Consensus Building and the Monolectic vs. Dialectic Distinction

For this post, I want to explain the distinction between monolectical consensus-building, which involves finding a single source to build consensus around, and dialectical thinking, which involves building consensus through the synthesis of perspectives.  The term “dialectic” and grammatical variations such as “dialectical” have been used for centuries in philosophical discourse and were used extensively by Kant, Hegel, and Marx and their intellectual successors.  The Greek words from which this term derives mean something like “to gather across”, which signifies that we are gathering ideas across multiple perspectives so as to accumulate them into a fuller conception of reality that incorporates them all.  The term “monolectic” is quite new to philosophical discourse, and it can be understood to mean “to gather into one”.  This new term is intended to refer to epistemic processes that gather disparate ideas and beliefs toward an optimal set of beliefs that supersedes the others.  Before explaining these two concepts in more detail, we will need to consider the different ways in which people can come to agree with each other so as to build consensus around some idea, proposition, or perspective.

Any episteme that is even partially mutually understandable must have a reliable process for building consensus.  There has to be some sort of a way for people to come to agreements with each other, otherwise the episteme is purely subjective because it ultimately comes down to each individual’s point of view and their idiosyncratic conceptions of reality.  One of the main goals of this project is to minimize unnecessary conflicts and to promote peace through improved communication and understanding, which is why consensus building is so important.  There are multiple ways of building consensus, which might take place within communities of practitioners or within classroom settings where the teacher is giving instructions or in public forums where people present their perspectives and try to get others to understand their point of view.

Some might read this and wonder why we don’t just hold up the truth and promote the basic facts as the basis for consensus.  Do we want consensus, or do we want the truth?  Of course, it makes sense that we wouldn’t want to build consensus around falsehoods, but there is a problem in framing this so simply around a simplistic and naïve distinction between truth and falsehood that is supposedly as clear as night and day and is always self-evident for everyone to see.  The most important things in life are not quite so cut-and-dry.  Sure, it is easy enough to just say let’s have consensus around the truth and facts.  It certainly makes sense that reality should be our ground for consensus, but what we’re concerned about it how to figure out what is the truth.  It does not work for a person to say that they have the truth, the whole truth, and that everyone should just recognize this because it is so self-evident and obvious.  It does not work for a person to simply figure that everyone who disagrees is just wrong.  We need to acknowledge that there have to be identifiable processes that we can rely on to get people to recognize the truth.  Also, from a metamodern orientation, we acknowledge that there are going to at best be partial truths within our public discourse and that these are colored by people’s perspectives.  We need reliable processes for getting people to mostly agree upon the facts, and we also need to accept that there are limits to our ability to know the full and detailed truth and there are also a lot of hurdles to overcome in conveying the facts to other people.  This applies even in situations where a person does have a very solid, detailed, and appropriately contextualized understanding of certain things, because there is no automatic way for other people to download this information into their own minds.  Also, we often think that we know more than we actually do and we sometimes need the help of others to recognize the limits of our own understanding.  As such, simply speaking of “facts” and “truth” can sometimes erect additional hurdles because it sometimes blinds people to the nuanced processes that are necessary to properly convey their knowledge to others.

We can now consider the different possible ways of building consensus, not all of which are rational.  Perhaps the most straightforward means of building consensus would be through unchallengable and dogmatic belief in tradition or in what is written in some book or in some person’s authority.  Epistemes that are based on dogma simply involve people accepting certain beliefs as a matter of blind faith.  This has the effect of building consensus among likeminded people within a belief community, but the ability to expand this consensus is rather limited, unless one resorts to violence or threats, which was often the way that dogmatic beliefs were spread in ancient and medieval times.  Also, there is a lot of evidence that if one has enough power and privilege in society, they can brainwash significant numbers of people into agreeing with their message by simply repeating it over and over through media that have broad reach and a large potential audience.  We have also seen a lot of examples where powerful people were able to build public consensus by coercively silencing opposing views so that their messages are not widely available in public discourse.  Authoritarian political regimes and societies where wealth and power are concentrated in very few hands tend to have more of this subtle form of mind control, wherein common people tend to consent to the will of the powerful without fully realizing that they are being manipulated through propaganda.

