All posts by Robert M Ellis

About Robert M Ellis

Robert M Ellis is the founder of the Middle Way Society, and author of a number of books on Middle Way Philosophy, including the introductory 'Migglism' and the new Middle Way Philosophy series published by Equinox. A former teacher, he now runs a retreat centre in Wales, Tirylan House, and is in the process of creating a forest garden there.

Objectivity Training: An update

Objectivity training, Psychology

It was in a previous blog post at the end of August that I first coined the term ‘Objectivity Training’. The reason I felt we needed a new term was because existing terms like ‘Critical Thinking’ didn’t really convey the breadth and the psychological depth of the kind of work we need to do to challenge all our biases and delusions. It’s not just a question of ‘thinking’ or reasoning, though that obviously comes into it.

Objectivity training is the name for an area of practice that needs to connect with our bodies and wider awareness of the conditions in which our beliefs arise, in addition to critical thinking. It is focused much more on our assumptions than on whether we are reasoning logically, because it is our assumptions that make much more of a difference in practice.

Since I wrote that first blog I have made a start on a new book called Objectivity Training, which will try to bracket out the philosophical arguments and just focus on this practical process. This book is undoubtedly going to take some time.  I have also made some progress with the ‘Mistakes we make in thinking’ video series, and produced five of them so far. However, probably the most important development is a decision to develop training courses.

There is plenty of training on meditation available in many places these days, but very little working practically with the integration of belief and elimination of biases, so there is obviously a widespread need for objectivity training courses. These courses could help a very wide range of people in a variety of ways, such as the following:

    • personal and spiritual development
    • moral and political judgement
    • study and research skills
    • effective decision-making in businesses and organisations

I’ve arranged the first Objectivity Training course to take place in Malvern UK, near where I live, for an intensive 4 day block from 31st May-3rd June. Please see this page for more details and to book. But there is plenty of scope for developing and delivering courses of different kinds elsewhere. To be able to give this the time it deserves I’ve decided to try to make it part of my livelihood, hopefully in time taking over from some of the online tutoring I currently do. That’s why I’ve decided to offer this training independently rather than making it a society event, but the society committee has agreed that it can be advertised through the society.

In thinking further about how to present objectivity training I’ve recognised one new key distinction. That’s between the aspects of cognitive error (biases and fallacies) that apply to all judgements, and the specific biases and fallacies that apply to some judgements but not others. I have identified 15 dimensions of judgement that will always be present to some extent in every judgement, and will play a part in determining how far that judgement is either limited and deluded on the one hand or objective and adequate on the other. As these dimensions of all judgement are so widely important I have decided to focus all my initial work on them, and the book (or at least its first volume) and the Malvern training course will be focused on them.

To get some idea of how these different dimensions interact, let’s take an example judgement. Let’s say you get into a road rage scenario when driving a car. Let’s say another driver pulls out of a side street unexpectedly in front of you, you brake sharply and swerve to avoid him, and a car on the other side of the road is then forced to swerve to avoid you. You are enraged by this. Doesn’t this person know the Highway Code? He could have caused a serious accident etc. University Street Liege Jeanhousen CCSA3-0

Let’s pause the situation there. It could develop in all sorts of ways: with everyone just driving off, with a reproving blast of the horn, with both drivers getting out and shouting at each other or even coming to blows. But your key judgement at that point is that the dangerous manoeuvre, with its dangerous consequences, was the fault of the other driver. It’s from that judgement that your anger flows. However, unknown to you, the other driver has just heard that his wife has been taken to hospital in a critically ill state. He’s in a distracted state and is desperately trying to get to the hospital as quickly as possible.

Your tendency to assume that the other driver is responsible can be related to the actor-observer bias in cognitive psychology, whereby we tend to assume that another person is responsible for an action with a bad outcome, whilst exculpating ourselves. The most obviously relevant dimension of the judgement here is thus that of responsibility. There is a lot of interesting psychological research on responsibility biases that can be applied here. It’s also worth noting, though, that every other judgement has this dimension even if it doesn’t at first appear to be particularly about responsibility. If we assume that we are powerless in making any judgement, for example, we fail to take responsibility for it and thus cannot work to improve it, even if it is a judgement about a ‘factual’ matter like a measurement of a length of guttering or the shortest route to a particular destination.

