Instant Genius - How thinking more radically can help us see the bigger picture

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

These days we’re constantly bombarded with information, be it from television, social media, friends and family or simply from the world around us. But how do we interpret this information, what role do our beliefs play and how can we harness the power of critical thinking in our daily lives. In this episode, we catch up with Peter Lamont, a professor of history and theory of psychology at the University of Edinburgh to talk about his latest book Radical Thinking: How to see the bigger picture. He tells us why we should constantly be questioning the foundation of our beliefs, why we should recognise and embrace our limitations and how thinking radically all begins with curiosity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goegett. commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. These days we're constantly bombarded with information,

be it from television, social media, friends and family, or simply from the world around us. But how do we interpret this information? What role do our beliefs play? And how can we harness the power of critical thinking in our daily lives? In this episode, we catch up with Peter Lamont, a professor of history and theory of psychology at the University of Edinburgh, to talk about his new book, Radical Thinking.

He tells us why we should be constantly questioning the foundation of our beliefs, why we should recognise and embrace our limitations, and how thinking radically all begins with curiosity. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So today we're talking about your book, Radical Thinking, How to See the Bigger Picture. At the start of the book, you say it's all about the need to be more curious.

So what do you mean by that? And why is that so important? Yes. So I think it begins with curiosity. I mean, what became a book really started a few years ago when I created a new critical thinking course at the University, the University of Edinburgh when I work. And the practical problem is how can you help students

to think more critically? And when you look at the literature, and I looked at the whole history of critical thinking, There are some common themes, you know, logic and scientific method and increasingly the various errors and biases and why we get things wrong, which I think are fine but kind of limited. But regardless of that, whatever you do to think critically, knowing how isn't enough, you actually need to do it. And that takes effort. And so a way to do that is to begin with curiosity, with an awareness that there's something that you don't know. And that leads you to ask questions and look further.

Plus it also helps you find the world more interesting, which is no bad thing. So for example, in one of the lectures I gave in the course, I would begin by pointing at an old portrait on a wall of a Victorian gentleman. And this is in a lecture theatre where the students have been before many times. And you just begin by saying, do you know who that is? Do you know why that painting is hanging there? And now they're curious about, well, who is it? And so you can use that as a way into delivering narratives or evidence or whatever it might be that help people understand how they think.

So the curiosity thing is a way in, a way to get people. and the book takes a similar approach. Begin with something that's hopefully interesting and curious, and then as people get into it, they learn things along the way. So you mentioned their critical thinking, but the book's called radical thinking. So what's the distinction between the two there? Right.

So yes, so it begins as a critical thinking project. The problem with critical thinking, if you like, is that the term has come to mean all kinds of things. things. So, you know, even Christian fundamentalists will say that critical thinking is a good thing. But what they mean is that critical thinking is needed to question the facts of evolutionary theory because they contradict the truth of the Bible. Okay. That's obviously not what I mean. And then even with experts in critical thinking, we disagree about what precisely that is. You know, is it an ability? Is it a trait? Is it specific sense?

skills. And then there's always talked about errors and biases and why we get things wrong. So what I wanted to get back to is what I think is what critical thinking should be. And the reason that's called it radical thinking, radical from the Latin, radic meaning root. It's about questioning the foundations of our beliefs. That's what I think proper critical thinking should be. So you say that a good place to start is by recognising our limits. So what do you mean by that? And how can we go about that? I suppose the first thing is just to be aware of our limit. In the book, I talk about various things that shape our thoughts.

So whatever you think, it depends on what you notice. If you don't notice something, you won't think about it. Whatever you notice, it depends on how you interpret it. We don't see the world as it really is. So we see a fraction of what's going on at any given time. Whatever we see, we interpret it one way or another. and it's on this basis that we come up with a world view. So none of us is truly objective.

