Introduction
Becoming grownups. That’s what we’re talking about. A big part of becoming grownups involves intellectual development. Not becoming intellectuals, whatever that means. But developing our intellects, our ability to think and talk and act like grownups.
Intellectual development consists of both cognitive development and moral development. That’s our first Axiom. Cognitive development supports mature reasoning. Moral development supports mature moral reasoning.
Both cognitive and moral development are related to biological development, to getting older. However, for the most part, biological development only permits cognitive and moral development, only makes it possible. It doesn’t assure it.
Learning leads development.
That’s our second axiom: learning leads development.
Learning is the key to development and good teaching is the key to learning among students. Good intellectual leadership is the key to learning among adults.
By around the age that American students graduate from high school, virtually all humans have attained the biological maturity required for both mature reasoning and mature moral reasoning. And yet the majority of American adults haven’t achieved mature cognitive development and the vast majority haven’t achieved mature moral development.
More adults are smart and good than there are who can make mature arguments, arguments that use mature reasoning; or can make mature moral arguments, arguments that employ mature moral reasoning.
We use the arguments we make in the public square to decide on the laws we make. However, the vast majority of those arguments are made without mature reasoning and certainly without mature moral reasoning.
In order for We the People to operate with mature reasoning and mature moral reasoning in the public square, we need to develop the capacity to conduct mature reasoning and mature moral reasoning. We need to learn to do both so that we can develop the capacity to do both.
Again, Axiom 2: Learning leads development.
First, we are going to learn about mature reasoning and mature moral reasoning, then we are going to learn to use both.
We have two goals in this and the next episode.
First, we will learn about cognitive and moral development as they occur in individuals. How each of us grows up, as it were, matures cognitively (how we think and reason), and morally, (how we think and reason morally).
Second, we will learn about how we as a society, as a body politic, mature cognitively and morally.
Obviously, we don’t want to be immature adults or an immature body politic.
It’s not so obvious how we can become mature and more important, how we can attend, as a society, to the full cognitive and moral development of all of our people.
Even more difficult, especially today, is how we can assure the full cognitive and moral development of our Society, We the People, our body politic.
One thing is clear to me and will become clear to the reader: Healing our fractured body politic requires that we pay attention to the full cognitive and moral development of our body politic and our mind politic.
We’re talking about the majority of Americans who can develop cognitively and morally but too often don’t. And the more we learn about human development, the more shocking it is that so many adults don’t fully develop and that our society remains indifferent to that failure.
Indeed, some members of our society undermine the full development of our people. That’s an important point.
We can’t sit back as a society and ignore the full development of our people, and that includes taking on the forces that work against that development.
Here’s the real kicker. We can’t allow to go unchallenged people who find it in their interests to make arguments at low levels of cognitive and moral development. People can say anything they want, but not with impunity. Not all arguments are equal just because the right to speak is equal. So we all get to participate, we all get to speak. But those who are stuck at immature levels of cognitive and moral reasoning cannot be allowed to prevail.
Why do we care? Give a state or local community a critical mass of ignorant citizens and it gets stuck on stupid. They do not solve problems. They make a stupid commitment to ignorance.
Give a state or local community a critical mass of mature citizens, and they can solve problems, meet challenges, prepare for the future.
Everything is at stake, for our nation.
There is an old saying: “You can’t argue with stupid.” There is some truth to that, but it’s not the whole story. Many people are ignorant but not stupid; they lack cognitive and moral development. They haven’t had the learning experiences they needed to achieve cognitive and moral development. We show insight into these people by recognizing that they may need help but that does not make them stupid. Indeed, they may have been so exploited that they have developed doctrines felt as facts that inhibit their cognitive and moral development.
We will see that humans live in three domains: The Individual, the Person, and the Self. That’s true of immature people as well as mature. One does not lose one’s humanity by being immature. That’s rarely just the fault of the person who is immature. It is both wrong and ineffective to disdain people who are immature. They aren’t stupid and they aren’t deplorable. They are humans with all of the dignity and rights inherent in human beings, and we’re here to help them become fully developed human beings.
