Is It Possible to Increase General Intelligence Skills by Teaching Objectivity Skills?

Table of Contents, with page #s from another format:

Preface    2
Part One:  That Objectivity Leads to Intelligence    4
A "Robot World" Analogy    4
appropriateness    4
agreement    5
learning from disagreements through objectification    6
Part Two:  A Curriculum that implements this argument    9
The Writing and the Psychology Classes    9
The Objectification, or "Meaning-Making," Procedure    10
The first step: defining the target text    10
THE RIVAL    11
The second step: generating the "gut level" assessment -- the feelings    11
The third step: objectifying the feeling    12
objectifying is not normalizing    12
the example    13
The fourth step: assessing the objectivity of the association and the feeling    14
Objectivity as qualified agreement    14
Assessing appropriateness versus right or wrong    15
the example    15
The fifth step: understanding    16
the example    17
caveat    18
Part Three:  Understanding disagreements based on preconscious and unconscious concerns and beliefs    20
How the failure to account for determining information causes unresolvable disagreement, the inability to understand    21
The two forms of unaccounted information:   preconscious and unconscious knowledge    23
An illustration of an unconscious motivating concern    24
the example revisited    25
The necessity of making the classes and the procedure emotionally "safe" and manageable    27
Part Four:  Research Concerns    29
what should I be doing?    30

Is It Possible to Increase General Intelligence Skills by Teaching Objectivity Skills?:

My Central Research Concerns

by Charles P. VanBoven
February 1989

[This document was created as part of my application to the combined program in Psychology and Education at the University of Michigan in Feb 1989. Professor Harold Stevensons commented on this saying that I had "clearly thought a great deal about this." For whatever that's worth.
-- 4-1-98 ]

Preface

    In this paper I want to characterize the basic questions that I would want to make the center of the research that I would pursue in a program of graduate studies.  This central question can be put very bluntly as, "Is it possible to increase students' intelligence and capacity for being appropriate by teaching them to become more objective?"  
    The simple argument for saying "yes" to this question is this:
    First, we tend to call behavior intelligent or appropriate to the extent that it seems to take into account those concerns or considerations that we think should be taken into account.  The obverse of this is that we call some behavior unintelligent or thoughtless if it fails to take into account such concerns.  
    Next, while objectivity can be defined in several different ways, a commonly accepted one would be to say that being able to be objective means being able to anticipate and understand what sort of associations other individuals would have when thinking about some particular entity.  Thus, defined this way, being objective means in effect being able to think of the various associations, concerns, and considerations implicitly that other individuals would think of in association to any particular behavior, project, or entity and so forth.  It is a very short distance from here to see that being so objective means being able to see the implications that we call the ones we would say are the ones necessary to know about in order to behave intelligently.
     While of course simply being able to imagine what other people would think is no guarantee that you're going to take into account all of the concerns that one really "should" take into account, and thus not necessarily at all be a guide to intelligent behavior.  The obvious counter argument to this is that when you are not coming up with the "right" considerations, then you are simply not taking into account, necessarily, the appropriate individuals to try and be objective in terms of.  Assessing the objectivity of the opinions you are trying to take into account is obviously only a reapplication of this same task.  (See my discussion of objectivity being "qualified agreement" below for my development of this point.)

    My sense is that doing research in education is fairly difficult simply because of the vast number of variables involved.  For example, one teacher who might be labeled a relatively poor one might happen to be a God's-send to one particular type of student.  The number of variables involved are practically infinite as in any human interaction.  Thus, as a result of this, my sense, too, is that educational research will, as a result, tend to be fairly theory-driven.  Therefore, what I would like to do here is to try and describe a relatively comprehensive theory that would on one hand make interesting predictions and on the other hand account for when straight-forward predictions made by my theory would tend to fail.  
    More precisely, I want to detail when and why individuals would begin to behave more intelligently when they applied the teaching techniques I have described in this paper that implement my theory, and I want to describe when this technique will fail.  In general, as students become more skilled at being able to discern the reasons why they disagree with each other, they will become more intelligent.  But this circumstance is limited by when the reasons that are being brought to bear on the disagreement are unconscious ones.  I feel that this limiting condition is an important one that deserves if not requires study in its own right.
    In this paper what I want to do is focus predominantly, at least in the first part, on the theory underlying the research program that I would like to pursue, and in the second part of this paper I will detail some specific types of teaching procedures that would apply this theory.  In the third part I will describe the dynamics underlying the limiting conditions of the application of the teaching technique and discuss some possible ways of dealing with these conditions.  Then in the fourth part I will address explicitly some of the concerns and issues I imagine I would want to deal with in carrying out a systematic research program to test this theory.  
    I close the paper addressing whether I should be allowed into specifically the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan.

Part One:  That Objectivity Leads to Intelligence

    The purpose of this relatively theoretical part will be to make plausible a rationale for the assertion that teaching individuals to become more objective would make them more intelligent.  To deal with this issue I'm going to have to address issues such as what does it mean to be appropriate.  I am going to argue that to be intelligent, in many respects, is to have the appropriate associations, to think of the appropriate concerns that bear upon a particular situation that one is trying to be intelligent about.
    Trying to talk about, much less trying to prove, what in general makes any thing appropriate or not is a threatening prospect in its abstractness and in the endlessness of the considerations that enter into making any thing appropriate in any particular circumstance.
    Here, I will begin with a very reductionistic analogy, and build my basic premises in terms of it.  I want to discuss just enough of these "philosophical" issues as to allow me to begin to intelligibly discuss and work through a concrete example in the second part.