So part of it is just recognising that these are our natural limits. They're not flaws or errors. We're not meant to be perfect. It's just being aware of that. And from that, hopefully, you get more openness to alternative views to people who notice other things and interpret them in different ways. And by being open to them, we need to agree with them. but we can get a sense of perspective, in that sense of a bigger picture and see our own position

within it. So related to that, you mentioned that we experience a sort of false feeling of completeness when it comes to our knowledge of the world. So how can we avoid falling into that trap? Yeah, so I think that refers to, I talk a little bit about psychology and perception. Psychologists will tell you, we don't see the world like a camera. We notice part of parts of a scene, we build up a picture of the hole by filling in the gaps. So there's work on things like change blindness and inattentional blindness that show how we fail to notice things without being aware of it. And more broadly, of course, in the world, we often think that we have a more complete picture than we really do. So one of the examples I give, like in a real

world example in the book is that of Encyclopedia Britannica. So when that began at the end of the 18th century, it was supposed to be a book that contained the whole of human knowledge. But when you actually read it, you see it's a very limited picture. So in various ways we can see. We don't notice everything. We don't know all the facts. So the only trap is in thinking that we do.

And that, if you like, is also basic scientific thinking. You know, scientific knowledge is uncertain. if new evidence comes along, we change our mind. And so scientific knowledge changes over time. And again, it's that. It's about the outcome. I remember during lockdown, you'd hear some critics of science saying,

oh, these scientists, they keep changing their mind. And you think, well, yeah, but that's the outcome. The problem I think they had was that the outcome was inconsistent. But what's consistent in science isn't necessarily the outcome, it's the process. So if new evidence comes along, then you do change your mind. That's the strength of that way of thinking. So it comes back to this notion of it's not about where we end up necessarily. It's about the process of how we get there.

So having said that, what problems do we face when we're trying to interpret information, you know, and how can we do that better? I suppose, so the first question is problems. And in terms of how we interpret things, whatever we see in here, we interpret it as something. So there's lots of examples from psychology, the classic duck rabbit. that obviously I can't show here. Well, I can show it to you, but listeners won't get it, but they may know it. It's an image that looks like the duck one way, but it looks like a rabbit the other way. But there's lots of examples. The idea being that whatever we see, we can interpret it as one thing or some other thing. And similarly, with words, we can interpret words in very different ways. A table can be a display of figures, a chair can be the head of a meeting and so on. So we're always interpreting the world. in a particular way, and different people interpret the same thing in different ways. So what do we do?

Well, when we see or hear a claim, when someone says something or expresses a thought or a view, we need to be clear about what they mean, how are they interpreting this particular claim so that we know what they're talking about. The obvious thing in recent years would be something like Brexit, right, So that whatever you think about Brexit, we argued about it for years, but whatever view we took, we were regularly arguing about different things. And as a result, we were talking past each other. So the interpretation thing really is, first of all, recognising that we can interpret things in different ways, and then to make sense of a claim from somebody, we need to know what they mean.

So one thing that I think is interesting is people that hold extraordinary beliefs, something like, flat earthers. So why do people find things like that so appealing? Yeah, it's tricky. I mean, I've studied extraordinary beliefs for a very long time for more than 25 years. And so when people say, well, why do people end up believing extraordinary things? My usual answer, which might seem a bit glib, is, well, the same we end up believing ordinary things. You know, we know that certain things, we interpret them in one way rather than another, we end up with a belief. However, When we talk about extraordinary beliefs or paranormal or supernatural, by definition, we're going beyond the ordinary or the normal or the natural.

So a belief in something extraordinary involves a rejection of ordinary explanations. So for someone to believe in something paranormal, they only have to believe that at least one thing has happened that doesn't have a normal explanation. And if they believe that, they can believe that such things are possible. Now, that doesn't seem so weird. And I've studied these things for a long time and I've read hundreds and hundreds of claims. And there's lots of things going on.

But what you also see with things like paranormal claims is the view that science takes, which is these things don't happen. And so now this involves a rejection of the mainstream scientific view. And you have an argument about science. Then you mentioned flat earthers, which is a very weird one, because that involves not just a rejection of the ordinary view and the rejection of the scientific view. It also involves a rejection of all kinds of other knowledge, all of which says, no, it's not flat. Now you get into other areas of belief to do with, we might talk about conspiracy theories at this point. So to believe that the earth is flat, you have to go further and think all the evidence that people give us that it's not flat.