Additionally, there is no reason to bother learning about cognitive and moral development if we’re not going to act on that knowledge, if we’re not going to make decisions based upon mature thinking and reasoning.
This is not elitism. Elitism is out there and we will talk about it. But this isn’t elitism. It’s common sense. We want to think and act like grownups. But we must give intellectual attention to understanding the difference between immature and mature development and social attention to becoming mature.
We start with cognitive development because we must understand it to understand moral development. Although cognitive psychologists and educators must be interested in the development of young children, we will focus most of our attention on the stages of development as they exist and play out among adults.
Humans become capable of cognitive development at early ages. The problem is that too man adults have not developed, and adults who get stuck in low levels of cognitive and moral development bring serious challenges to the public square. We can’t help them if we judge them. We can’t reach out to them unless we care about them.
First let’s understand cognitive and moral development, then let’s work to develop it both in ourselves and in the body politic.
We start with cognitive development. Cognitive Development
Cognition deals with how we think and reason. Cognitive psychology studies both how we think and reason and how we develop the capacity to do so. I used three sources to ground my understanding of cognitive development: Jean Piaget, Reuven Feuerstein, and Lev Vygotsky. I confine this initial discussion to the work of Piaget who is especially helpful in understanding early development and later to Vygotsky and Feuerstein who help us understand mature development. Eventually, I use Thomas Kuhn, whose research helped me understand the highest level of cognitive development, formal reasoning.
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development:
Piaget identified two stages of cognitive development that interest us. Concrete operations, age 7 to 11; and Formal operations, age 11 to 15.
We are interested in the development of adults who find their way into the public square. They operate at least at the concrete operations stage.
Importantly, the ages associated with each stage of development refer to the ages at which the majority of children become biologically capable of that level of development. They are ranges that apply to virtually all children. There is a lot of time within those ranges, but we’re not concerned here with children. We’re interested in adults and their capacity to reason. We will talk some about how children develop because that helps us understand this theory. Our main interest is in how both cognitive and moral development impact how adults conduct themselves in the public square..
Four things interest to us. First, humans become capable of high levels of both cognitive and moral development at an early age.
Second, although all adults are old enough to have attained high levels of cognitive and moral development, their actual development covers a wide range. Age allows development. It does not guarantee it. Adults operate at different levels of cognitive and moral development.
Third, learning leads development at every level of cognition. Learning determines both development and the content of development, the fullness of development at every stage. Two people can operate in concrete operations, for example, and one can have vastly greater knowledge and skill than the other.
Learning ===> Development ===> Learning
Learning allows us to develop into a new, higher levels of cognition. Once we have developed that capacity, learning with that new capacity, that new stage of cognitive development, influences how much we can actually know and are able to do with that capacity.
Obviously, once we have developed the capacity to use concrete operations, we must learn the content of various disciplines, trades, and hobbies to actually develop concrete knowledge. Different people learn different disciplines, trades, and hobbies; and different people learn different levels of knowledge and skill within various disciplines, trades, and hobbies.
Fourth, formal operations is tricky. Most adults operate in concrete operations. The vast majority of adults who do operate in formal operations do so in areas of their work where they have been taught a formal operation.
A formal operation represents an intellectual achievement. They do not grow on trees and we do not mature into them. The vast majority of us must learn them. All this will become clearer when we get into our discussion of formal operations
Concrete operations:
Pre-operations is the stage prior to concrete operations. A classic example of the difference between pre-operations and concrete-operations involves a teacher and students. The teacher has two containers of equal size and shape each containing an equal amount of liquid. Kids look at both and see that they are the same. Then she pours the liquid from one into a big container and the liquid from the other into a much smaller container. Tricky!
