Thinking Contextually (Part 1)

Thinking contextually allows us to take responsibility for our thinking rather than hiding behind the “truth” of our conclusions and ignoring their consequences

In the next two posts, I will be doing something different than usual. Instead of analyzing a particular topic using a contextual mode of thinking, I will provide some tips for how to think this way on your own. Specifically, I want to point to some common fallacies or confused ways of thinking about a topic that occur when we try to think about a topic independent of its context. This post and next week's posts will be centered around what I see as the main logical fallacy that causes thinkers to not take context seriously, what I will call the representational fallacy. I came up with this term, so you won’t find it in the traditional list of logical fallacies. 

Thought always constructs universal generalizations. Whether we are simply describing a physical object like a cup or attempting to ascertain the laws of physics, thought always takes a group of diverse phenomena and generalizes them with a single concept or conceptual claim. In this sense, thought always moves from the many to the one, attempting to arrive at a concise simple concept, law, or a set of laws, that can govern a diverse range of phenomena. This process of generalizing a diverse field is not only helpful for scientific and philosophical investigation, but also simply put, necessary to get around in our daily life. That being said, I would suggest the representational fallacy creeps in when we add the amendment that the universal principle we make use of can be abstracted from its ability to make sense of the particular domain of empirical data we analyze and ossify as the true nature of that domain for all time, that it refers to something outside of the changing tides of nature and culture.

The author of the famous science fiction novel, Dune, Frank Herbert, proved himself to be worth his weight as a philosopher when he wrote, “A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the process, must join it and flow with it.” As Herbert suggests, any domain we attempt to understand is a process that is always in movement; whether that domain be an individual human mind, society, or even the laws of nature. As such we cannot aim to stop the process, but rather must aspire to flow with the process, and through this flow align with the principles underlying the process as it manifests at our given time in history. I suggest, with Herbert, that we should consider our analysis at the level of thought to be a living, dynamic, and creative activity that aspires to sync up with the flow of a domain of phenomena. If we skillfully achieve this synchronization, we can then ascertain certain laws and principles that can act as a useful approximation of how that domain is functioning. However, we must keep in mind that our attempts to capture the principles that govern the domain with a concept or set of laws attempt to capture a living, dynamic system using a static, unchanging tool. To assume that these static concepts refer to the truth of that domain is to create a serious confusion about the nature of what we are describing. Once we take this representational fallacy seriously, two practical considerations become pertinent.The first (I will go over the second in next week’s post) of these considerations is that we, as the one analyzing a given domain, are not a totally disinterested observer looking down on the phenomena we are analyzing from a bird’s eye view, but are also participating in the process we are analyzing through the very act of analysis. The act of rational analysis acts out a paradox. To reason responsibly we must adopt an attitude that is as objective and disinterested as possible. However, it is also true that the principles one arrives at through that attempt at disinterested observation will participate in the process one is observing and have an intimate effect on its trajectory.

Let’s look at two examples; one political and social in nature and one more on the scientific and metaphysical side of things. The political conception of the nature of a human being has changed radically throughout history. These days, many of us assume that it is simply the most “civilized” way of conceptualizing a human being is as an autonomous individual that has the freedom to pave their own path in the context of religion, career, and lifestyle. What we might forget is that this fundamental conception of what a human is has historical, political and ideological origins. In the modern western world, at least, it was the ideals that inspired events like the French Revolution, the European enlightenment, and the American Revolution that eventually led to this notion of the free individual as central to the moral fabric of a nation or a people. In many cultures today and throughout history this commitment to the autonomous choice of the individual as the highest good is not the organizing principle of society. For many, a better way to think about justice is to organize society in a way that is best for the functioning of the whole community, which may involve assigning careers or social roles based on ability or birth. For example, in The Republic, Plato suggested an ideal society would not allow autonomy at all, but place one in a particular role or profession based on their capacities, regardless of whether they wanted to take that profession or not. Those who had the intention to implement the vision the autonomous individual as the organizing principle of society participated in the paradox of rational analysis; they looked out at their domain of analysis, in this case the nature of the moral status of a human being, and did their best to see what all these humans have in common, which they determined to be the desire for autonomy. From this point of view, they did engage in a disinterested observation. However, it was also the case that the concept of human beings as having “innate” rights was an entirely new stimulus that was added to the process of history and human experience; producing radically different societies and political structures, and even individual human motivations than we had seen in the past. 

It may be easy to accept that this paradox of simultaneous observing and doing is true in the sphere of politics, morality, and values, but I would suggest the same paradox applies even in theoretical analysis. Let’s take the transition from a Newtonian conception of subatomic particles to a quantum conception as an example. In this paradigm shift towards quantum theory, scientists let go of the conception of the subatomic particle as a true particle and traded it for the conception of a wave of probability that did not exist in a particular location; resulting in an entirely different metaphysical framework. In a quantum model, the subatomic universe is no longer made of physical objects or points, but rather of waves of probability that are only collapsed into particular, determinate points in space and time through observation. Like the example from earlier, quantum theory both ascertained an underlying principle through disinterested observation, but also participated in the doing of science, changing the metaphysical assumptions which underpinned the field.

Once we shed the representational paradigm, i.e., shed the idea that the concepts we arrive at represent the true, timeless nature of the domain we are attempting to describe, we are left with a paradox at the heart of analysis. On the one hand, thinking attempts to arrive at the most objective principles it can through disinterested observation of the domain it is analyzing. However, on the other hand, these concepts and descriptions do something, they participate in the domain they are attempting to describe, becoming part of its processual flow. The universal principles we grasp with our analysis always redirect the course of the domain we are analyzing in some way. Although we must be loyal to the data we are working with, this does not mean we can hide from the practical implications of our analysis by simply claiming it is the “truth;” ignoring the sense in which we are also creating that truth, sending out into the world as an attempt to reorient the domain we are speaking of in a certain direction. We see thinkers do this both well and poorly in any domain. To give one more example; in psychology, to simply state that a certain set of symptoms means you now have an anxiety disorder and are a person with “abnormal” psychology, in my opinion, reflects a commitment of this fallacy. Instead, if one understands that the concept of “anxiety” as a fundamentally pragmatic concept that is created only to help us group together certain symptoms that can be treated in similar ways, one sees the way the concept of anxiety is a doing, that in this case can be helpful for a patient’s treatment. Thus, I suggest that we always ask ourselves both why we are invoking a certain concept to explain our domain of analysis and what the organizing of that domain through these conceptual structures will do.

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Please feel free to leave a comment if you have clarification questions, feedback, critiques, or anything to add. Philosophy is all about dialogue! I will do my best to respond to all questions and concerns.