A "Robot World" Analogy

    To illustrate and to make a little more transparent the dynamics that I'm talking about, I will try and rely upon a relatively extended metaphor which I will refer to here as a "robot world".

appropriateness

    Given a robot with a single goal, anything that would help that robot fulfill its goal would be, for the robot and in terms of its goal, appropriate.  If we give this robot more than one goal, assessing what would be most appropriate for that robot would entail essentially weighing the relative importance of the various goals and then finding those sets of behaviors, or opportunities or experiences if you will, that would achieve the greatest "net" achievement of its goals.  For example, it would be more appropriate for the robot to work towards a less important goal if under the immediate circumstances there were good opportunities to meet it, and there were no opportunities to affect positively or negatively the more important goal(s).  To the extent that you could quantify the relative importance of each goal and the extent to which each goal could be met, you would then be able to in effect quantify the "net appropriateness" of each set of alternatives that the robot was confronted by.
    Obviously, it is very difficult to prioritize, and practically impossible to quantify, our various human concerns.  In fact, simply identifying our various concerns is sometimes a non-trivial task.  The process of learning how to objectify our concerns is a crucial dimension in learning how to become objective and intelligent in general.  Our concerns are going to define what is going to be important, what is going to be appropriate, and what we are going to be intelligent about.  Our culture and our own experience helps us to identify our concerns: this is the process of education.  In the second part of this paper I will describe one procedure that distills this process of explicating concerns, of objectifying them.

agreement
 
    Let me extend this robot-world metaphor into the issue of agreement.  Two robots with the same sets of concerns, and the same sets of experiences (which would shape their beliefs and memories about what does or does not work in terms of satisfying their concerns in terms of their environments), will agree about the appropriateness of a given set of actions under a given set of circumstances.  This follows, straightforwardly, simply from the logic of determinism.  Extended to human beings, this argument would say that to the extent that human beings all have a common set of fundamental concerns, all disagreements between human beings are going to stem from having different experiences, basically.  If people had the same set of experiences they would not disagree with each other, according to this argument.
    Needless to say, no human being has the same set of experiences.  Nonetheless, human beings do have an ability to vicariously put themselves in the position of other human beings.  That is to say, they can imagine having been through the other person's set of experiences and in effect come to understand why someone else would come to different conclusions than they themselves would have about a certain set of circumstances.
    In terms of this robot-world metaphor, all disagreements must stem from some variations of the following circumstances (each of which are obviously variations of each other):  Either 1) individuals bringing to bear different sets of concerns to a common set of circumstances, or 2) their having a different set of experiences (and therefore different beliefs about the set of what the circumstances may mean and what opportunities or threats are in the particular set of circumstances in question), or 3) the two disagreeing robots are attending to different aspects of the same set of circumstances.  Obviously, all three of these alternatives interact and synergistically determine each other.
    In human beings we can assume for this argument that there is a basic set of human concerns which from human to human is basically within understandable "shouting distance" with each other.  (See my discussion of the nature of understanding below in the description of the teaching technique's fifth step.)   These concerns obviously are then shaped by the environment.  
    I am going to define a concern as being anything that would motivate attention: a desire, a fear, a curiosity (which is a very intense human concern), a concern with what other people would think -- anything that would motivate attention.  They can be things that grab our attention out of our sensorium:  We are concerned, however transiently, with loud or sudden or red things, especially wen they are novelties.  We are very concerned about novelty.  Concerns obviously do not necessarily have to even be conscious.  They are the determinants of attention, by definition.

learning from disagreements through objectification

    If we're concerned with trying to increase the capacity of our metaphoric robots to behave appropriately, we are going to want these robots to take into account as many relevant concerns as possible, which would mean recognizing the relevant implications of both the circumstances they're trying to operate in terms of and the actions they are considering under them.  The key term here of course is what is "relevant."  Because what is appropriate is defined in terms of the concerns brought to bear, we humans will do best to rely on entities that share our concerns -- other humans.  When other humans disagree with us about the same subject, then they know, or are "knowing," something that we are not.  And what determined that knowing might be something we would want to know about.
    Any disagreement can be a basis for the individual or robot to think, "Well, what do they know that I don't?"  The other individual may simply be wrong.  In that case, you can help the other individual by making them become aware of the concerns that they themselves would admit would be appropriate for them to be aware of, once they had these concerns pointed out to them.  Obviously, however, this same point can apply to ourselves.  Again, to the extent that we define intelligence and appropriateness as being the ability to maximize the number of important concerns that are being addressed and met, then one's being able to take into account more and more considerations is going to move one towards becoming more and more appropriate and intelligent.  And being able to anticipate the concerns and considerations that other individuals vicariously or otherwise would bring to bear upon a situation will obviously tend to increase one's horizons, that is, how many considerations one will see at all.
    A "division of labor" results when other individuals can explore the same circumstances and discover things that others missed that they all would agree were important.  I want to stress here that truly interesting disagreements are based on more than simple facts about the circumstances.  Discovering how different people categorize a situation, the long term or chronic concerns that shape a whole perspective, can provide insights that will generalize across many particular circumstances and concerns.
    What I am saying is that if, in the process of interacting with other fellow robots, the robots do not disagree about what is appropriate, relatively little will be learned compared to if they did.  That is, our "robots" will learn the most about the opportunities and dangers available in terms of any particular set of circumstances when they can work through to some sort of resolution the bases for any disagreements they may have.  And this, I am saying, entails the process of objectification.
    Working through to "resolution" means in effect that, while the the robots may disagree at the outset about what is or is not appropriate, they can eventually come to at least understand why they are disagreeing.  That is to say, they are able to identify 1) what are the concerns the different robots are bringing to bear; 2) what are the different experiences and/or beliefs that they are bringing to bear about the circumstances and concerns; and 3) what are the salient circumstances they are responding to are in the first place.  Given these defined factors (the generation, definition, and sharing of which being the process of objectification), our "robot world" metaphor would insist that any individual/robot would come to the same conclusions.  Identical input should lead to identical outputs, if you will.  Or at least to a basis for understanding "where the other person is coming from."  (A more detailed discussion of this dynamic is carried out below in the "meaning-making procedure" sections, specifically in terms of the fourth step and how objectivity is qualified agreement.)
    Clearly, experiences can shape our concerns.  Various mechanisms such as imprinting are obvious examples of how our basic biases about what we will choose to identify with or follow, or allow to influence us, are going to be shaped by experience.  Nationalism is  a very fundamental concern in many humans and may seem to be the basis for apparently irreconcilable differences.
    Nonetheless, we can usually come to agree to some sort of meta-agreement over why disagreements are occurring.  More fundamental disagreements tend to stem from when there is no comprehension of what the concerns are that the other individual or robot is holding.  (I will address a crucial set of circumstances that result in the loss from awareness any representation of active concerns in Part Three.)