Then she asks the children which of the new containers has more in it. Young children, children still in the pre-operations stage of cognitive development, almost always choose the smaller container because it looks more full.
Once children reach the stage of concrete operations, they remember that equal amounts of liquid were poured into the two containers and know that they hold the same amount of liquid, regardless of how full or empty the containers may appear.
They remember that the original containers held the same amount of liquid and apply that knowledge to the question regarding the second set of containers. They think about what they saw and apply it to what they now see.
Similarly, children who have reached concrete operations can go outside, walk some blocks from home, and turn around and follow the path they took back home. They can remember where they went and apply that knowledge to what they see on their return and use that information to find their way back home.
These children can find a toy or book by thinking about where they left it. There is a huge difference in the mental capacity of children when they move from pre-operations to concrete operations. The vast majority of adults operate in concrete operations.
It’s the content of their knowledge and skills that they have developed within concrete operations that vary.
Concrete operations are operations on things that are physically present, whether we can see them right now or not. According to Piaget, children become able to perform concrete operations from around age 7 to 11. They become able to perform formal operations as early as age 12. That’s 6th or 7th grade.
Formal Operations:
Formal operations dominates our attention as we talk about both cognitive development and moral development. Everything we do in this blog and everything required to heal our fractured body politic depends upon our capacity as individuals and as a body politic to operate in formal operations. Not in all facets of our lives, but clearly in the public square. We the people must achieve formal operations in both reasoning and moral reasoning.
With formal operations, we become able to think about how we think. If we’re going to argue about laws, we must be able to think about how we think about laws.
All laws are moral laws. That’s Axiom Three: All laws are moral laws. We must be able to think about how we think morally.
In Growth Spurts During Brain Development: Implications for Educational Policy and Practice, Herman T. Epstein demonstrated that the brain grows physically in stages that correlate closely with Piaget’s stages of cognitive development.
So we’re talking real physical and psychological growth. But when we talk about formal operations, we must focus on intellectual achievements.
We need formal reasoning to operate with universal moral reasoning. But formal reasoning receives little attention in education or psychology. We need to give it considerable attention because we must use it. When I Read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions I began to understand it. First lets just talk in general about formal reasoning, then we can begin to see how Khun helps us understand it.
Formal Operations in General:
Concrete operations use abstract reasoning. With concrete operations, we can think about things we have seen even if we can no longer see them. But we can only think about things we have seen or touched or weighed or heard. Thus the term “concrete.”
With formal operations, we can think about what we have never seen. Here is a fun example. In The Making of Mind, A.R. Luria (1902 to 1977) describes the work he and Vygotsky (1896 to 1934) did to study the impact of literacy on adult cognitive development. They visited Russian farming communities that were still populated entirely by illiterate adults. They presented the adults of these towns this question:
In the far north where there is snow year round, the bears are white.
Novaya Zemlya is in the far north,
What color are the bears in Novaya Zemla?
The leaders of the towns invariably laughed and replied, “None of us has ever been to Novaya Zemlya. How could any of us know what color the bears are there?” They laughed, thinking it was silly that anyone would ask them to think about a place and things they had never seen. They were not capable of formal reasoning. Illiteracy, then, guarantees that one cannot perform formal operations. Literacy, however, does not guarantee that one can.
The term formal comes from the role of the form of a deductive argument, the most famous of which is the syllogism. The form matters because in a syllogism, if the form is followed correctly (and the premises are true), then the conclusion must be true. If these illiterate Russian farmers were capable of formal reasoning, then they would have known:
A. If all of the bears in the far north where it snows year round are white
B. And if Novaya Zemlya is in the far north where it snows year round,
c. Then all of the bears in Novaya Zemlya must be white.
But notice, even such a syllogism represents an intellectual achievement. We must learn about syllogisms, and practice constructing them in order to be able to invent one. Syllogisms are invented. They don’t occur in nature.
