First Contact
First Contact
Monday, 14 January 2008
I have been covering the topic of critical thinking and reasoning with my ToK (Theory of Knowledge) classes this week. As a diversion from the ‘normal’ work on deductive and inductive reasoning, validity and invalidity, correlation vs causation, and so on, I looked at a real historical example where reasoning was used in an attempt to make sense of a completely new and unfamiliar situation.
In the early 1930s, the Highlands of Papua New Guinea were one of the last unexplored regions left in the world. This situation changed when a group of Australians ventured into the mountains in 1930 searching for gold. What they encountered amazed them - they discovered a number of wide, very fertile, well-watered valleys running through the elevated parts of the Highlands. In those valleys lived almost one million people whose existence the rest of the world had never suspected. It was the last large-scale ‘first contact’ encounter between indigenous people and the outside world.
Before the intrusion of the outsiders, the Highlands people assumed they were the only living humans. That was a reasonable assumption based on sound inductive reasoning - they had never encountered anyone else - and so their unique existence was accepted as a basic assumption of their worldview.
In time, the truth became known (yes, there IS such a thing as truth in this context, even if some of the details and interpretations are disputed!). In the movie First Contact, an old man tells of the time when, as a young boy, he watched one of the “spirits” defecate. He was so excited by this discovery that they must be human after all that after the white man departed, the boy immediately went over, collected the excrement and ran home to show it to his excited parents. As his father said “their skin may be different, but their shit smells just like ours”.
The point of all this is that the process of reasoning used by the Highlanders was both valid and sophisticated. Deductive reasoning is like a mathematical proof - it can provide us with 100% certainty IF the logic is valid and IF the assumptions are accurate. In the case of the Highlanders, it was their assumptions that were flawed - quite simply, they were NOT the only human beings on the planet as they presumed.
Untold numbers of arguments and conflicts arise between people because of different underlying assumptions. Rational arguments become almost impossible (and certainly unproductive) when basic assumptions are not shared or agreed. And yet, most people are actually unaware of the assumptions they make, as they are so close to their basic view of the world. For most of us, our personal assumptions are almost impossible to identify without the help of others, and perhaps even more difficult to change.
The experience of the New Guinea Highlanders, and they way they applied valid logic and reasoning to arrive at an absurd conclusion can be a lesson to everyone. Assumptions matter! As G K Chesterton (1874-1936) said “ You can only find truth using logic if you have already found truth without it”.
Or, as I sometimes say (much less eloquently than Chesterton), if you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish!
I captured this image of local people at a “sing-sing” near Minj in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, May 1983