Well, that's made up. And now we're into this conspiracist thinking. So there's different layers. But what you do find, even with conspiracy theories, is lots of variety. So people believe particular things. They might believe that the US government is responsible for 9-11, but they might mean responsible in very different ways. some of them not so implausible given that we know

that there have been conspiracies in the past I mean real ones so there's a lot of mess there but I think the key thing would be that what we think of as extraordinary depends on what we think is ordinary and what we think is ordinary changes over time and it varies from culture to culture

so part of the radical thinking is in the remembering that what we take to be ordinary is ordinary in this time and place but it may not be taking for granted in other contexts. Yeah, so coming off the back of that, you talk in the book a lot about perspective. So what can we learn from that?

I suppose there's two bits to that. I mean, the first is that we always look at the world from whatever we are. And the book is all about me and looking at the world from where I am and using that to think about how we look at the world. So one is being aware of our own perspective, which has its own limits. the other part would be, well, how can we gain a wider perspective, which is this, what I'm calling the bigger picture? And that bigger picture comes from the views of other people. So other people see other things, and they interpret them in different ways.

And if we want to have a wider perspective, then we need to engage with these alternative views. We don't have to agree with them, but we can learn about the territory. we can learn about the range of options that are available, and then within that we can find where our own position fits. So having said that, like, how about the notion of our personal experience? Do you think we tend to trust that too much? Well, again, I suppose the way I've started to answer all questions now is with, well, let's start with what we mean.

And in this case, what do we mean by our experience? So our experience would include, say, everything that we've read and heard, which would include, say, all the scientific knowledge we've learned. You know, so that would be part of our experience too. One of the things I found useful is embedding myself in places where everyone disagrees with me. You know, I've been an atheist since I was 15, but I studied theology for a year. And everyone else around me was not just religious, but they were a Christian. and that was interesting because I was constantly getting a different perspective. But what I found was that the more I spoke to Christians,

there was all this diversity within their viewpoints. I thought that they are Christians, they believe the same thing. From my perspective, they are the other, and they all believe what Christians believe. But of course, what you find is they believe very different things. Many points I agree with some of them, but not with others and so on. So when you find yourself in a different position, you get a different perspective, much like traveling. You go somewhere else, you find yourself slightly out your depth, and you start to question yourself.

And I think that's useful to do. It's not always enjoyable, but it's useful to do at times. So the more you can find an alternative perspective and put yourself in a position where you're having to deal with that, the more you find that you challenge those assumptions that you have, the things that you take for granted. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craft.

entrepreneurship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist's focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So there's a phrase in the book that you say,

the messiness of knowledge, which I found very interesting. So what do you mean by that? So I'm talking there about the real world. So when you look at critical thinking stuff and a lot of it is about logic and science, and that's a fine thing. But logic is abstract, and science takes place in a laboratory

and in controlled conditions. And we don't live in those worlds. We live in the real world, and the real world is messy. People say things, and logic isn't always our main concern. They make claims, evidence is not always our main concern, and of course they're doing other things as well. And so the world of beliefs and claims and rhetoric and so on is messy. And we live in a world perhaps more than ever.

We have more information than ever before, but we don't know what we can trust. So we're not in a lab where we can control against external factors where we kind of know what's true. When we hear something, we don't know if it's true. We don't know if we can trust it.

So it's much messier. And so one way to deal with this is to go back to basics and say, well, okay, how do we look at the world to begin with? What are the things that shape our thoughts? And then we can start to kind of build up from there. So when someone says

something, we don't necessarily go for, well, what's the evidence for that? We start with, well, first of all, what are they saying? What do they mean by that? Once we've clarified that, okay, so what's the evidence for that thing? But also, we need to think about other factors, like, why of all the things he might tell us, are they telling us that? So we hear a lot of, you see this in politics all the time, of course, of people saying things. They may or may not be true, but the reason for saying them is not about it being true or not. It's about changing the discussion. And so we need to be wary of all those things, which within science, you wouldn't worry about so much. So you've mentioned logic a couple of times. Like some people might be familiar