Formal operations allow us to think about what we haven’t seen or touched. We think using formal logical operations. In her wonderful little book, Children’s Minds, Margaret Donaldson (1926 to 2020) insists that children aren’t capable of success in school after a fairly early age if they can’t understand and perform the syllogism:
If A > B
And B > C
Then A > C
In other words, students must learn to think formally to succeed in school. Her example has the added benefit of using symbols which takes us immediately into mathematics where of course formal reasoning is essential.
Notice that this syllogism does not work:
If A > than B
and C > than B
Then . . . Nothing.
All we know is what we have stated, both a and c are greater that b. But we do not know which is greater, A or C. We do not have to have been trained in logic to see the difference between the two syllogisms, especially once the difference has been pointed out.
Now this is all well and good as an introduction to formal reasoning, but it doesn’t get to what finally allowed me to understand formal reasoning and develop the formal intellectual tools that contribute to my book and this blog. Deductive reasoning has been around since before Aristotle and he pretty well perfected the syllogism. So what did I have to figure out?
Kuhn and Formal Operations:
As I have mentioned, my insights into formal operations began to emerge when I Read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For a few years I had been baffled by Piaget’s claim that formal operations allow us to account for all of the hypotheses that can be constructed around a topic. What does that mean? “Account” for all the hypotheses? How does it do that? I wondered. Piaget, as far as I can tell, did not explain what that means, not in any of his works that have been translated into English.
First let me answer the question about what account means. Now remember, Piaget was a brilliant natural scientist, a biologist, before he became a developmental psychologist. It’s fair to assume that he knew what Kuhn was talking about, even if he never read Kuhn. Kuhn accounts for various questions or hypotheses with these responses:
Yes, we know that’s true; and no, we know that’s not true.
Interesting, and we’re studying that expecting to find an answer, either that it’s true or not true.
And finally:
Sorry, we don’t know if that’s true or false and there’s no way we can study it at this time, within our current paradigm.
That’s what “account for” means. Yes we have answered it, yes we’re studying it, no we can’t even study it. But jump back? What do we mean, We can’t even study it? How do we account for something if we can’t even study it?
Formal operations consist of structures such as syllogisms, formal conceptual frameworks, and theoretical models and paradigms. These do not grow on trees. Someone must invent them, or in the case of syllogisms, teach us how to construct and use them..
Kuhn studied scientific revolutions. As I read Kuhn’s descriptions of these revolutions, what he called paradigm shifts, I noticed that they were not just scientific revolutions, they were also cognitive revolutions. By understanding how science advances knowledge, I was able to understand how we can advance our understanding of cognitive development.
Scientists learn new stuff, stuff that’s so new and so big that it causes a revolution in how they think.
We also need to learn new stuff to advance from concrete operations to formal operations, to change how we think.
The more I understood The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the more I understood the structure of formal operations. Cool! Don’t you think? So let’s talk about Kuhn and paradigms. We will learn about the structure and content of paradigms.
Paradigms and Scientific Revolutions:
The first scientific revolution that Kuhn describes is the Copernican Revolution. You know, Copernicus and Galileo rejected the Ptolemaic view of the universe, the Ptolemaic paradigm, in which the earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus argued and Galileo proved that the earth rotates around the sun.
Let’s explain what it means to say we don’t know something and can’t even study it. What does that mean? H does not being able to study something account for it?
Imagine 15th century astronomers talking about the sun and planets and one asks, “How long does it take for the earth to travel around the sun?”
Within the 15th century astronomy paradigm it was impossible to think about or study that question. So they could account for it as being impossible to study or answer within that paradigm.
However, as 15th and 16th century astronomers gathered more and more data on the movement of planets, they began to encounter more questions than answers. And a few, Copernicus in particular, began to consider the possibility that they didn’t even know how to think about some of these questions.
Copernicus began to think differently about the fundamental assumptions of the Ptolemaic paradigm. Copernicus changed those assumptions and thereby destroyed the old paradigm and invented a new one.
