Theory

The Cognitive Domain

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This essay, provided by Lt Col Dave “Sugar” Lyle, USAF, is part of the Personal Theories of Power series, a joint Bridge–CIMSEC project which asked a group of national security professionals to provide their theory of power and its application. We hope this launches a long and insightful debate that may one day shape policy.

Complimentary mental models hold the social world together. It’s not the lines painted on the road that keep us from careening into each other on the highway, as we sadly find out too often. Paper money has no intrinsic value on its own, unless you like the pictures and holograms, are trying to starting a fire, need a bookmark, or have just run out of toilet paper. Online credit purchases do not even require the plastic card anymore, and only work because we collectively believe that strings of ones and zeros — stored electronically in computers that we’ll never see — equal our right to receive services and things from other people, and keep them. In all of these cases, it’s not about the symbolic artifact. Our agreements about what those artifacts represent, and our willingness to act on those beliefs, are what keep the wheels of society turning.

If it’s true that the plot of every story in the world can be reduced to trying to answer the question “Who am I?”, then it speaks volumes about the importance of identity to human beings.

Our brains are hard wired to socialize; to find personal meaning in the groups we belong to and the groups we interact with. If there’s a group, we instinctively figure out if we belong to it and what our place is in the pecking order. We usually try to maintain or improve our position in the hierarchy, even if it’s only within a subgroup we identify with. And to do so, we simultaneously cooperate and compete with others, usually both at the same time.

If it’s true that the plot of every story in the world can be reduced to trying to answer the question “Who am I?”, then it speaks volumes about the importance of identity to human beings. In fact, our brains process things that we associate with our own identity in different ways than we process things that we see as being “other”. We have a very hard time rationally questioning anything that becomes part of who or what we imagine ourselves to be.

But how do we know what is “us”, and who or what is “other”?

We make up stories to set the boundaries. We love stories, and literally can’t live socially without them. The basis of our shared mental models, we encode our stories in metaphors, in ceremonial rituals, in songs, in books and films, and in various physical artifacts that help us to remember and communicate both the stories and their meaning. We use the stories as guides for social interaction, and we rewrite them over time to incorporate new experiences. Stories help us understand where we’ve been, and set the direction for collective effort in the future. They are our guideposts for understanding and negotiating ever changing social landscapes, and for accepting our roles within them. Because we have stories, we have identity, we learn to specialize, and we learn to work together for mutual benefit, creating far better lives together than we could ever possibly experience separately.

We only think we’re in charge of what we believe, and that we deliberately control our own decisions through conscious, rational thought.

And here’s the real kicker. We only think we’re in charge of what we believe, and that we deliberately control our own decisions through conscious, rational thought. What really happens is that a multitude of mental submodels — most of which we’re not even aware of — compete for control of our conscious attention, and the domination of our decisions. The idea of unconscious thought influencing the conscious is nothing new — the Greeks were talking about it thousands of years ago. But what is new, as we learn more about the neurobiological foundations of our cognitive processes, is how little control we actually have over our own thoughts most of the time. “Gut feel” intuition usually trumps the pure, unbiased processes of reason that we like to credit ourselves for, but seldom employ in practice — but that’s not always a bad thing. So how does this work inside the mind itself?

Heuristics  — the “rules of thumb” built in our brains through combinations of conscious and unconscious encoding — are really combinations of associated and connected mental submodels that are called up in specific contexts. Formed from the bottom up over time, ideas and memory literally emerge from countless physical structures in our brain building and interacting through electrochemical processes. With the numbers of neurons in our brains estimated to be in excess of 500 billion, the combinatory possibilities of brain processes are even greater than the known numbers of stars in the universe. To add to the complexity, nature and nurture combine as co-creative forces, ensuring that no two brains are ever alike, even if the basic structures are similar. The true “Great Unknown” can be found in the space between our ears…

But the human mind isn’t completely unknowable either. As Joseph Campbell observed, the same myths are constantly reinvented over the millennia because basic human nature — and the basic cognitive heuristics that form it — is universal across ages and cultures. An intuitive understanding of this has been the key to success for generations of generals, politicians, illusionists, and con artists, giving them the power to predict and shape human behavior. But now, through neuroscience and neurobiology, we’re finally starting to better understand the underlying biochemical processes that were at work the whole time.

The knowledge of identity stories — and the history of how they came to be — is crucial to building your own mental model of other people’s mental models.

