Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 111

CRITICAL THINKING

to categorically-based [logico-scientific]
knowing in the interest of coordination. As
demands for coordination increases, people
begin to perceive one another in terms of
roles and stereotypes, distributed cognition
becomes more category-based in order to
reduce differences and gain agreement, concepts become simpler and more general in the
interest of transmission, and there is a greater
aversion to inconsistency between interpersonal attraction and beliefs. While all of these
changes facilitate coordination, they do so at
the potential cost of greater intellectual and
emotional distance from the details picked up
by direct perception.11

Indeterminate Zones of Practice and
Action Learning
Professional military practice should advocate
the paradigmatic duality of critical reflection while
engaged in action learning—an incremental approach
to dealing with complexity.12 Here, ambiguous and
emergent tasks become vehicles for learning while
acting. Dealing with these indeterminate zones of
practice, practitioners try to figure things out as their
actions are interactive with a milieu of incongruous
actors and activities, such as we witness today, for
example, in Syria and Iraq.
Indeterminate zones of practice emerge in settings
that are interdependent and dynamic and where
institutionalized forms of knowledge are inadequate
to frame what is happening or not happening. Action
learning includes critical thinking associated with
balancing between the paradigms.
While highlighting expected surprises as complex
and chaotic situations unfold, the proposed dualistic
approach to critical reasoning acknowledges both
the need for technical knowledge (e.g., the science of
maneuvering on a fortified position) and knowledge
that must be crafted in action, while in the midst
of novelty (e.g., the immediacy of interpreting why
and how to spare a nearby mosque at this particular
time and place). In her 2010 monograph, anthropologist Anna Simons exposes the institutional failures
associated with not appreciating the value of immersive learning and intuitive forms of knowing needed
to interpret situations. Simons deftly critiques those
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2014

who seek only logico-scientific solutions, referring to
our institutional—
propensity to turn unduplicable lessons into
generic principles as if anyone should be
able to apply them … . [T]he penchant to
genericize in and of itself teaches the wrong
lesson. It implies that once the right lessons have been taught and trained, anyone
should be able to apply them. Yet, history
suggests this is hardly the case. More to
the point, those who orchestrated successful campaigns in the past invariably broke
new ground. That is why their campaigns
succeeded. This was usually in the wake of
something old and tried, which means such
individuals came to the situation able to
read and analyze it differently than their
predecessors, or they saw different possibilities, or both.13
Like exercising a dualistic world view with the
American football allegory, one has to know the rules
(institutional doctrines, best practices, and lessons
learned) and have the interpretative sensibility of
when to break free of them. The logico- scientific
paradigm deals with a dominant assumption about
causality—that history is useful as a storehouse of
proven knowledge for future use. The interpretive
paradigm assumes historically situated uniqueness—
that the use of history is reserved primarily as a valuable source of heuristics (rules of thumb) that may
serve to help interpret (not prescribe) in the here and
now.
Both world views require complementary forms
of creativity in the face of novelty. A different source
of artfulness is implied for each sense of reality.
Logico-scientism calls on an established vocabulary
that has a historic track record in applying proven
principles and cause-and-effect relationships. Here,
artfulness is about linking the present situation to
the appropriate knowledge base before taking action
(e.g., a planning approach)—where, ideally, the risk of
surprise is minimized.
Interpretivism, on the other hand, relies on the
awareness of both our inadequate linguistic structures and the potential for institutionalized group
think among practitioners; hence, surprise is considered a normal feeling. Action learning demands
109