But this judgement about responsibility also involves many other dimensions. For example, it involves confirmation bias (which is the tendency only to look for evidence which reinforces our prior beliefs), because all your observations of the other driver are likely to be interpreted in terms of the irresponsibility you seek to place on him. For example, if you see a little ‘B’ on the car registration you might exclaim ‘Ah, should have known, the Belgians have the worst accident statistics in the EU!’, although it would never have occurred to you to consider the Belgian-ness of the car in that light otherwise. You will also be constructing a ‘reality’ about this driver, this irresponsible Belgian, which has little to do with the complexity of the actual person concerned: our tendency to construct a reality that is affirmed or denied is another feature of errors of judgement. In this case it is a ‘reality’ that includes stereotyping and hasty generalisation.

The judgement also has conditions ‘further back’ on which it relies – for example, it relies on availability – the limitation of ideas that will actually occur to us. It doesn’t occur to you that the hapless Belgian might be rushing to hospital in a distracted state – and there’s probably no way you were likely to guess this unless he stopped and told you (and you also listened). It doesn’t occur to you as a possibility because it’s not salient for you: it’s not part of the goals and representations you’re intent on at this moment. But if we were to slightly broaden our awareness there might be some chance in this situation that the possibility of an alternative perspective might occur to us. That might just take the form of a general thought that there was probably a reason why the driver of the Belgian car pulled out like that. Once that general thought occurs to you, perhaps because of mindfulness training as well as some awareness of your likely biases, the edge of your anger might be blunted and you might at least avoid fisticuffs on the pavement. That general thought need not undermine your awareness of the importance of care on the roads and following the Highway Code – but dwelling on a near-miss that was due to someone else’s actions is hardly likely to make much difference in practice at that point. It’s probably best to let go of the incident as quickly as you can, and a wider awareness of your biases can help you do that.

So, I’ve mentioned at least four dimensions of judgement there: responsibility, confirmation bias, constructions of reality, and availability. There’s a lot more I could say even about these, and there are 11 more dimensions in my analysis of each and every judgement. But I don’t want to prolong this blog unduly. That should be enough to give a taste of how objectivity training might work by making us more aware of the different dimensions of our judgements. The training itself would obviously involve more time devoted to each dimension (as well as the relationship between the dimensions), with a more thorough explanation of how each works, further examples, exercises applying the dimensions and discussion of how we can make balanced judgements about them. It’s a big job, but a very worthwhile job central to all of our lives.

New review of ‘The Biology of Desire’ by Marc Lewis

There’s now a new review up of Marc Lewis’s bookThe Biology of Desire ‘The Biology of Desire: Why addiction is not a disease’, which you can read here. Marc Lewis is a neuroscientist and ex-addict who challenges what he sees as the over-medicalisation of addiction, providing a detailed account of the brain processes and some moving stories of individuals along the way. Marc Lewis was also recently interviewed by Barry for his podcast.

The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen J. Langer

A new review is now up of a great and highly readable pieceThe Power of Mindful Learning of psychology by Ellen Langer. Langer’s use of ‘mindful’ is much wider than normal today, and refers to provisionality and the recognition of uncertainty – core elements of the Middle Way. Click here to read the review.

Middle Way Thinkers 8: John Dewey

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy,

I find John Dewey one of the most interesting and inspiring figures in modern philosophical history. He was a pragmatist, meaning that he sought to prioritise practical experience over dogma as a guide to our beliefs. He was a highly synthetic thinker, particularly bringing together science and empiricist philosophy with the Continental Hegelian philosophy that had influenced him in his youth. Although he had a successful university career as a philosopher, he was far from limited to that field, and also engaged deeply in issues of psychology, education, society and politics. Above all, over a very long life (1859-1952), Dewey gathered enormous respect from many sides as a humane, liberal figure, a personal inspiration for many that was probably due to a high level of personal integration.John_Dewey_in_1902

Dewey came from Burlington, Vermont and his cultural background is very much that of New England liberalism. He studied at the University of Vermont and then (after an interval of school-teaching) did a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, followed by academic posts at the universities of Michigan, Chicago and Columbia. By the time he died, at the age of 92, he left behind a massive corpus of writings, so great and wide that it is very difficult to know where to start. In those days it was not so difficult for a philosopher to also be respected as a psychologist and educationalist, and to also become a public intellectual. Not surprisingly, he stressed the value of a philosophy informed by psychology, recognising the emotive basis of cognition and thus the unhelpfulness of a purely analytic approach. Influenced by his integrative psychology and liberal politics, he stressed an approach to education that stressed the development of autonomous judgement and integrated character.