Imagine all of those competing mental submodels as if they were Lotto balls, tumbling around in the hopper of our brains, competing to be selected as the winning ball at the top of conscious attention. Now imagine that all of those balls are connected to the other balls in various ways by small, invisible strings, with different degrees of connection and strength. If you could grab specific balls and strings, in specific sequences, you’d have a better chance of influencing which balls make it to the top of the hopper to be selected. You may not know exactly which one will be the winner, but your odds of predicting it are much better if you know something about how those balls are connected together, and how they interact. It works the same way with interconnected memories, ideas, and feelings: “cognitive priming” activates specific mental heuristics at specific times, for better or for worse. The knowledge of identity stories — and the history of how they came to be — is crucial to building your own mental model of other people’s mental models. It’s this “Theory of Mind” we use every day to negotiate and modify the heuristic driven social landscape, as we seek to shape it in ways that favor us.

Except it’s not always that easy. Sometimes the stories don’t match up. Sometimes we disagree about who is in our group, who gets to have what, who gets to tell others what to do, and what should happen if we disagree on these things. We try to define the boundaries with artifacts that evoke the stories. We write laws and codes. We wear uniforms, and issue IDS and badges. We buy power ties, $50,000 wristwatches, and $500,000 cars to cement our place in the social strata. Then we use these stories and artifacts to reinforce our place and our “rights” within the social system. We plead. We cajole. We flatter. We threaten. And finally, we fight.

We fight when our primitive brain senses that something is threatening our physical survival. We fight when something threatens our identity or place in the pecking order, and occasionally we fight over things peripheral to survival and identity that do not threaten the first two. We fight over fear, honor, and interest, as Thucydides observed, and we usually do it in that order. And when we fight, we often equate the ability to maim and kill as having power.

But killing really isn’t the point when it comes to power. While it’s true that killing someone else is a way to exercise power, and a way to prevent someone else from exerting power over you, power is much more about influencing their mental models of the people who you don’t kill, in order to drive the continuing social interaction in directions that you favor. As Thomas Shelling once said, it’s usually much more useful to have the ability to kill someone than it is to actually do it. And as he also said, it’s the loser who determines when the fighting stops, not the winner.

it’s usually much more useful to have the ability to kill someone than it is to actually do it…it’s the loser who determines when the fighting stops, not the winner.

So how does the loser accept the new reality? They rewrite their story in ways that rescue their personal and social identity. A temporary stability can be maintained under the threat of future sanction and violence, but when peace follows war, it happens because the stories of the victor and vanquished have become complimentary enough that the loser can not only answer the “What am I?” question with honor, but perhaps more importantly, “What can I become?” favorably under the new status quo.

Using knowledge of the basic human cognitive processes, and the stories that define people’s identity — to take actions that convince others to change their stories, identities, and actions in ways that accommodate yours, accepting your story as their own in the ultimate exercise — is called POWER.

Theory

Theory Properly Constructed

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This essay is the start to the Personal Theories of Power series, a joint Bridge–CIMSEC project which asked a group of national security professionals to provide their theory of power and its application. We hope this launches a long and insightful debate that may one day shape policy.

When professionals hear the word theory, their eyes tend to glaze over. Most believe theory is purely academic. While understandable, this is only one view of theory. For those of us that will be sharing our personal theories of military power, theory frames our worldview. It changes how we approach problems. Theory shapes how we project power. Over the next couple of days, this will become blatantly apparent as you read how a broad range of national security professionals share their personal theories here on The Bridge. We are presenting our personal theories as a starting point for a wider and deeper national security and strategy discussion.

Theory is crucial to what we do, but it must be consciously acknowledged and tested. In his book The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi suggests “we can know more than we can tell.” This is a useful description of our theoretical beliefs as knowledge; where knowledge, in what is irrevocably lost through unrefined English, is best understood via differentiation in the German tongue as Wissen and Können.[i]

The former, Wissen, is knowledge of awareness; here our particular gestalt is the sum of our biases and blind spots. The latter, Können, is knowledge of discernment; here we typically tend to make order of things within our perception and sub-conscious. These coupled concepts build a bridge between the creative powers of the mind and a value judgment for ordering of the operations of perception. For both these reasons, there is value in the expression of our personal theories. They expose buried subceptions, but are also practical extensions in reproductive and productive reasoning.[ii] Bringing these to the fore is the purpose of The Bridge’s efforts to gather the personal theories that follow this article: for narrow self-reflection, for wider public consideration, for discussion, for questioning, for debate, for recursion, and ultimately for improved practical application. So as a prompt for our writers and readers alike, it is useful to consider the proper construction of theory at the outset of this endeavor.

The Five Functions of Theory and their Impact on Practice

“Strategy and strategies, theory and practice, must be seen as one,” the eminent strategist and theorist Colin Gray suggests, and “[theory] should be able to help educate the realm of practice by assisting people to think strategically.”[iii] There is a unifying nature of theory, in that it informs and educates professionals towards making sense of their circumstances. Towards that end, the archetypical theory has five functions: it defines, categorizes, explains, connects, and ideally, anticipates.[iv]

Theory should provide users a description of what is being done and illuminate the purpose of what is being done.