if they've read Socrates or something. But how can we apply that in our daily lives? Like you say, it seems a little bit sort of rarefied. Well, yeah, I mean, logic, I've always is a fine thing, but logic is abstract. And the problem in the messy real world is how to translate the stuff that you hear and read or think into the language of logic. And that's difficult. And that's where this thing called informal logic, it was an attempt to do that. But in the book, I'm not really saying too much about logic. I talk about logic up to a point. If people want to learn logic, they should read something else. There's a little bit there. But primarily I'm talking about the problem of translating real-world arguments into the language of logic,

and that's messy. So I bring other things into it, things like meaning and context, and the ways in which people make arguments not simply based on logic, but in order to persuade us, in order to change discussions and so on. So it's really part of this messiness, that logic is central to critical thinking, according to most critical thinking experts, but in the real world, it's limited in how we can use it. So we're talking about messiness here. So probably one of the messiest things in the human experience is our emotions. So what can we say about that?

Yeah, I talked about emotions, as you know, in the book. And again, it comes back to what are we talking about? So what are emotions? And the modern concept of the emotions is about 200 years ago. old. Before that, we spoke about our feelings in different ways. But what happened around, you know, 200 years ago, roughly speaking, is we began to think of emotions as being separate from thoughts. And so after that, we could say, well, how do emotions, how might they play a role in our thinking? And we came up with this common view that emotions are rational and thoughts are rational. So there's a tension

between emotions and reason. And so emotions become problematic. And to this day, you'll still read within some critical thinking literature that emotions can distort our thinking and so on. But if you look at the history of emotions, you also see that emotions have been defined in very, very different ways, including since the middle of the 20th century, the idea that they're tied up with thought,

that fear includes an awareness of danger, for example. So they're not simply distilled. things. They're all bound up together. So what do you do with all that? So one way to think about it is, well, the idea that emotions are irrational, well, that's one view. But even then, reason is a means to an end. It doesn't tell you what the end should be. So how do we decide what the end should be? That's not reason. So one end that people would think about now, if you ask people, what they want more than anything else is to be happy. Well, happy is an emotion.

Okay, so now we've got an end goal. So how do you do that? So one way that emotions link to our thoughts is that they are desirable end goals and they drive us to think in certain ways about how we might then feel a certain way. And that's something else that you see that depending on how we talk about emotions,

some emotions are students preferable to others. And we talk about emotions, perhaps more than ever. but we often don't clarify exactly what we mean by them. So another sort of thing that feeds into how we think is our tendency to make assumptions. So where does that come from? And what can we look out for? What can we be careful of when doing that? Yeah.

So I suppose the first thing is, you know, we do make assumptions. We can't really avoid that. I mean, I right now, I'm assuming that you're real, that this is really happening, that you're not some sophisticated robot and so on. So we make assumptions and it's hard to function without doing that. Some people make more fundamentalist assumptions. They simply refuse to question them. So one way to think about assumptions is, well, what would it take to change your mind? So I worked in parapsychology for a long time, though I don't believe in paranormal phenomena, but again, surrounded by people who,

who mostly did. And one thing they would say to me was, well, what would it take for you to change your mind? And that's not a bad question, is it? It's a very scientific question. It's like falsifiability. There has to be something that would change your mind. And then you get into a discussion of,

what would it take for me to believe in the paranormal? And if I'm honest, I'm not entirely sure what that would be. Yes, it would be evidence, but how much evidence, how much evidence is enough. Well, that depends on how plausible you think paranormal phenomena are. So I suppose one way into it is simply to pick something that you assume, that you think is obvious, and then say, well, what if it's wrong, what would it take to change my mind?

