Western and Eastern Modes of Thought: Analytic vs Dialectical Thinking

ARGUMENT 3

Premise 1: No A are B.

Premise 2: Some C are B.

——————————

Conclusion: Some C are not A.

The first argument is meaningful and has a plausible conclusion, the second argument is meaningful but its conclusion is not plausible, and the third argument is so abstract that it makes no contact at all with any real-world facts. Despite the plausibility of its conclusion, argument 1 is invalid. Despite the implausibility of argument 2, it is valid. And the meaningless argument 3, as it happens, is invalid. (Try drawing Venn diagrams of these arguments to see how helpful they can be in assessing validity.)

The psychologists Ara Norenzayan, Beom Jun Kim, and their coworkers attempted to find out whether Asians and Westerners thought about problems like those above differently. They presented Korean and American university students with arguments that were either valid or invalid and that had conclusions that were either plausible or implausible. The researchers asked them to evaluate whether the conclusion followed logically from the premises for each argument. There were a total of four different types of syllogisms, ranging from very simple structures to quite complicated ones.

Both Koreans and Americans were more likely to rate syllogisms with plausible conclusions as being valid, whether they were or not. But Koreans were much more influenced by the plausibility of the conclusion than were Americans. This didn’t happen because the Korean participants were less capable of performing logical operations than the American participants. The two groups made an equal number of errors on the purely abstract syllogisms. It’s just that Americans are more in the habit of applying logical rules to ordinary events than are Koreans and are therefore more capable of ignoring the plausibility of the conclusion.

East Asian university students also make mistakes in syllogisms based on how typical the member of a category is. The investigators told the students, for example, that all birds have a given property (a made-up one, such as “have an omentum”). They next asked the students either how convincing it is that eagles have the property, or how convincing it is that penguins have the property. The two conclusions are of course equally valid. Americans were much less affected by typicality than were Koreans. For example, Koreans were not as convinced as Americans were that penguins have the property given that birds have the property.

Finally, East Asian students have more problems with propositional logic than do Americans. They’re more thrown off by their desires. If they would like a particular conclusion to be true, they’re more likely to judge incorrectly that the conclusion follows from the premises. This is not the sort of error one wants to make. It indicates that facility with logic—being able to strip meaning away from propositions and convert them into abstractions—helps Westerners avoid undue influences on judgments.

Context, Contradiction, and Causality

Recall from Chapter 2, in the discussion about the importance of context, that the Western approach to thinking about the world is to focus on a central object (or person). Westerners identify the attributes of an object, assign the object to a category, and apply the rules that govern that category of objects. The underlying purpose is often to establish a causal model of the object so that it can be manipulated for one’s own goals.

The Eastern approach is to attend much more broadly to the object in its context, to the relationships among objects, and to the relationship between object and context.

Different approaches to historical analysis follow from these differences in how best to understand the world. Japanese teachers of history begin by setting out the context of events in some detail. They then proceed through the important events in chronological order, linking each event to its successor. Teachers encourage their students to imagine the mental and emotional states of historical figures by thinking about the analogy between their situations and the situations of the students’ everyday lives. The actions are then explained in terms of these feelings. Teachers regard students as having good ability to think historically when they show empathy with the historical figures, including those who were Japan’s enemies. “How” questions are asked frequently—about twice as often as in American classrooms.

American teachers spend less time setting the context than Japanese teachers do. They begin with the outcome, rather than with the initial event or catalyst. The chronological order of events is slighted or even destroyed in presentation. Instead, the order in which factors are considered is dictated by discussion of the causal factors assumed to be important. (“The Ottoman empire collapsed for three major reasons.”) Teachers regard students as having good ability to reason historically when they are capable of providing evidence to fit their causal model of the outcome. “Why” questions are asked twice as frequently in American classrooms as in Japanese classrooms.

Both approaches seem useful—and complementary. But in fact, East Asian historical analysis seems simply wrong to Westerners. And in general, rather than appreciating the holistic style of thought characteristic of the East, Westerners frequently reject the approach. Remarkably, the children of Japanese businessmen living in the United States are sometimes put back a grade in their American school because their teachers find them to be lacking in analytic ability.

