Two Faces of Critical Thinking for the Reflective Military Practitioner

This article was external pageoriginally publishedcall_made in the external pageNovember/December 2014 Issuecall_made of external pageMilitary Reviewcall_made, published by the external pageUnited States Army Combined Arms Centercall_made.

The quest to educate our military toward the goal of fostering critical thinkers is an obvious part of the dominant narrative in U.S. military circles today. Critical think ing has become quite the catchphrase. Yet, there is little published in military circles demonstrating a philosophical examination of what critical thinking means; hence, my intent here is to start that conversation.[i] My argument calls upon two faces of critical thinking—a metaphor that conveys a dualistic approach toward a more reflective military practice.

A decade ago, I was on faculty at the U.S. Army War College where the curriculum employed a blue booklet on critical thinking authored by Richard W. Paul and Linda Elder.[ii] Later, as a faculty member of the Command and General Staff College, I likewise was di-rected to have our students read and apply the booklet, presumably to assure they were able to critically reason. In the booklet, Paul and Elder present what they claim to be “universal intellectual standards:” clarity, accu-racy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, signif-icance, and fairness. Indeed, the Paul and Elder text seemed to help students detect logical fallacies. That is, Paul and Elder, employing the logico-scientific paradigm , present critical thinking as a deductive-inductive reasoning process necessary to uncover flaws in logic much as one would in evaluating mathematical proofs and physics experiments.[iii]

Many of my students and I were left unsatisfied with this logico-scientific approach as it did not seem to address novelty, or what Donald A. Schön described as indeterminate zones of practice—conditions of com-plexity, uncertainty, and value conflict—which my student-o_cers had experienced.[iv] A search for mean-ing in these situations had little to do with identifying logical fallacies as prescribed by Paul and Elder. The complexities they experienced were uniquely “observer dependent,” and the observer’s sense of complexity was limited by the available language or institutionalized doctrines to interpret what it was that was complex. [v] Meeting Paul and Elder’s standard that requires bring-ing intellectual order to such chaos would be a misstep. Because such an uncritical practice could dangerously lead to an illusion of understanding, I began the search for another paradigm associated with critical think-ing. My intent here is to describe an alternative—the interpretive paradigm—and present this basis for critical reasoning as a complementary world view. I say complementary, as I argue that both paradigms are essential to make sense of complex unfolding events. In doing so, I will address each by section as follows: I will explain the sociological concept of paradigms; present an American football allegory to illustrate how two paradigms work in tandem; discuss how they critically relate to each other; and, at the end, offer a critical ap-proach to indeterminate zones of professional practice, called action learning, that applies both faces of critical thinking.

Two Paradigms for Sensemaking A paradigm is the way a particular community of practice makes sense of the world.[vi] As such, there are at least three interlaced philosophical systems of inquiry and analysis that underly the logic of para-digms—ontology, epistemology, and methodology. I will compare and explain each of these to help differentiate the logico-scientific from the interpretive paradigm. The first ingredient to a paradigm is ontology, or an underlying sense of being. Ontology attempts to answer the question, “what is real?” It may be construed along a continuum between beliefs of a purely objective world (involving a concrete sense of reality, or objec-tivism) and subjective world (the social construction of reality, or subjectivism). Objectivism is the ontological essence of the logico-scientific paradigm. Objectivists are closely aligned with the physical sciences in that re-ality may be proven to exist independent of mankind’s often flawed perceptions of it (i.e., what would consti-tute logical fallacies according to Paul and Elder). In contrast, a subjectivist, at the other end of the ontological spectrum, argues that mankind has sym-bolically created reality, where reality only exists in context. To the subjectivist, reality is dependent on sociological processes—the hallmark of the interpretive paradigm.