And that's a reminder that whilst we need to assume things in order to function, we can be aware that that's what we're doing, that we are actually assuming this. So this has all been a really fascinating discussion, but sort of by way of summing up, do you have a sort of top of the pops hit list of what we can do to just tune our thinking in a little bit more effectively? One thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about beliefs,

particularly the beliefs of others, is that beliefs are particular things. People believe particular things, whether it's an extraordinary things or ordinary things. People have particular beliefs. One thing happened many years ago when I was studying theology, which is always stuck in my head as an example of that. We were in this seminar, which was on the feeding of the multitude

from the Gospel of Matthew, which is where Jesus and the disciples are in a place, and it's getting late and they're getting hungry. And the disciples say to Jesus, well, what shall we do? And he says, well, gather in what food you can. and they gather in fish and bread, and everyone eats as much as they want, and afterwards there's baskets of food left over. And then, according to Matthew, Jesus cures the sick and walks on water. And then, still according to Matthew, Jesus and the disciples are surrounded by four or five thousand people,

and it's getting late and they're getting hungry, and what should we do? And Jesus says, well, gather in what food you can, and everyone eats as much as they want, and afterwards there's baskets of food left over. Okay, here's what doesn't happen. What doesn't happen is the disciples don't say, Jesus, can you do that thing that you did before with the fish in the loaves? Okay. So I'm at the seminar and I said, well, from this, isn't it just obvious that this is two versions of the same story?

And that the compiler of the gospel has included both for whatever reason. And if you accept that, can we at least admit that the Bible as a historical document is not entirely accurate? So it went very quiet. And then somebody said, well, I'm surprised you can say that and call yourself a Christian. And I said, I'm not a Christian. I'm an atheist. And it went very quiet again. And then the gentleman on my right, who was a retired chap,

and he said this thing which I've never forgotten. He said, well, I am a Christian and I do believe in the miracles in the Bible, but I have a problem with this particular miracle because I used to work as a professional caterer and I just can't see how it could have worked. And I thought that there is an example of how we believe things. People believe particular things. People don't just believe in miracles. They believe in particular miracles. And when you talk to anyone, Donald Trump supporter, someone who's fought against Brexit, or any other topic, the beliefs are always particular. And what we do too easily is we dump folk into categories, oh, they're believers and they're disbelievers. But when you actually get into the detail of what people think, it's much more nuanced. And what you find is when you engage with alternative views with people who make different assumptions, you find that many of these positions, you find that many of these positions.

are not as weird as you thought they were. So part of that is putting yourself in a position where you try to understand what others think, even though you might think that what they believe is very weird. In terms of general advice about what to do, I talk about this at the end of the book. First of all, you know, there's no formula. Anyone who says that a formula or, you know, five principles or six secrets, be wary of that. But in terms of what you can, you know, can do. The first thing, as always, is, well, what are we talking about? So what I talk about are knowledge claims. So when you want to make sense of something, or think critically about it, I'm talking about knowledge claims. So anything where something is the case or is not the case,

that's what I'm talking about. So start with that. What I mean is we're not talking about questions or broad topics. So let's start with an actual claim that something is the case or something is not the case, whatever that might be. Question one is, what precisely is the claim? That's an issue of meaning. And it seems obvious, but it's not, because we continually have arguments. I hear it on the news every day of my life where people are not talking about the same thing. So the first thing is clarify what are we actually talking about. Once we've got that, then we can ask the other questions such as, okay, what's the basis of the claim? What's the evidence? for this, okay? But what's the evidence for this claim? Not some other claim or something like it.

So what we're talking about? What's the evidence for that? And the third thing I mentioned, which many people miss, is the why question. So why, of all the things that they might claim, are they claiming this? There are endless facts out there. So even if it's true, there are endless things going on. Right now, I'm talking and you're politely. listening and we're both sitting down, we're looking at screens, we're breathing. There's endless, endless facts going on right now. So why, of all the things that someone might say, are they telling us this? And that gets at a function, or to use another word, at agenda. And then I use various examples of how these play out in the real world and how they can be

bound up together. But that plus the reminder that we can make sense of anything, that's not the same as knowing the truth. That's a separate question. but you can make sense of anything if you're curious enough. Thank you for listening to this episode of Vincent Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor of History and Theory of Psychology, Pisa Lamont. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Radical Thinking.

The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems,

combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.