If this consensus-building process isn’t based on anyone’s authority nor on dogmatic adherence to traditional beliefs and if the information ecosystem allows for free flows of ideas, then people need to be rationally convinced to believe in these ideas on their own accord.  An episteme that doesn’t rely on any of the irrational tactics mentioned just above would probably need to have convincing power in the form of reason or evidence that anyone can come to understand or observe or replicate.  Perhaps the most reliable way of building consensus through rational means is by using pure deductive logic and reason.  This is quite effective within educational institutions since the teacher can explain the rules for logically deriving conclusions and because it simply does not make sense to challenge any conclusions that are based on sound reasoning, wherein no logical fallacies are committed.  However, this purely logical approach has limited applicability because it doesn’t usually apply to anything we and observe nor to any practical situations.  Pure logic always requires axioms and postulates to start, and these cannot themselves be derived from pure logic.  Any axioms and postulates that might serve as the starting point for the deductive reasoning process must be known through other means, such as observation or tradition or authority, and anything of this sort can be the subject of dispute.

One person might observe something, and others might not believe her if they didn’t also personally make the same observation.  We cannot personally observe and verify every point of information that is important to our lives, so we do sometimes need to believe the claims made by others.  Hearsay alone is not an effective means of consensus-building.  It might be possible to at least to have enough public understanding of the information gathering and vetting processes that the experts employ so that one can come to reasonably trust the results.  There are heuristics that people can rationally employ to scrutinize public information and for each person to judge for themselves the likelihood of the veracity of claims and this can allow well-informed and reasonable people to come to agreements regarding what is most likely going on in some matters of public interest and in current events that few people could personally witness or verify.  When common people learn to think a bit like investigative journalists, they can develop a certain measure of reliable agreement regarding what is going on in the world.

The most reliable way of building consensus for observable phenomena involves the scientific method and the institutions that practice it.  Modern science gives us the power to build consensus through the gathering of evidence, the publication of findings with tentative conclusions, and the invitation for other researchers to reproduce experiments, wherein they might or might not come to similar conclusions.  If enough experiments are conducted and enough corroborating evidence is gathered, people tend to accept the accuracy, or at least the usefulness, of a scientific theory.  It is true that even the most well-attested theories can eventually be replaced by better ones, but people usually tend to believe in scientific results and theories that have demonstrated their usefulness.  There are inevitably disputes about the finer details of any scientific field, and we can note that consensus does not require absolute unanimity among all specialists within a given field.  The process overall is quite reliable for consensus-building on the most significant aspects of physics, chemistry, and biology, and this is also true to a lesser extent as it relates to the human sciences such as psychology, sociology, and economics.

While dogmatic religion, mathematics, journalism, and science are quite different in many important ways, all of those have something in common: consensus-building can be reliably achieved through the assumption that some people’s beliefs and perspectives can be mostly or entirely incorrect and there are epistemic processes for discovering the most accurate beliefs, which serve as the engine for compelling more and more people to discard their ignorant beliefs and accept the consensus.  Within modern science, the consensus certainly changes over time, and it is not supposed to be based on authority or dogma or going along with the crowd, but there is still this overarching assumption that there are knowable factors that sort out what are the most reasonable conclusions from those that don’t have evidentiary support.

Each of these reliable consensus-building processes have built-in ways to get people to coalesce around shared beliefs because they have standards for determining which should be accepted and which should be discarded.  Each of the epistemes has ways to weed out inaccurate claims, ideas, and false beliefs, or at least they each have some way for certain beliefs to be considered authoritative.  In each case, it might be the case that one person has the correct answer and there are processes to get everyone else to understand this.  It might also be the case that nobody knows the correct answer and there are processes to teach them all.  It might be the case that everyone has completely inaccurate beliefs and these can be weeded out.  It might even be the case that a single person can use these methods to figure out entirely on their own what is the most accurate information and then to convince large numbers of people by explaining how they derived their conclusions.