That Dewey was a Middle Way thinker in many respects comes across from a number of key writings. I am very far from having read even a substantial fraction of Dewey’s vast output, but in what I have read, the following passage particularly stands out in encapsulating Dewey’s stance as a Middle Way thinker. It was written in his old age, in 1944 when he was 84 years old:

“[My view] assumes continuity; [whereas the dominant theories of knowledge] state or imply certain basic divisions, separations, or antitheses, technically called dualisms. The origin of these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walls that mark off social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent to the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with an isolated subject-matter, aim, and standard of values. Every such social condition must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is to be a sincere account of experience. When it gets beyond dualism – as many philosophies do in form – it can only be by appeal to something higher than anything found in experience, by a flight to some transcendental realm. And in denying duality in name such theories restore it in fact, for they end in a division between things of this world as mere appearances and an inaccessible essence of reality.” (Democracy and Education)

This passage brings out Dewey’s concerns about social division, and his recognition of the relationship between group identity and dogma, in which one group will seek absolute allegiance and reject a counter-group by using metaphysical beliefs as rallying point. It also shows his ability to see through the religious absolutisations that were still highly influential in his lifetime. It will not be sufficient to break down class divisions in society, he is telling us, merely to appeal to a classless God or a classless political ideal – we will need to recognise that this appeal itself will create a new dualising effect, an absolutisation in which the ‘other’ is rejected. The only solution to such a re-emergence of conflict, even in the beliefs of those who may sincerely want to overcome it, is continuity – to see how even opposing beliefs and ways of life may nevertheless be judged using the same incremental scales in relation to similar conditions. In this continuity lies the possibility of overcoming conflict. This dialectical aspect of Dewey’s philosophy is influenced by Hegel, but he left behind all the more dogmatic elements of Hegelianism.

Linked to this viewpoint is Dewey’s well-known emphasis on democracy. Dewey might fairly be accused of idealising democracy, but very often ‘democracy’ comes to mean for him something like the Middle Way – not just a system of government but a whole way of determining the values of society that respected autonomous development and the hard-won fruits of experience. At the same time democracy needs to reject raw power and its appeals to dogma to maintain itself. The values of democracy require those of education – of the development of autonomous individuals able to make adequate judgements for themselves and reject the dogmas used by tyrants. This kind of approach seems to reflect some of the best elements of the American tradition of liberal democracy.

Dewey’s approach to ethics was consistent with his belief in the importance of autonomous judgement in the public realm, and with continuous thinking rather than appeals to absolute in individuals. He rejected that fact-value distinction, and stressed the development of a reflective equilibrium, taking into account as many factors as possible, in the development of an adequate ethical standpoint. This subtle psychological ethics has more recently been adopted by such figures as Mark Johnson and Philip Kitcher (interviewed in the MWS podcast), and offers the promise of a far more adequate ethics than a mere appeal to one dominant rational ethical theory to solve all our problems (such as utilitarianism or Kantianism).

Of course, there are some ways that I think Dewey fails to hit the Middle Way on the evidence so far. However, I am uncertain how far some of these judgements are fair because of the size and breadth of his writings and the limitations of my reading so far. Perhaps the major limitation is that Dewey identifies himself (and is often identified) as a naturalist. Naturalism can take all sorts of subtle forms, and does not necessarily mean crass materialism or what Mark Johnson calls ‘science-mongering’, but it nevertheless to me seems mistaken because to be worthy of the name it must still in some respect be seeking an account of right understanding and values in accounts of ‘nature’ rather than in the balancing of our own approach to what we experience. Dewey does at times seem to appeal to nature and to evolution in ways that I sometimes remain doubtful about, even though those doubts really need further investigation.

Dewey’s possible strayings from the Middle Way, if they exist, remain controversial and subtle, and may often be the result of limitations of information available to him in his time as opposed to ours (for example, he would have known little about meditation). Such issues are utterly dwarfed by Dewey’s positive achievements as a subtle, integrative, humane and compassionate figure, active in society as he was in the intellectual realm. Nevertheless, he remains neglected by modern analytic philosophers, psychologists and politicians alike, who often seem unable even to really take in, let alone emulate, such a synthetic figure from an earlier age.