A World of Questions & Answers—Part VII

Description, Explanation & Action

Introduction

In this week’s eighth installment of our presentation of Collingwood’s logic of question-and-answer (the seventh installment of the current article), we delve a little deeper into the pivotal role of description, the lack of any single preferred form of explanation in any arena, and some of the reasons behind the absurdity of rules-based action in dealing effectively with any situation where the outcome matters greatly.

—The Editors

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A World of Questions & Answers—Part VII:  Description, Explanation & Action

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A Heady Drink 

Last time, almost in passing, we looked at the way in which methodical, painstaking empirical analysis of what is actually our unique problem—along five or seven or twelve or even a hundred or more dimensions—under the illusion that this is a way to devise a “unique solution to a unique problem,” is in reality nothing more than a way to assign our unique situation to one of a relative handful of broad kinds of problem.  

In the process, we miss most of what is really going on, for the reasons Collingwood clarified, along with the potential for securing truly optimal outcomes through fast and effective action.  The illusion involves the individual “shutting his eyes to anything which might convince him that his readymade rules were not an adequate guide” to action.¹

As we indicated last week, the result of such boiling-the-ocean analysis is at best—almost by definition—to devise a kind of solution to a kind of problem, a solution which, at least if all goes to plan, often will work more or less well, and which can be made to kind of fit, sometimes if only we hammer the square peg hard enough and for long enough into the irregularly-shaped, roundish hole we started out with. 

This in-built fault applies equally even to the most sophisticated approaches, for the error is endemic to rationalism in all its endless contemporary variants, and is indelible.  A new logic and epistemology can enable us to avoid such unnecessary pitfalls. 

Those pitfalls can be costly. While an ultimately suboptimal solution to a particularly complex, intractable corporate problem, say, may take months or years to devise within the superannuated rationalist epistemology and take even longer to fully implement, the selfsame problem addressed within the new epistemology and deploying a form of Collingwood’s logic of question-and-answer can in many cases instead yield a truly optimal solution from scratch within a matter of just a few hours.  

That unique solution can be implemented at once, and the desired change achieved. Had you boiled the ocean instead, the same change might otherwise have taken longer to secure, or could eventually be completed or partially achieved only to slip right back to the status quo ante, or might have proved impossible to achieve at all.

To adapt the quip from the old NATO training manual which we have had occasion to cite more than once here in the pages of Change, just because it is humanly possible to push a pea up the side of a mountain with your nose does not mean that this is the best way of getting it there or that getting it there represents the best solution to your problem.

More broadly last time, we looked deeply into the murky waters of abstraction, rules, principles, categories and analytical techniques as a means of understanding and responding to what is, at the end of the day, always the utterly unique situation in which we find ourselves.  “In that darkness what we find is…not the solution of… problems, but only a heady drink which gives us the illusion of having solved them.”² 

We intimated too that the rationalist illusion is a particularly dangerous one, because it gives rise to the further, utterly compelling twin illusions (i) that our search for solutions was comprehensive, when in reality it was anything but, and (ii) that the suboptimal solution at which we ultimately arrived was the best we or anyone could come up with under the circumstances.

Wherever and whenever the outcome of our action matters, if we want to reach a truly optimal solution, we must base our action, Collingwood argued, not on general rules or principles, but on insight into the rich uniqueness of the situation we are dealing with. 

We must do so, moreover, without reliance on any preconceived abstractions whatsoever.  Instead we need to inquire into our situation concretely and insightfully within its unique, entirely idiosyncratic context.  

In short, to devise a unique solution to a unique problem we must get as far away as possible from the kind of thinking-in-categories and reliance on preconceived abstractions deployed by bureaucrats (whether civil servants or corporate functionaries), politicians and political activists, positivistic social scientists (and in the sense in which I intend the term this includes a majority of social scientists both in Collingwood’s time and nowadays³), and newspaper reporters—and in our own time also by most management consultants, by many market researchers who base their work on demographics, by business schools, and by social media pundits, to take just a handful of more obvious examples.

Instead we must learn to think more like a true historian in Collingwood’s sense (as opposed to his scissors-and-paste historian), or like an archaeologist, a Baconian scientist, a sophisticated counterespionage agent, a first-rate investigative journalist, or a fictional private detective like Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Miss Marple. 