The different types of thought result in very different metaphysics, or assumptions about the nature of the world. The differences in patterns of thought also produce different physics. Because of their attention to context, the ancient Chinese got some things right that the Greeks got wrong.

Ancient Chinese attention to context encouraged the realization that there could be action at a distance. This allowed the Chinese to correctly understand questions of acoustics and magnetism, as well as to comprehend the true reason for the tides. That the moon could drag the oceans along eluded even Galileo.

Aristotle’s explanation of why objects fall when dropped into water is that they possess the property of gravity. But not all objects fall when dropped into water; some stay on the surface. Those objects, Aristotle explained, possess the property of levity. But of course there is no such property as levity, and gravity is a relation between objects rather than a property of a single object.

Einstein had to add a cheater factor to his theories about the nature of the universe, namely, the cosmological constant, in order to account for what he was confident was the steady state of the universe. But of course the universe isn’t in a steady state as had been assumed since the time of Aristotle. As a Westerner thoroughly imbued with Greek assumptions about stasis, Einstein had a gut instinct that the universe should be constant, so he resorted to the cosmological constant to preserve the assumption.

Chinese dialectical reasoning had an impact on the physicist Niels Bohr, who was highly knowledgeable about Eastern thought. He attributed his development of quantum theory in part to the metaphysics of the East. There had been a centuries-long debate in the West about whether light consists of particles or waves. Belief in one was assumed to contradict and render impossible belief in the other. Bohr’s solution was to say that light can be thought of in both ways. In quantum theory, light can be viewed either as a particle or as a wave. Just never both at the same time.

But while the Chinese got a lot of things right that the West got wrong, they could never have proved their theories correct. For that it takes science, which the West has had for twenty-six hundred years. Science, at base, is categorization plus empirical rules and a commitment to logical principles. The Chinese understood the concept of action at a distance when Westerners didn’t, but it was Western science that proved the concept to be correct. This was done by scientists who set out to conduct experiments intended to show that action at a distance was impossible! They were startled by findings showing it was indeed possible.

Stability and Change

There is a profound difference between Eastern and Western beliefs about change. For reasons that aren’t at all clear to me, the Greeks were positively obsessed with the idea that the universe and the objects in it don’t change.

It’s true that Heraclitus and other sixth-century B.C. philosophers recognized that the world changes. (“A man never steps in the same river twice because the man is different and the river is different.”) But by the fifth century B.C., change was out and stability was in. Heraclitus’s views were actually ridiculed. Parmenides “proved,” in a few easy steps, that change was impossible: To say of a thing that it doesn’t exist is a contradiction. Nonbeing is self-contradictory and so nonbeing can’t exist. If nonbeing can’t exist, then nothing can change, because if thing 1 were to change to thing 2, then thing 1 would not be!

Zeno, Parmenides’s pupil, proved to many Greeks’ satisfaction that motion is impossible. One proof is his famous treatment of the arrow.

1. When an arrow is in a place just its own size, it’s at rest.
2. At every moment of its flight, the arrow is in a place just its own size.
3. Therefore, at every moment of its flight, the arrow is at rest.
4. Since the arrow is always at rest, we see that motion (hence change) is impossible.

Another of Zeno’s proofs is the Achilles Paradox. If Achilles is trying to catch a slower runner ahead of him—a tortoise, say—he must run to the place where the tortoise is at the moment. But by the time Achilles gets there, the tortoise has moved on. Ergo, Achilles can never catch the tortoise. Since fast runners can never catch slow ones, we can deduce that motion never occurs.

As the communications theorist Robert Logan has written, the Greeks were enslaved to the rigid linearity of their either/or logic.

The Greek insistence on an unchanging or highly stable world echoes down through the centuries. The extreme Western insistence on attributing human behavior to a person’s enduring dispositions rather than to situational factors—the fundamental attribution error—is directly traceable to Greek metaphysics.