    Before continuing at this point with a more thorough discussion of some of the different causes for disagreements that could occur (specifically the nature and negotiation of unconscious concerns) I want to make this very abstract discussion somewhat more tangible by beginning to discuss a specific venue which I believe these points can be concretely applied.  That is, I wish to describe two high school classes that would be taught in conjunction with each other -- a writing class and a psychology class.

Part Two:  A Curriculum that implements this argument

    There is no absolutely necessary reason why I am choosing a writing and a psychology class to implement and apply the theoretical principals I've tried to describe above.  However, I will describe in this part the reasons why I think these would be particularly convenient media to do so as I describe the characteristics of the classes.  I will then be weaving back and forth from my robot world metaphor to the descriptions of the class to continue furthering the discussion of the points that I am going to want to develop and research.

The Writing and the Psychology Classes

    I like using a writing class to teach objectivity.  In particular one reason is that members of the class can agree with a high degree of agreement exactly what are the specific set of circumstances they are talking about, i.e., they're all going to be talking about the same text and specifically the same words.  Further, writing allows a great deal of control over the concerns that will tend to be brought to bear.  You can choose materials that can be analyzed by the class that the class will perhaps share a common interest.  Or, and this is an important point, you can have the students decide what they want to write themselves, and this will tend to draw out the individuals to try and work out the implications and thoughts about concerns that are undiscountably came from themselves, issues that command and direct their own attention enough that they chose to write about them.  In the process of learning what other people think in association or about their own formulations about whatever captured their own concerns and attention, these individuals ostensibly could learn a little bit, at least about what other people think and conceivably about considerations and thoughts that they would find themselves appropriate to take into account in the future when dealing  with these same concerns.
    The Psychology class would be in place specifically to be able to provide a framework for dealing with the concerns and issues that I am going to try and describe below.  Specifically, how fundamental disagreements occur, specifically in terms of unconscious concerns that are being brought to bear upon a particular set of circumstances.  The two classes together would be explicitly devoted to try and increase students' skills at becoming more objective, that is, at being able to anticipate what other individuals would think -- not necessarily simply their peers but also ideally anticipating the associations and concerns of individuals who the students themselves would acknowledge as perhaps being more knowledgeable about the concerns and considerations that they're trying to address in their own writing.  Obviously, an instructor is going to be able to help provide information that they may not even be able to imagine in any easy way.  Nonetheless, the point is to teach them this skill so that they can more readily assimilate information as they grow in their abilities to imagine other positions and perspectives.

The Objectification, or "Meaning-Making," Procedure    

    I want to next address a specific type of source of disagreement and how it could be resolved.   The type of disagreement involves how very basic associations are going to differ about the same object of attention.  Let me illustrate this discussion by describing a specific teaching procedure to be used in the writing class to teach the skill of objectification, which I will for our purposes simply refer to as a meaning-making procedure or a sense-making procedure.  I will break it here into five steps.

The first step: defining the target text

    The first step is to specify exactly what we are going to work our objectivity skills out on.  That is, we define a text or segment of text that we are trying to analyze and become objective about.  The first step is for the student to choose some segment of text that they find salient, usually out a common text the entire class is working.  What this means is defining the specific set of words that grabs the student's attention, be it a single word or a sentence or a paragraph, etc., out of the text.  This allows the remainder of the class to become highly objective about what exactly what it is they are to try and associate to.  This in itself is a sometimes non-trivial skill, to simply define what it is that seizes your attention.  (I'll be expanding later, in the section about making such analyses "safe," on variations on this very first step, such as trying to specifically find a point that they find relatively positive as opposed to annoying or ignorant or bad.)  Sometimes I will ask them to choose a part of the text they simply find the least boring if necessary, but generally something that somehow addresses their own concerns in such a way that it becomes salient experientially.  This ability to simply define precisely what is salient to one's own self out of one's own experience -- most specifically in a way relatively independent of other's opinions -- is a non-trivial skill.

    To illustrate this procedure, I will say that the class is analyzing Sylvia Plath's poem "The Rival":

THE RIVAL

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abases her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

    For our purposes here, I will say that one student picked out as salient for himself the last two lines of the poem.

The second step: generating the "gut level" assessment -- the feelings

    In the second step I next asked the student to generate or get a sense of the feeling that they have about or an association to this chosen salient aspect of the text.  Again, for the reasons that I described in the first step, this is a non-trivial skill to be able to identify out of one's own experience those aspects that belong and originate specifically out of one's own self, and are not simply what one might anticipate others might feel or expect one to feel.  This sharpens the individual's sense of self and of the concerns, responses, and feelings that they have that are unique to their own self.

The third step: objectifying the feeling

    In the third step I explicitly ask the student to "objectify" the feeling that they have come up with in the second step.  What this means is that I ask the student to generate some sort of association, be it from memory or fantasy or from anywhere they can think of, that, while different from the chosen salient aspect of the text, still has or at least as closely approximates as possible the same feeling that a student was able to generate in the second step.  

    The rationale for the second and third steps relies on a set of arguments that would go beyond the scope of this paper to thoroughly discuss, though these arguments are themselves I believe worthwhile research topics.  Very briefly, these arguments assert that there are levels of categorization and response in the human information processing system, and that feelings correspond to the experiential component of the levels that are the earliest and the most basic, in the sense that subsequent processing is done in terms of these first categorizations.  To "tune" or objectify or make more appropriate these first levels' responses would clearly carry these effects down into the subsequent levels.  
    Further, and this has practical implications for teaching, because these basic levels of categorization are relatively less embedded in presuppositions that lie out of immediate awareness, say compared to categorizations done at the level of ideologies, they are much more accessible to being so "tuned," they can have the entire array of presuppositions underlying them turned out for experiential inspection and qualification.

objectifying is not normalizing

    Let me stress here that this skill of "objectifying" a personal sense one has of some object of attention is not being offered simply as a device to "shape" students' feelings or responses to fit into norms.  If anything, by thought is that this procedure will train individuals to be able to make their own personal experiences explicable to others.  In fact, this skill should allow students to challenge the norms and cliches they are exposed to by enabling them 1) to analyze and understand just where these norms came from, i.e. to discern the common concerns and experiences that crystallized the cliches and set the norms, and 2) to generate accessible bridging analogues for their own sense of their own experience of the common object(-s) of attention, giving them the "fodder" if you will that they or anyone needs to get someone else to understand something they did not understand before.  (For more on this point, see the example in the section on the fifth step of this technique.)

the example

    Let's briefly refer back to our example.  In this case we will say that he said that, while this image he's about to offer does not completely capture the feeling he has for the two lines he's picked out of the poem, it does approximate at least some of the strongest feelings that the lines give him.
    The image, he says, is from a movie that he thinks he saw but he can't even remember if the scene was described to him or he actually saw it.  The image is of a guy hurrying down a dark city street and looking over his shoulder all the time, while some psycho killer is pursuing him.  With a little questioning, the student adds that the guy in his image isn't sure that anybody is actually after him, but he's feeling "really paranoid, like somebody's after him."