Thought and Action

Optimally effective action requires that we get away from our usual mode of thinking and adopt instead a completely different way of thinking, one rooted in Collingwood’s question-and-answer logic.⁴  

At the same time it behoves us to get worlds away from the old, ubiquitous propositional logic Collingwood critiqued and which concerned itself only with universals and particulars (which as we discussed last time are not individuals per se but individuals considered only as instances of a universal), a logic and epistemology in which real-world individuals and one-off situations could never properly be considered at all, let alone understood and effectively addressed.  

In short, to act most effectively in novel situations (and what situations are not novel?) we need to learn to think very differently from all the ways we’ve been taught to think, and we must therefore have the courage to think differently from everyone else around us.

Heinrich Heine wrote in 1834, “Mark this, ye proud men of action:  ye are nothing but unconscious hodmen of the men of thought who, often in humblest stillness, have appointed you your inevitable task.”⁵ 

While Heine’s point is well taken, and while he was thinking on the right lines up to a point, even here Heine remains in thrall to what Collingwood refers to as “the vulgar division of men into thinkers and men of action”—another one of those beguiling myths by which we are led astray, unthinkingly and without any understanding of what an action actually is. 

It is perhaps unsurprising that a philosopher such as Collingwood who was also a practicing historian would find that vulgar distinction to be unnatural in the extreme. For in what universe could such a paradigmatic man of action as Nelson at Trafalgar be considered by an historian other than as a thinker, and a brilliant and effective one at that?

This false dichotomy between thinkers and men of action is one whose origins are not, however, lost in the mists of time, for “like so much that nowadays we take for granted….” the divide is a relic of the Middle Ages, a “survival”⁶ in Collingwood’s terms. 

“I lived and worked in a University,” he tells us, “and a University is an institution based on medieval ideas, whose life and work are still hedged about by the medieval [mis]interpretation of the Greek distinction between the contemplative life and the practical life as a division between two classes of specialists.”

[I]n his capacity as a moral, political, or economic agent [a human being] lives not in a world of ‘hard facts’ to which ‘thoughts’ make no difference, but in a world of ‘thoughts’; that if you change the moral, political, and economic ‘theories’ generally accepted by the society in which he lives, you change the character of his world; and that if you change his own ‘theories’ you change his relation to that world; so that in either case you change the ways in which he acts.⁷

Our actions are the creatures of our thoughts. More effective action is the outcome of more effective thinking.

Varieties of Description and Explanation

We have repeatedly emphasized in earlier instalments of this article the importance of the fact that, as Stuart Hampshire put it, “description of reality is essentially inexhaustible” (and purely by dint of the nature of description, as he pointed out). There is no one preferred description of anything we might have occasion to talk about.

It is a corollary of this that there is also no single preferred form of explanation of any event, for we can describe that event in an infinity of different, equally veridical ways, drawing attention to different factors involved.  As we saw in some detail in our first two posts this year, there are certainly severe limits to what can ever be explained in the terms of art of physics and chemistry, even in the indefinitely distant future.

And we saw in a post last December that the principle characterizing the entire biological realm consists of taking a selected environmental variable and extracting it from the causal nexus, making selective use of physical and chemical properties but otherwise rendering the properties of matter causally ineffectual—actually cancelling them out in fact. That’s an important aspect of what makes living things living.  

We cited the work of Bill Powers in this regard, but as he pointed out⁸ in a closely related context, it’s not only in the biological realm that the purely material nature of “material objects” ceases to be of any explanatory value in determining what takes place—the same is true even in the realm of inorganic matter.

For there is often a nonmaterial element which is the deciding factor in what physically transpires:  “[T]he way material objects behave can’t be predicted from their physical or chemical properties alone. There is something of a nonmaterial nature called organization that endows material objects with properties they would not otherwise have.”⁹ 

And he points out in a footnote that, “[o]rganization is expressed in terms of relationships among objects or parts of objects. Relationship is a nonmaterial aspect of things. The aspect referred to by between or above is not made of matter or energy.”¹⁰   “Or to say that better in another way,” Powers continues, “the way that collections of materials behave depends as much on how they are organized as on what the materials are.”¹¹

If you tried to analyze a plane or a boat into the materials out of which it has been constructed, even if you knew everything there was to know about these materials and their properties, without taking into account the design and organization of the whole you would be helpless to understand why a plane flies or a boat floats. 

The Seawise Giant, a Japanese-built, self-propelled supertanker the length of one-and-a-half Chrysler Buildings, when fully laden weighed in at over 657 metric tonnes (just under 725 US tons), and not only didn’t it just sink when launched into the water, but it sailed great distances, precisely as it was designed to do. 