One of the clearest examples of the damage done by the fundamental attribution error has to do with Western (mis)understanding of some important influences on intelligence and academic achievement.

I began to have trouble with math in the fifth grade. My parents assured me that was to be expected: Nisbetts had never been much good at math. I was delighted to have the alibi. But in retrospect I can see that my parents—and I—neglected to see that my problems with math began after a two-week bout of mononucleosis sidelined me from school. As it happened, that was the period when my class had taken up fractions. I’m still not much good at math, though I do believe I would have been better at it if I hadn’t accepted my parents’ dispositional inference about my ability to deal with fractions.

Contrast my parents’ attribution with what might be expected from a Chinese American tiger mother. “You come home with Bs in math on your report card? You start getting As if you want to be a member of this family!”

For the two thousand years since it became possible for a Chinese peasant boy to become the most powerful magistrate in the land through study, the Chinese have believed that hard work makes you smart. Confucius believed that part of ability was “a gift from Heaven,” but most of it was due to effort.

A study of American high school seniors begun in 1968 found that the Chinese-heritage students among them were about even in IQ with their Caucasian counterparts. But the students of Chinese heritage scored about a third of a standard deviation better on the SAT. SAT scores are highly correlated with IQ, but SAT scores owe more to study than IQ scores do. Astonishingly, a couple of decades after high school graduation, the Chinese Americans were 62 percent more likely to work in professional, managerial, or technical fields than the European Americans. Even among European Americans, students who view ability as modifiable do much better in school than those who don’t. And when European Americans are taught that how smart you are is in good part due to how hard you work, it improves their school performance. Learning about the importance of effort is particularly powerful for poor black and Hispanic children.

East-West differences in beliefs about malleability and change reverberate through an enormous number of domains of life. People of European culture—especially Americans—label a person convicted of theft or homicide as a “criminal.” Asians avoid such firm categorizations. Perhaps as a consequence, lengthy incarcerations are relatively rare in Asia. The U.S. incarceration rate is five times that of Hong Kong, eight times that of South Korea, and fourteen times that of Japan.

Dialecticism and Wisdom

The letter below was sent to the advice columnist Abigail Van Buren and published in scores of newspapers. Please think for a moment about the likely outcome of a situation like the one described there.

Dear Abby:

My husband, “Ralph,” has one sister, “Dawn,” and one brother, “Curt.” Their parents died six years ago, within months of each other. Ever since, Dawn has once a year mentioned buying a headstone for their parents. I’m all for it, but Dawn is determined to spend a bundle on it, and she expects her brothers to help foot the bill. She recently told me she had put $2,000 aside to pay for it. Recently Dawn called to announce that she had gone ahead, selected the design, written the epitaph and ordered the headstone. Now she expects Curt and Ralph to pay “their share” back to her. She said she went ahead and ordered it on her own because she has been feeling guilty all these years that her parents didn’t have one. I feel that since Dawn did this all by herself, her brothers shouldn’t have to pay her anything. I know that if Curt and Ralph don’t pay her back, they’ll never hear the end of it, and neither will I. What should I do about this?

After a little more explication of East-West differences in thinking patterns, we’ll return to this vignette.

Recall that Jean Piaget, the great mid-twentieth century developmental psychologist, held that the basis of all thought after childhood was propositional logic. He referred to these logical rules as “formal operations” as distinct from the “concrete operations” that characterize how children think about specific real events, such as the conservation of matter across the shape of its container. (There’s neither more nor less sand when you pour it from a tall narrow container into a short wide one.) Piaget held that young children use logic to develop their understanding of events in the world, but they lack the ability to use logic to think abstractly. As children enter adolescence they shift toward using formal operations to think about abstract concepts. Formal operations—the rules of propositional logic—can only be induced and can’t be taught. They are fully developed by the end of adolescence. There is no more learning about how to think using abstract rules after that point. Every normal adult has the exact same set of rules for formal logic.