The second ingredient of a paradigm is episte-mology—the ensuing belief about what legitimates understanding in light of ontological assumptions. Epistemology answers the question, “what constitutes our knowledge for professional practice?” For example, to understand the physical world, the logico-scientific knowledge structure is often judged objectively by its orderliness, coherency of theory, rationalized catego-ries and taxonomies, analytic theories of causality, and so forth. To objective purists such as Paul and Elder, emotions and intuitive processes are not only invalid ways to judge knowledge, but they reflect biases that must be overcome. To an interpretivist, epistemology is recognized to be tentative knowledge representing man-made, flexible conceptualizations of reality. Here, epistemology is necessarily an unsettled, Heraclitean process of “never stepping into the same river twice.”[vii] Beyond cognitions, interpretations are narratives that also spawn feelings such as surprise, irony, déjà vu, paradox, tragedy, artfulness, excitement, creativity, comedy, and so on. Intuition and emotions are inter-twined to constitute a subjective epistemology; hence, judgment of interpretive forms of knowledge cannot be divorced from either of them.

The third ingredient of a paradigm, methodology, involves how knowledge is legitimized. The logico-sci-entific paradigm would include the objectivist’s em-ployment of the scientific method, where, typically, the steps are—define the problem based in a coherent theory, search for possible answers, test them objective-ly for generalizability, and apply the best answer which feeds back into a nomothetic (lawful) knowledge struc-ture, traditionally known as science. From the world view of the subjectivist, the interpretivist employs idiographic methods—such as the use of metaphors, hermeneutics, rich description, or creation of neolo-gisms—for the purpose of deep, situationally specific learning. The idea is to develop distinctive meanings in appreciation of the complex experiences at hand.[viii] Note that the logico-scientific paradigm seeks context-free methods designed around sameness while the interpre-tive seeks context-specific methods designed around uniqueness.

American Football: An Allegory for Military Operations

As social beings, we are not stuck in a single par-adigm; we experience the world seamlessly between logico-scientific and interpretive ontological assump-tions. We can note that what makes professional football interesting is that no two plays, games, or seasons are alike—uniqueness being a key feature of idiographic-based knowledge. Yet, there are logico-sci-entific repetitions offering a generalizable sameness as well. When we watch a football game, we enjoy it because we have learned to understand the relatively consistent rule structure (sameness) and appreciate that those rules interact with the playing of the game at hand (uniqueness). We know that the rules (a key feature of football epistemology) are a subjective creation because we notice the league changes them as conditions change. We observe how the rules are enforced—in the most unbiased way possible—fol-lowed by methodical, physical hand-and-arm signals by well-experienced, objective referees. We also couple those observations with our subjective interpretations of what just happened—our agreement or disagreement with the assessment of penalties—and may actually disagree with the supposedly objective play-review video system.

While we observe and analyze the physical prowess of the individual players and their integration of their positional tasks into a team effort—using objective measurements such as yards gained and passes com-pleted—we interpret individual and team performance from an emotional basis as well (e.g., we become fans). We also are intrigued by how the coaches and quarter-back seem to subjectively know when to run, pass, or even intentionally ground the football. We listen to the commentators judge what play should be run and how they criticize plays that did not work as planned. We watch the dynamic physical interactions of the oppos-ing teams while reflecting how both sides can surprise each other. In our own minds, surprise (an emotion) seems a very subjectively interpreted experience as a surprising play is only a shock to the other team, the announcers, and the audience. Sometimes even the team making an unexpected play seems to surprise it-self as to the degree of its success or failure, particularly if the play did not unfold as practiced.

In football we reflect on the passage of minutes and seconds—both subjective measures invented by humans and, yet, measures that have become socially objectified as we equate time with physical events. We notice time is controlled by seemingly objective cate-gories: starts, timeouts, halftimes, resets, two-minute warnings, overtimes, and finishes. The subjectivist in us, however, recognizes that these times may vary among college or high-school football conferences when compared to those at the paid-professional level, again indicating time is a human invention. Also of note to the interpretivist is that there is a certain irony that an hour of o_cial play time often involves more than three hours for a single game.