This might seem perfectly natural, and it might not seem to even be possible that things could work otherwise.  After all, if there are mind-independent facts, which are things that have to be true regardless of what anyone thinks or believes to be the case.  These are usually objective, but this might perhaps even include some things that are intersubjective, such as certain ethical matters.  We have to acknowledge that some beliefs are closer to the truth than others and that some people just have the wrong beliefs and that they would benefit from having more accurate beliefs.  However, this is all based on propositional knowing, wherein some propositions are certainly more accurate than others.  If we consider perspectival knowing, then it is more difficult to consider what perspectives are more accurate than others.  A person’s perspective on certain matters incorporates their thoughts, feelings, desires, values, and related aspects of their cultural background and experiences in life.  It is often that a person’s perspective includes propositions that might be inaccurate, but it is not so simple to say that any of their perspectives in life could just simply be entirely inaccurate.  It is also likely that each person has unique perspectives that need to be given special consideration so that we can develop a deeper and more comprehensive picture of objective reality and also the intersubjective reality that would be the mutually understandable aggregate of each person’s inner world.

Bringing together people’s perspectives requires constructive dialogue and synthesizing perspectives, which is called a dialectic.  With a dialectical process, each perspective gives some understanding that needs to be incorporated into the greater synthesis rather than weeded out and each person’s perspective is grown to incorporate all others, and this can eventually lead to mutual understanding and consensus-building without anyone necessarily discarding their prior perspectives.  For propositional knowing, consensus-building relies on a process we can call monolectic, which often involves examining the propositions that are embedded within each person’s perspective and setting the record straight and building more detailed propositional knowing within each person’s mind through epistemic processes that don’t take into account each individual’s perspectives because that is not relevant to the matter at hand.  For science and math and also for dogmatic religion, a person’s perspective is not important to arrive at the most accurate beliefs, so these can be pruned away in order to build consensus.

Dialectical thinking necessarily requires multiple people with different perspectives and each person working to understand certain aspects of the inner world of each person that they are interacting with.  This is because is not possible for any single person to develop deeper, more complex, and more comprehensive perspectives entirely on their own without engaging in dialogue with other conscious and self-reflective beings.  The dialectical process involves considering other points of view to challenge one’s own point of view.  The idea is that different perspectives can be more accurate and more inaccurate than others in some cases, but none are 100% accurate nor 100% inaccurate because there is always something gained by incorporating other perspectives even if one of them happens to be mostly wrong.

The perspectives are put into context and there is an inherently greater understanding from seeing how another sees things and the personal experiences and cultural symbols that are wound up within each perspective.  By default, each of us only has our own perspective to draw from, but the dialectical process can develop additional perspectives without losing any, and this can then afford better propositional knowledge for each person as well.  This is why certain phenomena can only be adequately addressed through some sort of dialectic and that analytic and scientific processes are inadequate to understand certain aspects of life.

Dialectical thinking is based on the principle that any conception that one might have in mind can only be some imperfect and partial representation of reality.  No mental representation can ever fully capture reality.  This entails that every conceptualized system, every set of beliefs, and every worldview inevitably leaves things out.  There is always something lacking, some inconsistencies, and perhaps even some incoherence in every set of conceptual beliefs.  This is not a personal failing on anyone’s part.  This is just the nature of conceptual thought.  This shortcoming, inconsistency, or lack of coherence is what ensures that every level of mental development can be surpassed.  The lack is the door that opens into a larger more inclusive level of insight and development.

The goal is that dialectical thinking would tend toward less one-sidedness in thought, less ideological exclusivity, less hardening around one’s own position, and less opposition to the views of others.  In general, a dialectic occurs when one considers notions that are inconsistent with and seemingly contradictory to their existing beliefs and perspective on some matter or where one considers two or more possible concepts that seem incompatible with each other.  The competing perspectives, which we can call the thesis and the antithesis, are then synthesized in a way that removes the contradiction and the synthesis includes and transcends both the thesis and the antithesis.

One type of real-life scenario would involve two or more people who disagree, or perhaps two camps of people who are at odds with each other on some contentious issue who go through the dialectical process, through which everyone carefully takes into account the other camp’s perspective and try to understand the factors that led to them having this perspective on things.  This process can ideally result in all parties essentially merging their perspectives and synthesizing their opinions so that each of them walks away with their own perspective integrated with the other’s perspective.