Most of that story is mistaken. As this book shows, there are innumerable abstract rules beyond those of formal operations, such as the concepts of statistical regression and cost-benefit analysis. Moreover, these abstract rules can be both induced and taught, and we keep on learning them well after adolescence. Partly as a reaction to Piaget’s theories, psychologists in the late twentieth century began to define what they called “postformal operations,” that is to say, principles of thought that are learned primarily after adolescence and typically don’t guarantee a single correct answer but rather a range of plausible answers. Instead, application of the principles may result merely in new perspectives on problems or provide pragmatic guidance for dealing with apparent logical contradictions and social conflict.

The postformalists, notably Klaus Riegel and Michael Basseches, labeled this type of thinking “dialectical.” They relied heavily on Eastern thought in describing and elucidating these principles, which can be grouped under five rubrics.

Relations and context. Dialectical thinking emphasizes attention to relations and contexts, the importance of locating an object or phenomenon as part of some larger whole, an emphasis on understanding how systems function, a concern with equilibrium in systems (such as the body, groups, factory operations), and the need to view problems from many perspectives.

Antiformalism. Dialectical thinking opposes formalism because of its separation of form from content. We make errors by abstracting the elements of a problem into a formal model and ignoring facts and contexts crucial to correct analysis. Overemphasis on logical approaches leads to distortion, error, and rigidity.

Contradiction. The postformalists emphasize the importance of identifying contradictions between propositions and between systems and of recognizing that opposites can complement each other and lead to greater understanding than an insistence on the rejection of one idea in favor of another.

Change. Postformalist psychologists emphasize the importance of understanding events as moments in a process rather than static, one-off occurrences. They recognize interaction between systems as a source of change.

Uncertainty. Partly because of their emphasis on change, their acknowledgment of contradiction, and their recognition of the multiple influences present in most contexts, postformalists place a value on recognizing the uncertainty of knowledge.

These principles of thought are not alien to Westerners. The difference between Easterners and Westerners is that Easterners regard them as fundamental and use them all constantly. Let’s look at some examples of the use of these principles for everyday problems.

Culture, Aging, and Dialecticism

The psychologists Igor Grossmann, Jinkyung Na, Denise Park, Michael Varnum, Shinobu Kitayama, and I gave problems such as the Dear Abby dilemma described a few pages back, as well as problems concerning societal conflicts such as ethnic discord and disagreements about use of natural resources, to people of a wide variety of ages and social classes in both the United States and Japan. We asked participants what they thought would happen next and why, and coded answers in terms of six categories related to dialectical reasoning.

1. Does the answer avoid rigid application of a rule?
2. Does the answer take into account the perspectives of each protagonist?
3. Is the answer attentive to the nature of the contradictory views?
4. Does the answer recognize the possibility of change rather than a stalemate?
5. Does the answer mention possible forms of compromise?
6. Does the answer express uncertainty rather than dogmatic confidence?

We found that young and middle-aged Japanese responded to interpersonal and societal conflicts in a more dialectical fashion than did young and middle-aged Americans. The Japanese were more likely to avoid rigid application of a rule, more likely to take into account the perspectives of all participants, more attentive to the nature of the conflict, and more likely to recognize the possibility of change and compromise. They expressed less certainty about their conclusions.

In our view, the generally more dialectical answers of the Japanese were a reflection of greater wisdom on their part. And we’re in good company. We presented the problems, along with Japanese and American answers, to members of the University of Chicago–based Wisdom Network. The network consists of (heavily Western) philosophers, social psychologists, psychotherapists, and members of the clergy interested in the nature of wisdom and how people can attain it. Members of the network endorsed the more dialectical answers to the Dear Abby–type problems as being wiser.

As people get older, do they get wiser in the sense that they become more likely to apply dialectical reasoning to social conflict? Americans do. From the age of about twenty-five to about seventy-five, Americans get steadily more likely to apply dialectical approaches to interpersonal and societal problems.

It stands to reason that people would become wiser about how to handle social conflict as they get older. They could be expected to become more likely to recognize the potential for it, learn ways of avoiding it, and develop ways of reducing it if it occurs.