An Airbus A380-800 has a maximum permissible gross takeoff weight (MGTOW) of 575,000 kilograms (about 634 US tons).  That sounds pretty heavy. And yet, if you’re a commercial airline pilot, taxi it down the runway and hey presto, it flies, and before you know it, it’s more than 40,000 feet above the earth. 

It’s true that a lump of solid matter will, because of gravity, fall to the ground when released, accelerating just as Newton said it would (but for air resistance). It’s also true, however, that if the matter is shaped into a fuselage and wings, it will fly when you drop it. Laws that apply to lumps of material do not necessarily apply when the material is organized in ways other than lumps. If you analyze an airplane chemically or physically, it will prove to be made of materials that can’t, in their raw form, fly. Yet they can be organized to fly. 

Boats have been built from hollow logs, reeds, bamboo, canvas, iron, and concrete.… You would never find “floats” on a list of the physical and chemical properties of these materials. Whether the material floats or flies depends on how you organize the materials, and in which liquids you try to make the materials float, or how dense the medium is in which you want them to fly. Penguins fly wonderfully, but only under water. Even a boat built of hollow reeds will eventually sink in water if you don’t waterproof it, as Tor Heyerdahl discovered. Balsa-wood airplanes can easily be made to fly, though the airplane kit dumped out of its box will simply fall to the ground (same materials, wrong organization for flying).¹² 

Once you leave the comparatively simple realm of physical artifacts like supertankers and commercial airliners for the biological realm, explanation immediately gets far, far more complicated—certainly the very moment you start studying the behaviour of even the simplest known biological lifeforms, let alone once you start dealing with tens of thousands of intelligent human beings working together in large, complex, global organizations.  

When you’re attempting, at the helm of such an organization, to do things which have never been done before, to solve a complex strategic or operational or technological problem which has never been solved before, somehow trying to solve that problem by merely analyzing it along a hundred or so descriptive dimensions and deploying a very limited—certainly finite—repertory of forms of explanation, seems as absurd as trying to analyze the hydrodynamic properties of a Seawise Giant or the aerodynamic properties of an Airbus 380-800 in terms of the physical and chemical properties of their component parts.  

And this point is reinforced once you consider that every situation, in its all-important details, is unique, as is its context.  Something exactly like this has never occurred before and never will occur again.  This is where all categories and abstractions, rules and principles, all standardized approaches and all generic analytical techniques based on assigning aspects of the situation to predefined categories can fail us from the very start.  

Fortunately, Collingwood didn’t leave us up in the air to crash, or all at sea only to sink.  He pointed the way to an infinitely more viable, un-rationalistic but far more rational alternative, to which we shall return next week.

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© 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted

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1. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 146

2. ibid., p. 140

3. comprising virtually all so-called “realists” and “constructionists” alike, those opposing camps within contemporary social science

4. Collingwood’s “question-and-answer logic,” as he called it, providing the logical foundation of his whole epistemology, has been the topic of this series of articles in Change, beginning with “Questioning Truth,” and continuing with the weekly instalments of the present article, “A World of Questions and Answers.”

5. in the book, De l'Allemagne depuis Luther (Germany since Luther) in which he famously warned the French to beware the quiet German philosopher scribbling in his garret. Heine was attempting to counter the misleading impression of innocence that had been given by Madame de Staël in her characterization of post-Kantian German philosophy in her popular (and actually rather insightful) work, De l'Allemagne.  Writing twenty years later in 1833, exactly a century before Hitler became the German Chancellor, Heine prophetically envisaged a future in which militias of fanatical “armed Fichteans” would come out of the woodwork, rampaging through the streets of Europe, for “there will be played in Germany a drama compared to which” even the most depraved horrors of the Terror during the French Revolution “will seem but an innocent idyl.” The passage regarding hodmen (day labourers) I quoted above did not appear in the original French edition, but rather first appeared in the heavily censored 1834 first German edition, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany).  Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany: A Fragment, Trans. John Snodgrass, London:  Trübner & Co, Ludgate Hill, 1882, p. 106

6. Collingwood, op. cit., p. 150

7. ibid. P. 147

8. W. T. Powers, Living Control Systems III: The Fact of Control, Bloomfield, NJ:  Benchmark Publications, 2008, pp. 16-18

9. ibid., p. 16

10. ibid., fn. p. 16

11. ibid.

12. ibid., pp. 16-17