[i] Some of this comes from Steven White in the Metamodern forum https://forum.metamoderna.org/t/increasing-cognitive-complexity-with-dialectical-thinking

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The Connection between Integral and Metamodern Thinking and Spirituality

The concept of worldview is pretty central to my work, and there are different ways of categorizing worldviews.  I want to add some depth to a post I wrote last year, which I began by restating a summary of Annick de Witt’s model for categorization, which involves a world cartoon graphic that shows some common cultural aspects of the 4 main worldview categories.  This categorization is similar to the spiral dynamics model and related models that a lot of metamodern and integral theory work is based upon, but de Witt’s system doesn’t present any of these as stages and no category appears as being above or below any other.  They are simply presented as different ways in which you can be oriented within the same world.  All people and all worldviews simply coexist within this model.

I analyzed her graphic and I envisioned it overlaid within a rectangular coordinate system:

In my interpretation, the X axis represents the spiritual/secular dichotomy.  We can say that “spiritual” means the interconnection to the timeless and to the underlying reality behind appearances that holds it all together and gives enduring meaning.  “Secular” quite simply refers to things that are instead more worldly focused, with the assumption that everything in reality is temporal and belongs to an age.  So this axis ultimately hinges upon the belief that there is something timeless holding reality together and that is what provides ultimate meaning for our lives.

The Y axis represents the epistemically monistic/pluralistic dichotomy. This dichotomy hinges on how complex or straightforward it is to understand reality. The epistemically monistic worldviews are also reductive, since they have a privileged source of knowledge.  Whether this source is modern science or a holy book, the common thread is that all other sources need to ultimately be interpreted in terms of this privileged source in order to be considered valid.  Epistemically pluralistic is also multi-perspectival, since more than one perspective on reality can simultaneously be considered valid.  However, unlike the postmodern, which lacks a process for determining a greater whole in which the perspectives can be contexualized, the integrative worldview category provides a way that we might reach this, and this is because it is both multi-perspectival and spiritual.  It is the non-dogmatic spirituality that allows us to consider multiple perspectives and to seek the deeper reality that ties it together, and it is through our search for meaning in life that we might find this.

Note that the “integrative” within this model seems to correspond to the “Tier 2” stages in Ken Wilber’s AQAL model and it also seems to align with the “yellow” or “teal” or “integral” stage that Hanzi Freinacht sees as what we should aim for in our personal and societal development.  Now, I will admit that I do largely agree with Hanzi and I also find a lot of agreement with Wilber.  They all seem to agree that there are stages of development that transcend and include the prior stages and that, therefore, what de Witt’s model calls “integrative” should be above and beyond the other 3, as far as development goes.  The sensibilities and perspectives of the other 3 (traditional, modern, postmodern) are transcended and included within the integrative, or whatever word we wish to use for that stage.  Despite this, I like the way Annick frames it because it is less condescending to convey to people who are at the lower levels. Her model simply shows these as different co-equal perspectives on the world and none are necessarily better than others. In her work, she does go on to carefully convey that there are benefits of some sort of integrative worldview, but the beauty of framing it initially this way is that it is more inviting to people who are traditional, modern, or postmodern.  So while I agree that we should try to develop to an integral stage as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as a global society, I also acknowledge the utility of presenting the virtues of integral and metamodern thinking to people without coming off as condescending.

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Ideas on the Nomothetic vs. Idiographic Distinction

I want to share some ideas on the nomothetic vs. idiographic distinction.  The term “nomothetic” refers to research about general principles or generalizations across a population of individuals.  This is based on a tendency to generalize, and is typical for the natural sciences.  In general, this describes the effort to derive laws that explain types or categories of objective phenomena.  In contrast, the term “ideographic” describes the effort to understand the meaning of contingent, unique, and often cultural or subjective phenomena.  It is based on a tendency to specify, and is typical for the humanities.  This distinction should not be seen as absolute and binary.  Instead, some epistemes can involve the interplay between these two.  The description of particular streams of consciousness and symbolic interpretation of stories can sometimes be relatable for other people and this can lead to a certain mutual understanding.  In some cases, these might be so particular to the author’s personal experience that there simply isn’t any way for anyone else to relate.

A major influence for me and one of the greatest minds of our time, Gregg Henriques, has said that ideographic aspects of reality are not amenable to scientific study, since, he figures, quantification and reproducibility are just not possible.