But Japanese don’t get wiser in these respects.

Here’s how we account for the fact that Americans become more dialectical with age and Japanese don’t. Younger Japanese are wiser about conflict than younger Americans because their socialization emphasizes attention to social context. They are explicitly taught how to avoid and reduce conflict, which is much more damaging to the social fabric in the East than in the West.

Young Americans are less likely to be taught dialectical principles or how to deal with conflict. But as Americans experience more and more conflict over their life span, they induce ever-better ways of recognizing and dealing with it. Japanese don’t get better with age because they’re merely applying early-learned concepts rather than increasing their repertoire of conflict-related principles in the conduct of everyday life. Moreover, they encounter much less conflict in their daily lives than Americans, and so they don’t have occasion to induce ever-better ways of dealing with it.

So is logical thinking or dialectical thinking better in general? This may sound like a nonsensical question. I’ve argued that both have their advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes it’s helpful to abstract an argument to the point that its logical structure can be examined, but sometimes it’s a mistake to insist on separating form from content. Sometimes it’s helpful to try to dissolve contradictions, but sometimes it’s more productive to acknowledge them and see whether the truth might lie between the contradictory ideas, or whether it’s possible to transcend the contradictions and find some respect in which both are true.

But I’ll stick my neck out and hazard the generalization that logical thinking is crucial for scientific thought and some kinds of well-defined problems. Dialectical thinking is often more helpful for thinking about everyday problems, especially those involving human relations.

Assuming that you agree with East Asians, the elderly, and the members of the Chicago Wisdom Network about the value of dialectical thinking, could you learn to be more dialectical in your own life?

I think so. And I think you have already. Much of what you’ve read in this book is sympathetic to dialectical reasoning and skeptical about too much reliance on formal analytic procedures. The book has emphasized the importance of paying attention to context (thereby combatting the fundamental attribution error), the likelihood of variability and change in processes and in individuals (weakening susceptibility to the interview illusion), the fact that the attributes of objects and people tend to be associated with other attributes (encouraging attention to problems of self-selection), and the uncertainty of knowledge (strengthening concern with true score, measurement error, accuracy of assessment of correlations, reliability, and validity). And most important of all: ATTBW—Assumptions Tend to Be Wrong.

Summing Up

• Some of the fundamental principles underlying Western and Eastern thought are different. Western thought is analytic and emphasizes logical concepts of identity and insistence on noncontradiction; Eastern thought is holistic and encourages recognition of change and acceptance of contradiction.
• Western thought encourages separation of form from content in order to assess validity of arguments. A consequence is that Westerners are spared some logical errors that Easterners make.
• Eastern thought produces more accurate beliefs about some aspects of the world and the causes of human behavior than Western thought. Eastern thought prompts attention to the contextual factors influencing the behavior of objects and humans. It also prompts recognition of the likelihood of change in all kinds of processes and in individuals.
• Westerners and Easterners respond in quite different ways to contradictions between two propositions. Westerners sometimes actually believe a strong proposition more when it is contradicted by a weak proposition than when encountering it by itself. Easterners may actually believe a weak proposition more when it is contradicted by a strong proposition than when encountering it by itself.
• Eastern and Western approaches to history are very different. Eastern approaches emphasize context, preserve the order of events and emphasize the relations between them, and encourage empathy with historical figures. Western approaches tend to slight contextual factors, are less concerned about preservation of the sequence of events, and emphasize causal modeling of historical processes.
• Western thought has been influenced substantially by Eastern thought in recent decades. Traditional Western propositional logic has been supplemented by dialectical principles. The two traditions of thought provide good platforms for critiquing each other. The virtues of logical thought seem more obvious in light of dialectical failings, and the virtues of dialectical thought appear more obvious in light of the limitations of logical thought.
• Reasoning about social conflict by younger Japanese is wiser than that of younger Americans. But Americans gain in wisdom over their life span and Japanese do not. Japanese, and undoubtedly other East Asians, are taught about how to avoid and resolve social conflict. Americans are taught less about it and have more to gain as they grow older.