SKILLS IN THINKING
Edward de Bono
TEACH YOURSELF TO THINK
Penguin Books, Toronto/London/New York, 1996
John Wilson
THINKING WITH CONCEPTS
Cambridge University Press, New York, 1988
The Generic Skills
I still vividly recall a conversation I participated in over thirty years ago, during my undergraduate days at university. A group of us with "radical" inclinations were discussing what a university should and shouldn't be, and what eventually emerged was that "the purpose of education should be to teach skills in thinking". That injunction became the guideline for my self-directed learning from that day forward.Over the intervening years I accumulated many techniques, both through suggestions from others and by way of my own trial-and-error. About a decade ago I read an earlier de Bono book, SUR/PETITION, and recognized that the method he was calling "Concept R&D" was the one I had developed independently beginning on that fateful day at university in the late 1960s.
What I just discovered the other day was a more recent de Bono title, TEACH YOURSELF TO THINK. Not only does de Bono cover all the basics I have learned, he synthesizes them into a sequence of stages that is even an improvement on the scientific method! De Bono has a way of simplifying and summarizing that is very useful. First and foremost, he does proclaim that thinking involves a set of skills, not simply conscious cognition. Just having ideas floating around in your mind, even creative ones, is NOT thinking -- you need procedures and practice.
The stages are simple but powerful: (1) TO (purpose); (2) LO (observation); (3) PO (possibilities); (4) SO (choices); and (5) GO (action). Why the stages are necessary, what the stages consist of, how they are accomplished, and where they can lead to, are the substance of the book. I used TEACH YOURSELF TO THINK to run a check against my own approach, and found it both a wonderful review AND a source of important refinements. Thanks Dr. de Bono.
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The Conceptual Skills
Concepts are the classes of things we refer to with words, the types of things that transcend the particular example we are pointing to in any particular case. These types may be archetypes, prototypes, stereotypes, or ideal types, but we do not have individual terms for each instance of a thing, process or idea we encounter -- so each type displays some degree of generality, and that is what the concept picks up on. As such, concepts are the tools we think with.The most effective way to use concepts in thinking is the process of Conceptual Analysis. Wilson takes us through the various aspects of Conceptual Analysis, and then provides a lot of exercises whereby we can get some practice. What he demonstrates is that many arguments arise from situations in which participants in a conversation have different definitions of a concept, yet each is using the same (or very similar) terminology. If, for instance, a concept has a number of important aspects [democracy being an example, which includes considerations of both equality and liberty], people often disagree because they prioritize the different aspects differently. If one prefers equality-type democracy and the other prefers liberty-type democracy, they may never even agree on what they mean!
But with the use of Conceptual Analysis people can not only keep their own thinking straight, they can engage in more productive conversations by clarifying the way they and other discussants are defining and using their respective concepts. They may not necessarily agree with one another, but at least they will understand the basis for their disagreement. A large proportion of both political and philosophical acrimony seems to turn on the lack of conceptual clarity at the basis of disagreements. Disputants often believe their opponents are either fools of knaves because they are apparently misrepresenting basic ideas. But there are many legitimate conflicting definitions of concepts, and there are no concept police. The best we can do is to learn and practice Conceptual Analysis, and John Wilson shows us how.
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