    I want to add that there are any number of different formats for practicing this technique.  For example, one student could pick out a segment of text but then a number of students besides the choosing student would then be asked to come up with feeling-matching associations.
    Also, before moving on, I want to make a point that I will develop more in Part Three:  I feel strongly, for reasons that I will detail later, that students should be totally free to "pass" at any time they feel like not participating in class.  Again, there are any number of different ways of formatting the practice of this technique, such as through writing assignment where the students can have more control over what they will practice on.
    The central point that I can not underline enough is that the students should feel safe as they explore "meaning making."  Intuitively this point may seem obvious, but I will return to it explicitly regardless in Part Three.

The fourth step: assessing the objectivity of the association and the feeling

    The fourth step is going to be an almost automatic process of trying to see whether other individuals share the same association or not, or whether they have the same feeling to that particular association.  This is essentially the step of trying to go through the process of assessing whether the associations are objective or subjective.  But before continuing with the example, I feel I need to clarify some more theoretical points, specifically about what "objectivity" and "subjectivity" actually are.

Objectivity as qualified agreement

    When we talk about objectivity or subjectivity we are not making judgements about a relative degree of "realness," but rather we are talking about the capacity to generate degrees of qualified agreement about one's assessments or associations to something.
    I speak of qualified agreement in the sense of the same way that we may agree with an explorer who has gone to some territory we ourselves have not gone to but we could in principal go to that territory and check the maps that that explorer returns with.  It is essentially a division of labor where we will defer to someone else's expertise because they have done the work for us, essentially checking out what concerns or circumstances exist in some area that we may be curious about.  Similarly, if someone "does not know the territory" we may not very well respect the fact that they disagree with our opinions about that territory which we ourselves feel very familiar with.  It is on this basis that we can start speaking of a qualified agreement, a qualified basis for consensus about deciding what is relatively true, appropriate or real.  
    (To be sure, I personally am a radical skeptic and do not believe that any human being necessarily has any necessary logical basis for assuming that any belief or perception necessarily corresponds to a reality that exists wholly independent of experience.  On the other hand, I am also a pragmatist in that I am willing to act upon certain conceptions I have of reality, i.e., beliefs.  These beliefs may not be correct, they may be ill-founded, but they will be good enough to guide my actions.  For practical purposes I'm going to assume that there probably is an independent reality while I'll also have to grant philosophically that may not be true.)

Assessing appropriateness versus right or wrong

    Returning to the writing class, what this operationally means is that when people disagree with others' associations to or feelings about some saliently chosen aspect of the text, these disagreements are the basis only for saying that the feelings or what-not are only relatively subjective -- specifically in the sense that they are not easily understandable.  The efforts to make sense of these disagreements are to be spent working towards defining what are the differences in the concerns and beliefs that are causing the disagreement, and not who is right or wrong.  
    This is NOT to say that assessments can not be made about whether one conclusion or reaction is more appropriate than another.  I've argued above, in my discussion of appropriateness in the robot world, that this can in principle even be quantified.  Rather, such assessments must take into account the matrix of concerns, beliefs, and perceptions that the questioned conclusion emerged from.  Assessments of relative appropriateness approximate those of right and wrong, but the former (as I'm defining the former) is more explicit in taking into account the context of the feeling, association, or conclusion, than the later.  "Right and wrong" at least specifically connotes an assessment of appropriateness that stands independently of context.  Such assessments, which fail to account for defining contextual variables, are seriously impaired in their ability to explain the origins of differences, especially deep ones, and as such do not richly facilitate understanding well, nor, I would argue, the development of general intelligence skills.

    (I want to note how in some respects it is harder to assess the "right-or-wrong-ness" of feelings or associations than an argument's conclusions, though it is obviously done.  My real point is that this sense-making procedure can be applied to logical arguments as well as "free associations," though at such high levels of categorization and information processing the assumptions and their relative objectivity and appropriateness can be very deeply buried, and thus not nearly as accessible to resolution as associations and "gut-level" feelings are.  This I hope will go towards explaining part of my bias towards using a writing class practice these skills.)

the example

    Returning to our example, one format for practicing this technique would be to have student, after a segment of text has been defined, first all come up with their own feeling-matching association before hearing anyone else's.  Then (again, allowing anyone to "pass" if they so feel), we could go around the class and garner a set of associations.  This, alone, would be a straightforward means of generating concrete associations that could be used as the basis for comparison and analysis.
    So, let us say that in this case that, in a small sample, there were two more associations to slasher films, a girl comes up with an image of being lost in a desert with space aliens landing, at least two passes, one boy comes up with a government conspiracy involving maybe a tax audit, another boy vividly imagines his Aunt Edna, and one girl has a warm, nurturing image of a mother hiking on vacation in Africa (or, with prodding, in Scotland so its not literally the same image as in the selected text) and being still preoccupied about her daughter's safety back in the USA.  Several people disagree about whether it is the author or the person the poem is addressed to who is "walking about in Africa."

The fifth step: understanding

    After making assessments of whether the associations or feelings are shared or agreed with or not, that is, how relatively objective or subjective they are,  the next, fifth, step moves on to try and understand the bases for the various agreements or disagreements.  That is, to understand the associations/feelings and their origins.