First, theory defines the field of study. In a sense, it provides via classification a clean break with what its users are considering and what they are not. Inherent in this classification are two additional considerations: definitions ideally should provide users a description of what is being done and illuminate the purpose of what is being done. [v]

Blind Monks Examining an Elephant by Itcho Hanabusa (Wikimedia Commons)

 

Second, theory must categorize its field of study into constituent parts, thus providing some form of typology, for example, differentiating between strategy and tactics, or limited and total war. Ideally, perhaps even scientifically, this typology requires the theorist to establish criteria of exhaustiveness and mutual exclusiveness. This is logical, even purely logical, if impossible. The curb of practicality must provide limits of such logic to the user of theory in favor of pragmatic reasoning. This pragmatic reasoning is what provides grammar to a particular theory. Thus, hopefully familiar to the reader: theory’s logic is not its own—so as to provide consistency with its purpose—but its grammar in what it does is its own. This nature drives theory towards a healthy respect for empiricism rather than just glib idealism. This also means the categorization of a theory is likely never final; it will remain eternally relevant for contemplation because of either new explanations or new grouping, or some combination of both.[vi]

“Explanation is the soul of theory.”

The Alchemist by Pietro Longhi (Wikimedia Commons)

 

Third, theory provides an explanation of occurrences, and this is theory’s most important function. Harold Winton goes so far as to suggest, “explanation is the soul of theory.” Here within theory is the convergence of both deductive and inductive examination of an object of study. Where the former is focused upon a theory’s empirical testability, the latter is more intuitive and requires creativity to recognize a paradigm shift. While this is the most important aspect of theory, it is also the most transitory. This distinction from the transitory property of categorization results from a recursive flow of analysis and synthesis via observation, hypothesis, and testing.[vii]

Carl von Clausewitz

Fourth, theory relates and connects together concepts. This part of theory progresses the conception of an object from an existential basis (inherent in the previous functions) to a form of relational construct. Without such a progression towards the latter, theory suffers from a pensiveness that precludes practical application. This relational aspect of theory applies order to things and, in other cases, also describes correlation, or even causation, and it can even be a probabilistic supposition. A familiar example of the relational concept in theory is the elegant Clausewitzian connection between violence and politics.[viii]

Hand with Reflecting Sphere by M.C. Escher (Wikimedia Commons)

 

Finally, theory anticipates the future. Theory is more than naïve empiricism, which if followed would suggest that our practical application would only be the sum of our accumulated observations. Karl Popper disputes the idea of this aggregation of observations by reminding us that, “[we] do not ‘have’ an observation, but we ‘make’ an observation.” Observation, then, is always preceded by something more theoretical that presupposes expectations for an object under consideration. Thus convinced that empiricism alone is insufficient, to what extent or limit would the prudent theorists extend their judgment from propositions, hypotheses, principles or axioms, to even laws? The complexity of this issue is discussed elsewhere, but it is sufficient to say a theorist must not abandon empiricism either. For, if they do, it is rather axiomatic that theorists will find their theories are merely visions, which I.B. Holley describes as “ideas not systematically prepared for authentication,” or illusions as “ideas that could not survive systematic preparation for authentication,” or at worst as myths where “ideas… exempt themselves from any systematic authentication.” Here it might be forgivable, falling short of being useful theorists to at least being compelling visionaries, but only the most maligned and rare theorist is caught in illusion- or myth-building.[ix]

“Questions are our best friends for the invention and refinement of strong useful theory, and they are the lethal enemies of poor theory.”

Conclusion

Now that we’ve properly wrestled with the Wissen and Können aspects of theory construction, it’s now time to set it out for review and challenge. “Questions are our best friends for the invention and refinement of strong useful theory, and they are the lethal enemies of poor theory,” Colin Gray reminds us. Now its time to put that idea to the test, ever mindful of the Master’s aim for theory:

The primary purpose of any theory is to clarify concepts and ideas that have become, as it were, confused and entangled. Not until terms and concepts have been defined can one hope to make any progress in examining the question clearly and simply and expect the reader to share one’s views.[x]

We hope you enjoy the next few days as our authors explain, likely through their own intellectual struggles, their personal and particular theories, and we challenge you to respond with your questions, counter assertions, and your own personal theories.

[i] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, Reissue edition. (Chicago ; London: University Of Chicago Press, 2009), 4–8.

[ii] Ibid., 6–8.

