Dialectical reasoning is at least 2,500 years old. It was independently invented in Greece, India, and China at just about the same time. And it's remained a preponderant way of reasoning in China, while being much less common in countries which are the intellectual inheritors of the Greek and Indian tradition. Socrates taught his students to reason dialectically. In the Socratic Dialog, which was a conversation or debate, people offer propositions and argue for them. Other people add, modify, or contradict those propositions, and the point is to reach the truth about some matter. The next major installment in the West on dialectical reasoning was the eighteenth and nineteenth century. German philosophers Kant, Fichte and Hegel and their most famous contribution was the concept of matters proceeding by a thesis followed by an antithesis, something which contradicts that thesis, followed by a synthesis, something which reconciles those two theses. Dialectical reasoning is also the form of reasoning that's characteristic of Talmudic discourse, which has been around, again, for about 2,000 years, ever since Jews in the Middle East became aware of the Greek dialectical form. The Chinese version developed at the same time as the Greeks. Like the Greek, it was not formal or deductive. The goal is to reach correct conclusions, or even more, to reach useful conclusions. And it's much more concerned with the acceptance of contradiction than getting rid of it. It deals especially with intellectual and social conflict, with uncertainty and with change. Recently psychologists have begun to study it and it's called post-formalism. The great developmental psychologist Piaget said that the formal rules of propositional logic are what constitutes reasoning. That's it. Turns out to be a spectacularly wrong [LAUGH] hypothesis. This course has been full of principles of reasoning that don't involve logic at all. The post-formalists, people who were looking at the kinds of reasoning, patterns that we develop well after the formal roles, the logical roles have developed, are not deductive. They involve attention to relations and context. They're anti-formalists, because of a belief that it's a mistake to separate form from content. And it's very much concerned with identifying contradiction and transcending contradiction, or accepting it, or using the contradiction to learn something new about the world. It's also very much concerned with change, [COUGH] and with uncertainty. This is really utterly different from the central western tradition. It's always been there in the West, but it's never been central in the way that logic has been. The East Asian tradition is much more sympathetic to these kinds of principles than the Western tradition. To show you just how different East and West are and their fundamental assumptions about the way to reason, Aristotle proposed the following propositions as the foundation for logical thought. First of all, identity, A = A, whatever is, is. A is itself and not some other thing. Noncontradiction, A and not A can't both be the case. Nothing can both be and not be. A proposition and it's opposite can't both be true. And the excluded middle, everything must either be or not be. A can be true or not A can be true, but not something in between. It might seem that there's nothing to disagree with here, but in fact East Asian thought disagrees with all these propositions. The Chinese psychologist Chi Ping Pong has identified the foundations of dialectical reasoning. And he doesn't call them propositions, by the way, they're looser than that. One is the principle of change, reality is a process of change. What's currently true will shortly be false. The principle of contradiction, contradiction is the dynamic underlying change. Because change is constant, contradiction is constant. The principle of relationships, or holism, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, parts are meaningful only in relation to the whole. These principles are intimately linked. Change creates contradiction, and contradiction is going to result in change. Constant change and contradiction imply that it's meaningless to discuss the individual part without attending to its relationships with other parts and with previous states of the world. There's a strong emphasis in Eastern thought on finding the middle way between extreme propositions. Contradictions are often merely apparent, A is right, but not A is not wrong. Now this way of thinking is not alien to Westerners. We're familiar with all of this. And Westerners have made contributions to the dialectical tradition. But when push comes to shove, Westerners usually side with logic and Easterners with dialectical approaches. By Easterners I mean Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, among others. As an interesting demonstration of the difference, Pong presented Americans and Chinese with pairs of alleged scientific findings. [COUGH] They're near contradictions, one statement was always more plausible than the other. And they weren't literal contradictions, but if you believed one, you wouldn't be likely to believe the other. So, fuel usage in a large number of developing countries indicates a great worsening of environmental problems, including global warming. And the statement a meteorologist studied temperatures in 24 widely separate parts of the world and found that temperatures had actually dropped by a fraction of a degree each of the last five years. Some participants saw only statement one, some saw only statement two, and some saw both statements. All participants were asked about their beliefs about each of the statements. The Americans actually believed the more plausible proposition, which was the first one here, by the way. Americans actually believed that proposition more when they were also exposed to the less plausible proposition, than if they weren't. That's actually logically incoherent, as philosophers would put