involved in wisdom research.
Another issue that I’ve faced that remind me of the weirdness between observer and observed is about wisdom researchers’ own normative standards. While studying a set of normative standards, how the brain maintains and modifies them, how they are propagated through culture, and so on, these standards are unavoidably compared to the researcher’s own. The reason why I say that this is unavoidable is because while the researcher might refrain from concluding that his or her own normative standards are better or worse than those under investigation, it is probably impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to even make sense of other normative standards without making use of one’s own. We ‘see through’ our norms as much as we see through our eyes, so a hypothetical, non-normative wisdom researcher would be roughly analogous to a blind ophthalmologist.
The problem here isn’t that the researcher’s own normative standards influence his or her understanding of the normative standards under scrutiny. While this is certainly an issue, it is one that applies to a broader set of topics than just wisdom, and is instead part of the barrier of Normativity. What I am trying to point out is that sometimes the researcher is persuaded to change his or her normative standards, largely from being exposed to so many other expressions of normativity. The reason why this is problematic is that the researcher’s normative yardstick begins to resemble Neurath’s ship, undergoing continual renewal. Furthermore, since this metamorphosing set of norms acts as the researcher’s metaphorical ‘lens’ of observation, the impression that filters through these norms and is cast upon the researcher’s thought also changes in normative ‘shape’ or ‘colour’.
This concludes my first actual post on Cortical Wisdom. It’s helped me point out different types of research issues before I actually attempt to address them in depth. While there are many potential topics to choose from for next time, I’ll probably wind up talking about rationality or expertise. Please leave feedback, since it would be great to find out how comprehensible and interesting this is to others, and would certainly spur some motivation, too.
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