    For our purposes here we can define understanding as being able to first evoke a related or relatable analogue to what we are trying to understand, and then to assimilate the novel object in terms of that analog that we feel we already understand.  That is to say, if we can relate it to something we feel we already understand, the novel thing feels itself understood.  This of course only speaks to the experience of feeling like we understand something:  The analogue or category we are assimilating the novelty to may itself be something others might not understand.  Obviously, this discrepancy itself is fodder for analysis, as it is in everyday life and in socialization generally.
    Pragmatically, what this means is that sometimes the associations will feel very straight-forward and they "simply make sense" if you will, and no one has any problem "understanding" the association.  However, to understand the association in more detail, or if the association seems overtly unrelated to the target of the association (i.e. the originally chosen salient aspects of the text) then to understand where the association came from would require somewhat more detailed analysis.  
    This is done in a relatively straight-forward manner by specifically trying to find any and all similarities that exist between the association and the target of the association.  Those commonalties we will assume are going to be the so-called "active ingredients" for causing the common feeling that the target and the association have.  Further, whenever there is any question about whether the association is related to the target or not, we simply have to reach for whether the feeling is the same or not.  If other individuals do not have the same feeling to the association, then this process of "focusing" the association would be the means for trying to make salient those aspects of the "target text" that caused that feeling for the student that generated the association.  And what will commonly happen is that the associator will find that their association was shaped by more than just the targeted text.

the example

    Let's return to the example.  First of all, most students will feel they understand their own associations.  (I will address the exceptions below.)
    (I feel like explicitly noting tat the analyses offered in these examples are necessarily going to be very cursory, and only long enough to illustrate the processes involved.)
    We will say that the three "psycho" associators felt they understood their associations.  But in pressing them to analyze their associations, they had to find specific aspects of their associations and of the text that had common feelings.
    Being stalked in the psycho associated scenes, and being stalked in Africa by the person "walking about" there was one attempt.  Another was that the author was in America maybe while the stalking-hiker was still in Africa, but somehow the walker was still a threat to the author in America.  Eventually aspects of the entire text, beyond the targeted segment, were appealed to:  the enemy  can make stone out of everything, like a Gorgon; or, better, dissatisfactions arriving like carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas -- better yet by mail, thus being able to inflict damage from one continent to another.  The "psycho" associations capture a murderous, killing quality in common with these above aspects.
    We will say here that the girl who associated aliens coming down to a girl lost in a desert did not feel she understood her own association.  Again, focusing on those particulars of the association and the (targeted) text that were especially salient would be the means of analyzing the association.
    The desert could connect for her (or for others in the class as they associated to and analyzed the relationship between her association and the (targeted) text -- remember that there are any number of formats for practicing this technique) with the images of the moon and the mausoleum, and by looking at what these three features have in common the class would have an easy opportunity to distill a super-ordinate category of bareness, of emotional desolation, that the features all shared.  A similar process would connect the aliens with the moon, and a more difficult to label super-ordinate category would emerge, of emotional alienness, which in turn could be connected to the "psycho" associations.

    Clearly, this process would press students squarely up against how our labels, categories, norms and cliches are themselves all distillations of associated particulars o experience; hardly an insight that lends itself to making one want to "normalize" one's idiosyncrasies, even if one could.

    Further, it should be clear that this practice would make students much more sensitive to connotations and implications.  Again, while it is an acknowledged jump to generalize from being able to assess the connotations of a poem to, say, the consistency of the logic of an argument, I'm going to argue that there are fundamentally similar skills utilized in both activities.  And that these skills are at least honed by being able to anticipate what others would understand about what one is attending to.  (That this makes the development of intelligence skills an at least socially sensitive product is obvious, but a topic beyond this paper's domain to develop sensitively.)

caveat

    There still remains a fundamental problem here however.  The examples so far have involved differences that were able to be resolved by all the parties involved.  (That one boy who thought of his Aunt Edna told an arresting anecdote about her that hit a cord in the class.)  But I have deliberately included in my example a more difficult association, where the individual first had difficulty even coming up with an image different from the target text's, and then interpreted it in a way that was both at odds with most of the rest of the class's associations and was also relatively inflexible and intolerant of ambiguity or ambivalence, in spite of features in the general text or the class's associations that would seem to contradict her sense of the target text (though the girl who associated the aliens in the desert could sense some connection with this girl's association).  And the girl felt very confident that she understood her own association.
    Sometimes apparently no resolution is forth-coming.  With this technique we are building a vicarious space, if you will, where one individual can work to position their self to recognize what some of the concerns are that the first individual had in order to generate the not understood association or feeling.  But clearly, if what was involved in all disagreements was as straight-forward as this account has been up to now, the world would be a dramatically less disagreeable place.    At this point then, we must explore another set of considerations to account for the origins of disagreement, considerations that must be explicitly allowed for especially in any research program devoted to exploring the nature and effects of training in objectivity skills.  To understand disagreements in any general way, we must address the phenomenology of psychodynamics.

Part Three:  Understanding disagreements based on preconscious and unconscious concerns and beliefs

    This segment of this paper is going to move towards accounting for apparently un-understandable, inexplicable, fundamental disagreements.  I will do this by making reference to unconscious psychodynamics.  Understanding the nature of unconscious concerns, and specifically learning how these concerns can manifest themselves in disagreements in assessments of the objectivity of one's associations, say, in the writing class, could teach an individual 1) to become more objective about the limits of their own capacities to be objective, 2) expand their capacities for empathy and understanding with other individuals, including that of their limits at being objective.   I would argue that this would provide a terribly important perspective and basis for furthering understanding and the patience necessary to develop a consciousness of intelligent implications.

    As in the previous parts of this paper, I am going to begin with a theoretical discussion before turning to more concrete illustrations of my points.  In this particular case the discussion may seem especially elementary at times.  These are my reasons for being so:  First, this is a sample of what I found to be relatively intelligible to the high school students that I have taught this material to.  Second, this is my "theoretical orientation."  Third, because of both of the preceding reasons and because of the very real political explosiveness of this material, I want very much to err on the side of exhaustive clarity.  As I have and will again note, I recognize that there is, to say the least, a real capacity for significant controversy to explode around the issue of whether psychodynamics should be taught in public schools.  I want to be clear about what I mean when I say that I want to research teaching such material.
    One option I want to make explicit is that many if not all of the benefits of the writing course's practicing of the meaning-making technique may very well be obtained without any extensive emphasis on the psychodynamic theory that I will be dealing with in this part.  This is another empirical question.  I am describing this material and how it could be taught however in order to be explicit about what are a crucial set of boundary conditions within which the meaning-making technique will work, but not outside of them.
    The characterization of psychodynamics below is what would be covered in more detail specifically in the psychology class that accompanies the writing class.  The psychology class would provide a framework for understanding some of the successes and failures to work to resolution the various disagreements that would occur in the writing class.  Make no mistake:  It would be stressed as being absurd to say that every unresolved disagreement was caused by unconscious (versus preconscious -- see below) motivations.  But it would allow a perspective for understanding how at least some disagreements of perspective could be understood empathically.