it. A proposition can't be more more plausible if you've seen something contradicting it Than if you haven't. In trying to get rid of the contradiction, the Americans beefed up the more plausible proposition and weakened the less plausibe one. It was so important to decide which of these things is correct. In complete contrast, Chinese actually believed the less plausible proposition more when they had also seen the more plausible proposition than when they hadn't. This is also logically incoherent. A proposition can't be more plausible if you've seen something contradicting it than if you haven't. In trying to find ways in which both propositions could be true, the Chinese beefed up the less plausible proposition. That can sometimes be useful, [LAUGH] but it's not logically allowable. Have a look at a brief video, which is of an underwater scene. And I'm going to ask you after you've seen that video to tell me what it was that you saw. Okay, please note, write down if you can, what it was you saw. You'll find that what I'm about to say will be more interesting if you actually do that. This video was shown to Japanese and American participants, and what people reported as having seen was very different. Americans said I saw what looked like three big fish swimming off to the left. They had pink stipples on their bellies and fins on their backs. And there were rocks and shells and plants on the bottom. The Japanese almost always started with context. They said I saw what looks like a stream. The water was green. There were plants and shells and rocks on the bottom. There were three big fish swimming off to the left. The Japanese participants actually reported 60% more information about the context than the Americans did. And they reported twice as many relationships, the frog was close to the plant, than the Americans did. Eastern pick up much more contextual information in pictures and in movies and in ordinary life situations than Westerns do. And when describing a situation, they emphasize the context information, they begin with it. Then they note relationships among different aspects of the context. A second profound way in which East and West differ, is that Westerners believe the world is static. That's a heritage we have from the Greeks. I don't know why it was so obvious to the Greeks that the world was unchanging, but that's what they believed, or if it is changing, or seems to be changing, it does so in a linear fashion. In contrast, Easterners believe the world is constantly changing, often in a cyclical pattern. In fact, the fact that the world is in one state now is just an indication that it's about to be in another state in a bit. This causes Easterners to make decisions like the following. If they're presented with a choice between buying a stock that is increasing versus one that's decreasing, whereas Americans go for the increasing stock, Chinese are likely to go for the decreasing stock. Because the fact that it's decreasing just means it's about to be increasing, because change is the nature of the world. That's a mistake, by the way, as I pointed out in the last lesson, to keep the stock, keep or buy a stock that's decreasing rather than one that's increasing. Well logic has its virtues, but a dialectical approach to problems, [COUGH] especially social problems, can be wiser. Igor Grossmann and a number of his colleagues at the University of Michigan presented American subjects and Japanese subjects with social conflicts of various kinds. For those of you who know the genre, we gave them Dear Abby questions, were in the newspaper columnist [COUGH] gives her judgement about what should be done in some conflict. [COUGH] So, for example, one of the social conflicts involved a sister and brother in a conflict about how much each should be expected to pay for a gravestone for their parents. And, we coded the answers for the avoidance of a rigid application of a rule, for taking into account the perspectives of each person involved. For being attentive to the nature of contradictory views, to recognizing the likelihood of change rather than a stalemate. To mentioning possible forms of compromise and for the expression of uncertainty rather than undue confidence. The young Japanese were substantially wiser by these criteria than the young Americans. The Japanese, however, get no wiser as they get older. 75-year-old Japanese are not wiser by these criteria than 25-year-old Japanese. Americans start out low, but they do get wiser. And I think these differences come from the fact that Japanese culture teaches how to avoid conflict and how to deal with it if it occurs. Conflict is a much bigger deal, social conflict, in the east than it is in the west. American culture doesn't teach those things all that well, so Americans get into conflicts frequently and they have to learn ways of avoiding it and dealing with it if it happens. And older Americans are about as wise as older Japanese. So which is better, logical thinking or dialectical thinking? I'm sure you think that what I think is that that's not really a sensible question. They serve different purposes. When it's really necessary to discern the nature of an argument, or to be sure that a conclusion follows from what you already know or assume to be true, you really do need logic. Logic is also extremely useful for rhetoric, for convincing other people. In scientific papers I'll often put what for me where loose arguments, I put them into a rigid, logical form, because it helps to convince other people. It's a rhetorical tool. Sometimes, when you put what you think you know into a logical structure, this can force you to realize you actually don't have a logical case, [LAUGH] which is quite useful. When you're trying to understand something from a variety of perspectives, when you're trying to avoid or solve social conflict, dialectical reasoning is what's called for. Well, that's it, except for a wrap up that follows this session.