Football statistics give us the impression of objective fact; hence, predictability. Predictability is the quintes-sential goal of the logico-scientific paradigm. Measures of player and team performance may give clues as to which teams will make the playoffs. Measures of effectiveness, such as scores at the end of a quarter, half, or game are partially reliable predictors of an overall season victor. However, we cannot imagine looking only at a computer screen with ongoing statistics to fully appreciate what is happening a game. We want to appreciate and emotionally involve ourselves in what is happening on the ground. When viewing the game, we interpret how it is going and realize that strictly monitoring “objective” statistics is not satisfactory. We celebrate (with emotion) when underdogs surprise us by winning games that probability and statistics would deny—and we experience heightened morale (also an emotional state) when the winning team surges.

We are aware, outside the conduct of a game, of on-going, behind-the-scenes, complex emotional tensions among the players, managers, and owners of the teams. These require subjective judgments as to whether the players will be fined, go on strike, be provided disabil-ity pensions, be recruited, or be traded to other teams. We interpret how outside interactions might affect the game at hand and the season ahead. Finally, taking ourselves outside our comfort zone, the interpretivist in us contemplates why culture in the United States has created a very different epistemology of football from most of the rest of the world, whose game we Americans call soccer. We should critically wonder why we call our game football at all. Objectively, the ball is kicked far less than it is carried or thrown.

With this short allegory, we demonstrate that the reality of professional football may simultaneously be ontologically objective and subjective, that the epis-temologies (knowledge structures) of football vary along the logico-scientific—interpretive continuum, and that methods of meaning legitimation in the sport are heterogeneous. Making sense of football strictly from the logico-scientific paradigm would certainly constrain our overall interpretations of its complexity, highlighting the need to derive an aesthetic-subjective appreciation of the game. We learn from this allego-ry that with complexity there must be a great deal of room for interpretation, a respect for other knowledge forms, and other methods of knowledge formation that are equally important to produce richness in our sense-makings about what we are observing.

Indeed, our military sensemakings would become disabling if we were to employ only the logico-scientific paradigm to study the complexity of our recent experi-ences in Afghanistan, observing the messiness of Syria and Iraq, and in the wake of Russian involvement in the Ukraine. Obviously, such complexity demands even more concoctions of ontological, epistemological, and methodological ingredients than would football.

Dual Paradigms Offer Complementary, Critical Perspectives

Logico-scientists criticize interpretivists as too speculative, violating such notions as Paul’s and Elder’s “universal intellectual standards” which offer the promise of removing ambiguity and imprecision. These standards suggest only the logico-scientific paradigm provides a legitimate basis for critical reasoning. That is, the military practitioner should seek to remove all subjectivity about the situation at hand; apply a gener-alizable epistemology of proven tactics, techniques, and procedures expected to work again and again; and use scientific methods to further legitimate those tactics, techniques, and procedures and add new ones (deduc-ing the rigorous application of authoritative practice and inducing so-called lessons learned and best practic-es into those doctrines).

Conversely, interpretivism provides a vehicle to criticize logico-scientism. The interpretive purist sees logico-scientism as a collection of socially construct-ed objectifications that habitually distort reality.[ix] As veterans of recent military operations will appreciate, to remove subjectivity, using the intellectual standards suggested by Paul and Elder is inadequate when dealing with befuddling complex situations where subjective appraisals are vitally important. Such confounding situations tend to present themselves at the opposite end of the continua—infusing us with senses of ambi-guity, inaccuracy, or imprecision. Equipped only with logico-scientific epistemology, we will hopelessly try to detect logical fallacies when the uniqueness of situations require observer-specific narrative interpre-tations. Indeed, such sensemaking situations may be mapped better along continua, rather than according universal categories, as depicted by my rendition of Schön’s indeterminate zones of practice (see figure). Here, reflective practice requires that the observer, “think critically about the thinking that got us into this fix or this opportunity; and we may, in the process, restructure strategies of action, understandings of phenomena, or ways of framing ….”[x]