    Another, last, point about the curriculum of the psychology class before turning to very briefly outlining the nature of psychodynamics:   In teaching material about psychodynamics I am explicitly not offering to practice psychotherapy.  Admittedly, the technique I have described for the writing class has a more than family-resemblance to psychoanalytic techniques.  It should:  I distilled it from them through the filter of my understandings about cognitive psychology.  But practicing it with high school students does not make them patients any more than it makes me an analyst.  (In fact, in my personal research, working three and a half years as a volunteer high school teacher, where my students earned high school credit, I have developed several techniques to protect my students from any too-invaisive "instruction.") The technique is a striped-down-for-transport set of practices that, I am arguing, makes available to a relatively more adaptive and certainly larger potential population some of the benefits of the techniques that have been among the most successful in improving the adaptability of some extremely disturbed individuals.  It is a cliche in psychotherapy research that the healthiest patients benefit the most from practically any "therapeutic" intervention.  In many respects then, my proposed research is an effort to develop effective means of sharing with a much wider population a distilled version of the most beneficial and basic insights made by psychotherapists.

How the failure to account for determining information causes unresolvable disagreement, the inability to understand

    Let me begin by reviewing on a very general level how the feelings, associations, conclusions, "output" if you will,  are generated and understood in the first place, and then move to note how the failure to be able to account for some of the determinants would result in a failure to understand.

    Referring back to the robot-world metaphor, we can remember that any output of the machine, if you will, is going to be the result essentially of 1) the concerns, the goals that machine brings to bear, upon 2) the particular circumstances that the machine perceives and is responding to, and 3) the various beliefs as as result of the varied experiences that the machine has had that are activated by the circumstances and the concerns.  All three of these interact in very dynamic synergistic ways.
    We can link the robot-world to the writing class in these ways:  1) First, we can assume that because the individuals involved are human they are going to have a fundamentally common beginning basic set of human concerns to build up upon.  2) By specifically designating a selected aspect of the text, we can control for the specific external circumstances that are evoking the "output," and continue to refer to them with a high degree of reliability in assuming that this is the specific context that is activating the belief or association that we are trying to understand.  3) Thus, what we are going to try and understand, what will vary the most between individuals, will be the set of experiences that shape beliefs and associations about the circumstances, which of course do shape both (a) what aspects of the target is even going to be noticed much less associated to, and (b) which particular concerns, out of this same common set they may have, will be activated and brought to the fore, and which others perhaps even repressed.  

    To understand another's "output," the understander must in effect create a sort of "vicarious space" within which they can recreate all the pertinent variables that determine the output.  Again, the assumption illustrated by the robot world metaphor is that if given the same information, the same output would result, and that analogously people have a capacity to vicariously process the relevant variables to at least understand another human's "output."
    So, simply put, if we cannot understand another's feelings or beliefs, we, "simply," do not have the information to construct a sufficiently accurate vicarious model of the other's experience.

    I have belabored this framework in order to press this point:  That there are only two types of information that can go unaccounted for in any and all accounts of the causes of an "output" that result in a disagreement, and that these two types of information can be characterized well by the psychodynamic concepts of preconscious and unconscious knowledge.  Further, the meaning-making procedure can make the former information available relatively easily, but can only access the later type of information only under special circumstances and often with great effort, if at all.  (On the other hand, this technique may be the only reasonable or systematic means of accessing unconscious knowledge.)

The two forms of unaccounted information:   preconscious and unconscious knowledge

    Preconscious knowledge corresponds to anything that could be made conscious with any sort of effort.  Usually this applies to things such as, say, your name, but can also extend to areas such as the number of windows in the house that you grew up in.  It's not information that may readily spring to mind and may require some effort to bring it to consciousness, but it is information that is available.  In cognitive psychology a distinction is made between internal and external memory, where internal memory would correspond to what we normally refer to as memory, and external memory would refer to things like books or what appears on a blackboard, basically anything that falls within the sensory field, such as what someone says or could tell us.  Thus, practically all external memory that is not already in consciousness would be preconscious knowledge in terms of these distinctions ( -- with the qualification that some of this may be unconscious in the sense to be defined below).  Preconscious information could be the information in a point or consideration that a friend mentions, or what someone who is qualified to make an assessment of the circumstances could point out to you, some feature of the "territory" that you heretofore had not noticed or had not known.  
    The meaning-making procedure is clearly a device for mining preconscious information of this sort: feelings, associations, meanings, considerations, beliefs, etc., that one or an other can share with one's self or the other, given the effort of objectifying this information.  In principle, according to the logic of the robot world metaphor, a complete enough account of the factors behind any "output" can eventually given that would allow any reasonably human and empathic other to understand the feeling/association/etc.'s occurrence.

    Unconscious concerns and considerations on the other hand, as defined within the psychoanalytic framework, are specifically concerns that the individual is motivated to not want to think about.  To extrapolate from one of the examples taken to illustrate preconscious information, suppose instead of thinking of the number of windows in the house one grew up in, one had to think of, say, the worst traits of one's best friend.  In some respects this is information that one would feel relatively uncomfortable thinking about, and so you might be motivated to not want to think about it.  If we extend this into thinking about things like the worst traits of, say, yourself or things that would make one's self feel guilty or emotionally bad for whatever reason, these become pieces of information, sometimes even concerns, that the individual will be motivated to not want to think about.  However, just because a piece of information is not thought about does not mean at all that the information (say, for example, that a concern exists within the individual and the individual cares really very deeply about it, regardless of how much the individual also does NOT WANT TO CARE) is not going to have a profound effect upon the individual's "output."  This is in effect what an unconscious motivating concern is.
    Attempts to apply the meaning-making procedure to such factors in a subjective account of an output are going to encounter the resistance of the motivations that do not want to make these factors conscious.  At this abstract point, an example is called for to illustrate it.