With regard to science and ideographic knowledge, I would say it depends on how those terms are defined.  If we take a generalized definition of science, it can apply to the shared or relatable aspects of conscious experience that have correlates to objective behavior patterns.  This is how we can relate to each other and get a good sense of the inner world of the people we interact with.  There is always ideographic uniqueness, but if there are patterns that can be studied within groups then I think we can have reliable ways of building knowledge based on reproducible evidence.  Now, all sciences need to be anchored into reproducible evidence, but it is also scientific if the interpretation of the data extends into phenomena that are not reproducible.  This is why evolutionary biology and astronomy are sciences.  Those involve phenomena that are not reproducible in themselves but stand in this clear relation to things that are (we can reproduce tests on fossils and movements of stars in the sky, for example).  I figure any ideographic knowledge has to have some elements that are universal to the inner experience of consciousness, and we can reproduce our mindfulness of those phenomena and also the correlations to patterns of behavior for ourselves an for others.  Thus some ideographic knowledge can stand in relation to reproducible evidence and thus it can be somewhat scientific.

There are phenomenological experiments one can do, some of which take the form of “do this with process or procedure X your mind and you’ll get Y result”.  There are mindfulness practices that can allow people to more accurately assess their own consciousness.  If enough people agree on the results, then these can be considered to have consensus evidential support.  The findings can then be used, in conjunction with psychology and sociology, to help interpret the common threads of ideographic data.  What I’m describing here is only the paradigm and the methodology that we’re working on refining.  I think what you’re describing could be considered within a similar vein.  What might make something scientific is if it is driven by evidence (usually objective but perhaps also intersubjective) and there is some sort of methodology to drive it and the conclusions ultimately succeed or fail on the basis of reproducible experiments.  If what I’m describing is not scientific, then at least is it adjacent to science and we’d need a new word to describe it, since it is not merely speculative, there are not infinite ways that the data could be interpreted, and it does succeed or fail based on reproducible tests.

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Non-Introspective Cognitive Science Methods and Misappropriation of “-phenomenology”

In recent weeks, I’ve been posting a lot about phenomenology, including what it is essentially and the different branches.  It is also worth addressing the so-called practice of “hetero-phenomenology”.  This term was coined by Daniel Dennett, who defined it as phenomenology of someone other than oneself.  Dennett describes this discipline as involving the observation of others and listening to what they have to say with the goal of trying to understand what they experience and believe.  Introspection is seen as inherently unreliable, so only objectively observable data is admitted to any research projects using this method.  In this, he is essentially describing a form of cognitive science.  The utility of this is indisputable, since we can learn a lot about human behavior by observing, recording, and measuring how people behave and what they say.  However, it is disputable whether he is misappropriating the term “phenomenology” to apply to something that is quite unrelated to any of the major branches of mature phenomenology.

Dennett defines “hetero-phenomenology” in a way that clearly gives primacy to objective scientific methods and that discounts all intersubjective theories that are not in line with the presuppositions of naturalistic science.  Within his method, all subjective experiences are interpreted in terms of what is known from objective data.  Also, quite notably, the practitioner makes an assumption wherein it is believed to be impossible for one to form knowledge from subjective experience that can help interpret objectively based scientific theories.  The problem with this approach is that any information gathered from introspection is considered by Dennett to be unreliable and that there is no way within his method for introspective findings to be incorporated into any theory.  Dennett dismisses all forms of introspection, even those that would be carefully practiced, as hopelessly arbitrary and he doesn’t think we should trust any descriptions of one’s inner world that would be produced through introspection.  It’s not just that objective scientific findings are always trusted more, it is that introspective findings are never trusted at all.  At least, this is what he tries to argue the researchers and theorists of this method should do.

For this reason, what Dennett describes is not really any form of phenomenology, nor anything worthy of any derived term, but it is instead nothing more or less than a form of purely objective cognitive science and thus Dennett’s term is misleading.  There is obviously nothing wrong with purely objective science (although it does have limitations), but Dennett shouldn’t masquerade his cognitive science as a form of phenomenology when it lacks the elements that should be present in any appropriate use of this term.