[iii] Colin S. Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA, 2011), 15.

[iv] Harold R. Winton, “On the Nature of Military Theory,” in Toward a Theory of Spacepower: Selected Essays (National Defense University Press, 2011), 20–21, accessed April 26, 2014; Harold R. Winton, “A Black Hole in the Wild Blue Yonder: The Need for a Comprehensive Theory of Airpower,” Air Power History (Winter 1992): 3.

[v] Winton, “On the Nature of Military Theory,” 20–21; Winton, “A Black Hole in the Wild Blue Yonder: The Need for a Comprehensive Theory of Airpower,” 3; Antulio Joseph Echevarria, Clausewitz and Contemporary War (Oxford [England]; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 38–40.

[vi] Winton, “On the Nature of Military Theory,” 20; Echevarria, Clausewitz and Contemporary War, 38; Paul Davidson Reynolds, A Primer in Theory Construction (New York; London: Allyn and Bacon, 1971), 4–5; W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, Reprint edition. (New York; London: Free Press, 2011), 2, 21.

[vii] Winton, “On the Nature of Military Theory,” 20–21; Reynolds, A Primer in Theory Construction, 21–23, 26, 42–43; Frans PB Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Routledge, 2006), 57–64; “The Conceptual Spiral”, August 1992, 22–24, 31, 37–38, accessed May 7, 2014.

[viii] Reynolds, A Primer in Theory Construction, 67–75, 81–82; Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Howard, and Peter Paret, On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 87, 605–610; Winton, “On the Nature of Military Theory,” 21.

[ix] Karl R. Popper, “The Bucket and Searchlight: Two Theories of Knowledge,” in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Revised edition. (Oxford Eng. : New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1972), 341–342, 344; Reynolds, A Primer in Theory Construction, 76–81; I.B. Holley, Jr., “Reflections on the Search for Airpower Theory,” in The Paths Of Heaven: The Evolution Of Airpower Theory, ed. Phillip S. Meilinger (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1997), 580, accessed February 6, 2014.

[x] Gray, The Strategy Bridge, 17; Clausewitz, Howard, and Paret, On War, 132.

Beans Boots Bullets, Podcast, Sea Control: East Atlantic, Strategic Outlook

Sea Control 36 (East Atlantic) – NATO Defense Spending

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seacontrol2Your monthly East Atlantic edition of Sea Control brings you Alex Clarke with a panel on the state of NATO’s defense spending in the UK and Continental Europe, and whether this spending is sufficient to face our modern threats.

 

DOWNLOAD: Sea Control 36 (East Atlantic): NATO Defense Spending

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History, Seamanship and Leadership

Memorial Day: Your Real Distruption

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This year marks the 100th anniversary of the great maw that was WWI. On this Memorial Day, it should be our purpose to bear witness to the great scope of sacrifices made by those who came before us . Today, we all desperately cry out for “innovation” and “disruption” as if these things are new or unknown to our services. We discuss Google glass and 3-D printing, but in 1914 entire veteran armies were wiped out by new technologies and tactics in a war the likes of which soldiers had never seen; a war within which no innovation could save you. British soldiers went to battle without helmets, Napoleonic-era Cuiassiers rode into battle on horse-back against machine guns, the allies invented tanks to transport men and arms across the no-man land’s corpse-strewn horrors in an attempt to end the conflict that had destroyed a generation of their youth.

On Memorial Day, we honor the men and women who fought for our freedoms; it is critical that, in this remembrance, we realize that -we- are not historically unique. Arguably, while some of our number are heroes of the highest order -we- are not special. Out technology, our education, our innovation is nothing compared to the desperate measures taken in battle by our kin in arms who saw around themselves the end of the world. While we must continue to innovate as a matter of survival, never think our “new” is so significant as to escape the horrors of war. The “Wars to End All Wars” don’t, and any technology that claims to do so is only the guise for future failure.

So, when you think of “innovation” or “disruption” today, don’t think of new ways to use your phone, or the efficiencies you can find through knowledge management… think of the disruptions of war, the men whose sturdy minds snapped in the fields of France under the months-long thunder of guns, those whose innovation was forged in the set-jaw of those saving their civilization, their nation, and their families from a future of starvation, blood, and death.  So, “Happy Memorial Day,” because untold generations have snuffed out their quiet light so that we may be here today. Let us not find pleasure in where we are going and what -we- can accomplish, but find happiness today in that there were those, and still are those, willing to give it all so that we may have that opportunity.

Matthew Hipple is a surface warfare officer and graduate of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. He is Director of the NEXTWAR blog and hosts of the Sea Control podcast. His opinions may not reflect those of the United States Navy, Department of Defense, or US Government.

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.