An illustration of an unconscious motivating concern

    Let me start with perhaps an almost a facetious example that I have used in my classes and try to develop it to illustrate this point.  Many years ago I read in the juvenile humor magazine, Mad Magazine, an article from their "Birth Announcements We Would Like To See Department," in which one of these birth announcements was as follows:  "Dr. and Mrs. James Johnson are happy to announce the birth of their son, Dr. James Johnson, Jr."  This birth announcement, this joke,  illustrates the grain of truth, however, of how some parents may put very heavy expectations upon what sort of things their children should value.  James Jr. may wind up growing up being rewarded somewhat disproportionately whenever he expressed an interest to become a doctor and may be disproportionately punished if he expresses anything suggesting that he might not want to become a doctor.  We could half assume that this might generalize in James Jr. to the point where he has a general idealization of doctors in general that is not rooted at all in any basis intrinsic to what being a doctor might mean independently of his parents' opinions.
    At this point, we can start imagining how "James Jr." could sometimes be "crowded" or "interrupted" in his own assessments of what was salient or an appropriate response or association to any task or set of circumstances that reminds him of the issues involving being a doctor.  Thus, he may come up with associations that are relatively subjective or he may simply pick out a part of the text that no one else would think was very interesting, perhaps compared to what other people thought.
    To be sure, just because someone comes up with an association that we do not understand does not prove that they are in the grips of some neurotic denial of their fears.  The meaning-making technique, if anything, would be a means of beginning to put into proportion experiences that we may not otherwise be able to.  I am raising these dynamics in order to be exhaustive in characterizing the boundaries of the theoretical framework I am developing in this paper.

    Essentially, the dividing line between what is going to be conscious and unconscious is going to be the dividing line between what is going to be felt to be manageable and what is going to feel unmanageable to deal with emotionally.  We have all wakened from nightmares from which our gut reaction was we don't want to think about it anymore.
    But just because "James Jr." does not feel like thinking about how he may not be a lovable person if he doesn't become a doctor, that does not mean he will not be constantly concerned with trying to be a doctor.  A soldier may go through extended efforts to prepare against an enemy but will not want to vividly detail in his mind his getting killed.  He will develop his defenses to avoid being killed without trying to think about too much detail the particular result if he fails.  But going a step further, in certain cases of what we may now speak of as psychopathology and the development of a false-self, the very fact of the possibility that one does not have a genuine gut desire or love to become a doctor could itself be a source of extreme anxiety, perhaps unmanageable anxiety.

 the example revisited

    I have tried to characterize a sort of "worst case" example of a student who's ability to be objective has been impaired by the sorts of unmanageable concerns that I have described above.  Basically, to describe her in an almost characaturing psychological short-hand, I have constructed her as a girl so threatened by the ambivalences she has for and fears in her own mother that she blocks out from awareness even relatively oblique reminders of these concerns of hers, "even" when they reside in a poem.  (Great poetry of course is valued because of its emotional impact.  Again, I have constructed this example deliberately.)  
    The explicit dangers are that she will be ridiculed for her apparently subjective associations and her relative stubbornness in regards to her unwillingness to admit to their apparent obliviousness to what seem to be obviously disqualifying considerations.  If she is ridiculed, this would only compound the lack of psychic "space" or emotional freedom she has in regards to the problematic material, and, more importantly, would deny the fact that her association reflects a psychological reality, one that has an objective value and meaning.
    The girl with the aliens in the desert association was, in our story, the first student to sense this.  She linked the image of a nurturing, warm mother with her aliens by way of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the friendly alien's huge "Mother Ship."  In this way this girl was able to begin to broach the combination of negative and positive feelings that the poem implicitly evoked.  The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.  It was implicitly the intensity of the hope for love from the "Moon Queen" of the poem that made her expressions of dissatisfaction so mortifying.  It was only the intensity of the love that made the emotional coldness so devastating.
    Now, again, it is just this sort of insight that could be felt to be over-powering for someone like the girl with the warm mother association.  Everything hangs in the psychological space the girl experiences, both in the class and within herself.  The class could idealize the fact that she came up with a facet of the poem that they (arguably because of their unconscious disinclinations to broach it) had mostly failed to sense.  They may note that most of them disagree with her degree of emphasis, but a crucial dimension of the class's atmosphere is a respect and recognition of the limits of discourse.  In an ideal class the students would be able to discriminate cases where a free-wheeling exchange of criticisms would be safe and fun from those instances where they would know when to lay off and let material "pass."  The class itself is supposed to help teach this.
    This is a non-trivial problem, and I have no final answers.  One measure I adopted when I was experimenting with developing this technique was to stress having the kids select those aspects of text (especially when they were analyzing each other's works) that they liked the best, emphasizing the positive.  I wanted to have them develop a skill more than to perfect any single work, so having them building on their strengths, even to the neglect of working on their weaknesses in the short-run, in the long run tended to give them the confidence and space to deal with their weaknesses later.  (Even weaknesses can be dealt with positively by monitoring the weakness and when it is less bad than usual, rewarding them then by noting their genuine improvement.)
    Regardless of the difficulties and risks involved however, I feel that the effort is worthwhile.  I want to pursue research that would itself objectify the effects this technique has on students who practice it.  For the reasons I have detailed above, I sense that the practice of the technique would have a real impact on their skills at being meaningfully intelligent in a general and generalizable way.  But for the same reasons that it may be effective, it could be a potentially harmful, in that it addresses dealing with concerns that can be personally important, and that is not to be dealt with lightly.  Thus the importance of making the classes implementing these ideas as emotionally safe as possible.

The necessity of making the classes and the procedure emotionally "safe" and manageable

    What this all leads up to is the fact that one source of disagreement that could occur when students were trying to be objective about a text is going to sometimes be concerns that have been repressed because they feel emotionally unmanageable.  Learning how to deal with and negotiate such concerns is a non-trivial task, and frankly I feel that dealing explicitly with particular personal issues is inappropriate in a classroom setting.
    An analogy can perhaps be made with sex education.  Everyone can have directly applicable personal experiences related to the subject matter, but much of the class's information is devoted to dealing with the subject matter in a responsible and manageable way -- which includes as a central theme that one should not deal with the subject matter in a direct and personal way until and unless one is properly prepared and ready to do so.  Nonetheless, the class can also say that dealing with the subject matter eventually is both inevitable and actually desirable, and that there are indeed ways available to prepare for this.