Dennett also made up the term “auto-phenomenology” to refer to anything that meets the more generally accepted definition of phenomenology.  The prefix “auto” is redundant when applied to phenomenology, based on the generally accepted definition, and therefore there is no reason to use this term that Dennett invented.

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What is Hermeneutic Phenomenology?

This post is the second in a series on the main branches of mature phenomenology.  You might want to start with the prior posts about transcendental phenomenology and existential phenomenology if you have not already done so.

The third major branch of mature phenomenology uses hermeneutic methods to gain deep insights into the meaning of language, acts of communication, and the inner world of thinking and feeling beings.  Martin Heidegger also initiated this branch of phenomenology, and although there are similarities and overlap with the existential branch, this approach can be seen as distinct from that one.  There are strong connections to the work of Dilthey and other hermeneuts who both sought to interpret people’s written words and speech so as to understand what they were thinking and feeling.  When this is brought together with phenomenology, it is focused on what various acts of communication can tell us about what is common to lived experience in general.  Hermeneutic phenomenology seeks to discern the meaning of speech acts, texts, gestures, and lived expressions and all that might unite and tie together the experience of living with one another in a common world.

Interpretation of human society and culture is complex, with so many variables that are interacting with each other in ways that it is very difficult to sort out, but the idea is that one can find ways of focusing on one aspect at a time and studying its own unique nature.  Indeed, there are numerous people involved in any social situation interacting with each other in complex ways and they each have their own thoughts, feelings, and motives, which are extremely difficult to discern, but we can carefully try to assess each subculture and in some cases each person and each motivating factor separately.  This can involve considering the historical development of ideology and cultural beliefs and practices over the generations by carefully looking at history and the various time periods and what the people within each generation had and didn’t have at their disposal and what they believed and didn’t believe and what they were dealing with in their own lives and the problems they were trying to address in their lives.  This project is extremely difficult, but the main thinkers who formulated this branch of phenomenology would argue that progress can be made on this front.  We have access to troves of artifacts from the distant and recent past, so it should not be entirely impossible to understand the most significant patterns of thought and motivation that guided the development of human society and that are at work in our contemporary world and are driving us into the future.

Heidegger saw how the usage of language is important to how problems are framed and how solutions are formulated, and this is what inspired him to focus on hermeneutics in his work.  He argued that phenomenology could be used to address the central questions of metaphysics which had been misconceived and taken for granted throughout the history of philosophy.  He thought that philosophers had been fundamentally misled by language going all the way back to the work of Plato and he figured that the pre-Socratic philosophers had more open-minded ways of thinking about the nature of being and the relation to time.  He figured that generation after generation since then up to his time in the Twentieth Century, most philosophers had taken for granted the traditional notions of how being relates to time and they had not thought much about it.  He sought to use hermeneutics to open people’s minds.

Several notable thinkers continued the development of hermeneutic phenomenology after Heidegger, including Hans Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.  Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics is based on self-understanding as a means of understanding others.  Gadamer stressed the historical and linguistic nature of our understanding.  Whenever we understand something, be it a text, machine, or gesture, we understand ourselves as well.  Gadamer believed that hermeneutics is universal to human understanding and interaction with the world.  He realized one could gain insight through the communicative power of works of art and culture and he saw that our encounters with arts and literature give us insights into the human condition.  He didn’t think that any methodology could capture how the process of mutual understanding is constructed and refined, but he felt that people could utilize a variety of communicative tactics so as to achieve a “fusion of horizons” between their inner worlds.

Ricoeur sought to be more methodical than Gadamer.  He theorized and practiced a vast arc of narrative structural analysis that incorporated empathy, trust, suspicion, and distrust as overarching sentiments driving prior thinkers, since each of these are interwoven with human experience.  Ricoeur argued that hermeneutics is built on the basis of phenomenology, but he also argues that phenomenology is incapable of constituting itself without a hermeneutical presupposition.  Also Ricoeur said that our social life inevitably involves some combination of empathy and suspicion, which are opposites that interplay with each other to produce a gradually more explanatory model of the motives and ideologies of people and the cultures and subcultures that they are associated with.  Both empathy and suspicion are essential to a true understanding.  Overall, we are trying to understand the present by interpreting the past and vice versa.

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