Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 107

CRITICAL THINKING

…an object, event, or situation in human experience does
not carry its own meaning; the meaning is conferred on it.
—Herbert Blumer

T

he quest to educate our military toward the
goal of fostering critical thinkers is an obvious
part of the dominant narrative in U.S. military
circles today. Critical thinking has become quite the
catchphrase. Yet, there is little published in military
circles demonstrating a philosophical examination of
what critical thinking means; hence, my intent here is
to start that conversation.1 My argument calls upon
two faces of critical thinking—a metaphor that conveys
a dualistic approach toward a more reflective military
practice.
A decade ago, I was on faculty at the U.S. Army
War College where the curriculum employed a blue
booklet on critical thinking authored by Richard W.
Paul and Linda Elder.2 Later, as a faculty member of the
Command and General Staff College, I likewise was directed to have our students read and apply the booklet,
presumably to assure they were able to critically reason.
In the booklet, Paul and Elder present what they claim
to be “universal intellectual standards:” clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance, and fairness. Indeed, the Paul and Elder text
seemed to help students detect logical fallacies. That is,
Paul and Elder, employing the logico-scientific paradigm, present critical thinking as a deductive-inductive
reasoning process necessary to uncover flaws in logic
much as one would in evaluating mathematical proofs
and physics experiments.3
Many of my students and I were left unsatisfied
with this logico-scientific approach as it did not seem
to address novelty, or what Donald A. Schön described
as indeterminate zones of practice—conditions of complexity, uncertainty, and value conflict—which my
student-officers had experienced.4 A search for meaning in these situations had little to do with identifying
logical fallacies as prescribed by Paul and Elder. The
complexities they experienced were uniquely “observer
dependent,” and the observer’s sense of complexity was
limited by the available language or institutionalized
doctrines to interpret what it was that was complex.5
Meeting Paul and Elder’s standard that requires bringing intellectual order to such chaos would be a misstep.
Because such an uncritical practice could dangerously
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2014

lead to an illusion of understanding, I began the search
for another paradigm associated with critical thinking. My intent here is to describe an alternative—the
interpretive paradigm—and present this basis for
critical reasoning as a complementary world view. I
say complementary, as I argue that both paradigms are
essential to make sense of complex unfolding events. In
doing so, I will address each by section as follows: I will
explain the sociological concept of paradigms; present
an American football allegory to illustrate how two
par adigms work in tandem; discuss how they critically
relate to each other; and, at the end, offer a critical approach to indeterminate zones of professional practice,
called action learning, that applies both faces of critical
thinking.

Two Paradigms for Sensemaking
A paradigm is the way a particular community
of practice makes sense of the world.6 As such, there
are at least three interlaced philosophical systems of
inquiry and analysis that underly the logic of paradigms—ontology, epistemology, and methodology. I will
compare and explain each of these to help differentiate
the logico-scientific from the interpretive paradigm.
The first ingredient to a paradigm is ontology, or an
underlying sense of being. Ontology attempts to answer the question, “What is real?” It may be construed
along a continuum between beliefs of a purely objective
world (involving a concrete sense of reality, or objectivism) and subjective world (the social construction of
reality, or subjectivism). Objectivism is the ontological
essence of the logico-scientific paradigm. Objectivists
are closely aligned with the physical sciences in that reality may be proven to exist independent of mankind’s
often flawed perceptions of it (i.e., what would constitute logical fallacies according to Paul and Elder).
In contrast, a subjectivist, at the other end of the
ontological spectrum, argues that mankind has symbolically created reality, where reality only exists in
context. To the subjectivist, reality is dependent on
sociological processes—the hallmark of the interpretive
paradigm.
The second ingredient of a paradigm is epistemology—the ensuing belief about what legitimates
understanding in light of ontological assumptions.
Epistemology answers the question, “What constitutes
our knowledge for professional practice?” For example,
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