    Thus, I am stressing the potential importance of accompanying the writing class with the psychology class. I taught writing for one term and then psychology, the Psychology of Neurosis specifically, for six terms on a volunteer basis at Community High School between 1978 and 1981.  In the Psychology class I explicitly did not turn it into a psychotherapy group, and did not allow students to speak about their own lives, but rather instead would analyze videotapes of psychologically accurate films (such as Ordinary People) or short vignettes from evocative short stories, to allow them to keep the material of these various accounts of psychopathology, of people trying to negotiate unmanageable concerns, at a certain arm's length distance so that they could keep it manageable in their own minds and say, "oh, that's only a story."  
    In the writing class I always explicitly allowed students to be able to "pass" if they didn't feel like dealing with a certain association or exercise.  The important thing at this point is to try and make the situation as safe as possible for students so that they can feel comfortable even acknowledging that they don't feel like dealing with a certain subject, and somehow trying to remove any sense of onus from someone holding a relatively personal or subjective association.  Poetry can often be a rich source of extremely delicate and emotionally loaded associations, especially for the author.  Usually students will be guarded enough that they will only bring to the class what they would find manageable to share.  Nonetheless, it is a consideration that should be guarded for and taken into account.
    As potentially emotionally upsetting as the risk may be of dealing, however, indirectly and sensitively to unconscious concerns, the benefits of continuing the practice of this meaning-making procedure, of this practice of learning to become objective, I believe far outweigh the potential dangers.  Essentially, the individual will learn to become more empathic, better able to understand both others and their own selves, and thus, arguably, much more compassionate.  And these would be giant steps toward essentially becoming more reasonable, more intelligent, more appropriate in general.

Part Four:  Research Concerns

    In this last section what I want to try to do is try and detail some of the issues that I'm going to have to negotiate in order to do research on the issues, theory, and procedures that I've described above.

    To be candid, I do not have a lot of experience as a researcher:  One of my central purposes in desiring to attend to graduate school is to learn how to become a good one.  I recognize that, while an interesting theory can hold attention and sustain interest and efforts towards exploring and pursuing the theory's dictates, in the long run what counts is what will pay off, and research is basically the systematic determination of what indeed works.
    Thus, in this closing section I will only cursorily allude to some of the topics that I can see at this outset as being obvious candidates for investigation.  I am very  interested in any comments or thoughts that any reader might have about this paper.

    A central concern will be to define and create instruments for defining students' objectivity, intelligence, and their relationship.  Clearly this is the subject matter of psychological testing, a long, large, and embattled terrain of endeavor, about which I honestly need to learn more about.  But there already exist obviously many instruments, and a significant portion of my education and research efforts will be devoted to mastering this terrain.  With this experience I will doubtlessly work to create my own instruments, ones specifically sensitive to issues of objectivity, implication, and sense-making.
    Candidly, I am also keenly interested in exploring the possibility of building some sort of computerized simulation that captures the dynamics and qualities of a system that makes assessments of "net appropriateness" and that generates and utilizes implications to make these assessments.  Such a simulation, beyond being evocative of the mind's central dynamics, could also possibly guide empirical predictions.
    Various measures also could perhaps be made to warn an instructor whether relatively unmanageable concerns were perhaps coming to surface or not.  Such indices should also be a guard against the instructor themselves being too intrusive.  Very simple techniques such as tending to stress that students should focus on relatively positive aspects of papers that were written by fellow students would be a relatively elementary measure and precaution:  There are any number of dimensions over which different ways of expressing this could be tested for their effectiveness.

what should I be doing?

    Other dimensions that could be explored are teacher and student characteristics.  Laying aside for now teacher training issues (which are interesting), it would seem that this technique could in principle be applied to not just the high school students that I first explored it with.  Obviously college students could practice it.
    Thinking along these lines, it occurred to me that a logical extrapolation of the above notion was that this technique could be applied to training clinicians, at which point a part of me balked.
    I should say that I am aware that apparently some three years ago a sharp division occurred in the Combined Program to which I am at this writing applying to.  Those with clinical interests seem to have pretty much left the program, and "rumor has it" that a deep suspicion remains that some people might try and use the program as a means of getting into the clinical program.
    My "balk" above was a gut reaction in terms of my more if not most important personal and professional concerns.  While I obviously have a real interest in clinical psychology, I have no interest in being a clinician.  I love teaching however.  Further, I have a very bad feeling about how insular and relatively unshared the insights clinical psychology has are.  While Freud's notions of an unconscious have in a bastardized form become folk-lore,  the common level of psychological sophistication or empathy seems appalling, and I find the notion of putting my own energy into supporting a discipline whose best efforts seem to go to helping a stunningly small percentage of the population disturbing.  Make no mistake -- I am not disparaging clinicians nor their work, I am simply so wildly alive to the idea that a massively larger number of people could be being helped, that the adaptive could be made more so if you will, that I feel I would be cheating myself and the culture and world I am committed to by restricting myself to such a small goal.

    Is the Combined Program in Education and Psychology an appropriate venue for me?  This particular draft of this paper has been prepared in order to make my ideas available to especially those individuals who might have a hand in deciding whether I will be allowed into it or not.  Are my ideas too clinical?  Where else should I go?  I am certainly not drawn to the clinical program.  Should I have tried to apply to the School of Education?  What schools besides the University of Michigan would be best for me with my interests?
    I am genuinely very interested in anyone's qualified opinions about these questions.  I like AnnArbor, I was born here, and because of a gaggle of physical injuries moving from here into a new land would a hassle, but if that is what it would take to further this agenda I have described, I'll pack.
    Is this a legitimate agenda?  How might I best pursue it?  What kind of preparation would be best for me to have in order to pursue it?  ANYTHING!  I've been on my back for too many years, reading and thinking, and I'd like to start moving again.

    My purpose in applying to graduate school, specifically the Combined Program in Education and Psychology, was and is to develop, temper and test this model that I've outlined.  I hope that this draft helps to guide me to an appropriate venue to pursue and objectify my concerns.

any comments would be welcome

    Charles P. VanBoven