Not everyone agreed right away, but as astronomers used the new Copernican paradigm, it allowed them to answer questions about the movement of the planets that they had not been able to answer. Galileo employed the newly invented telescope to develop the evidence required to prove the new paradigm.
Notice, the new scientific paradigm which was developed by Copernicus and Galileo did not come fully developed. It won out over the old paradigm for two reasons:
First, the old paradigm was exhausted; it created more problems than solutions, more questions than answers.
Second, the new paradigm immediately allowed astronomers to explain things in new and better ways.
The new paradigm did not have all the answers immediately, but it provided a new way of thinking that researchers could use to investigate questions they had been unable to investigate, solve problems they had been unsolvable.
According to Kuhn, a paradigm is an intellectual achievement that provides the organizing principles that unite a scientific discipline’s knowledge into a coherent whole and its members into a unified community of scholars.
The Copernican Revolution was, first of all, an enormous intellectual achievement. It did not win out immediately, but when it did, it united the community of astronomers.
Copernicus crafted the theory, Galileo proved it, and Newton developed the whole system of scientific reasoning that has propelled scientific progress that continues to this day.
Kuhn made no scientific discoveries. All Kuhn did was figure out and set down in writing the structure and content of scientific revolutions by reflecting on what had happened.
Kuhn’s work is what turns out to be enormously helpful for us. For he helps us understand formal operations and formal reasoning in a whole new way. We can add to this understanding by considering formal conceptual frameworks.
Formal conceptual frameworks:
I learned about conceptual frameworks from Piaget. He was interested in how the brain works and how it develops. He taught us that the brain organizes information into different files, what he calls schema.
A formal conceptual framework is a schema that organizes a bunch of schema, a bunch of files. They let us think about how we think about the information in different files. How are they similar? How are they different?
Paradigms organize all of the knowledge in a discipline.
Formal conceptual frameworks organize a bunch of information on a topic.
I developed a formal conceptual framework that helps us think about economic theory. It provides us with a major intellectual tool that helps us think about economic justice.
Thinking about How We Think:
Knowing about syllogisms helps us think about the arguments we make that are fundamentally syllogistic. We know we cannot argue productively by just focusing on conclusions. We must ask two questions:
1. Are our premises, our assumptions, correct.
2. Is their a necessary logical relationship between our assumptions and our conclusions.
When we ask ourselves those questions, we are thinking about how we think. And when we argue about those questions, we can argue productively. The premises are either demonstrably true or not. The arguments are either logically necessary or not.
It is worth noting that when we argue about conclusions, we have nothing to argue about. We must argue about the validity of premises and the logical necessity that allows us to move from premises to conclusions.
When we have developed or learned a formal conceptual framework, it helps us think about how we think about its topic. We need an example. Let’s use the one I developed for economic justice.
In our discussion of economic justice, we developed a formal conceptual framework of economic theory as it pertains to economic justice. In order to develop it, we used the Golden Mean as an intellectual tool that helped us identify mercantilism and communism as the extremes of our theory. Having identified both extremes we could identify both capitalism and socialism as our golden. Once we had the complete conceptual framework we were able to think more clearly about how our economy can work both to develop wealth and to distribute it justly. A lot of new thinking emerged, new solutions, because the complete formal conceptual framework helped us improve how we think.
A Formal Conceptual Framework for Economic Justice
Extreme Golden Mean Extreme
Communism Socialism ∼ Capitalism Mercantilism
But here is the key for all of us. We the People need to be able to think about what we think and how we think in order successfully to operate as a body and mind politic, in order to solve the moral challenges we face. To do that, we must be able to think about how we think about moral development and moral decisions: moral reasoning. We turn to that topic now.
This entire blog is based on my book Let's Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. Some viewers may want to read it. You can order it from Amazon. Be sure to use my full name: Patrick Conroy.
Website: Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square.
Email: Patconroy317@Gmail.com.