Socratic Arts

Mission of Socratic Arts

1. To change how people think about learning.
2. To build new kinds of educational experiences.

If we wish to teach people it is important to ask what capabilities we want them to have when we are done, not what we want them to know.

Here are sixteen cognitive capabilities that Socratic Arts courses are meant to enhance. Every course may not touch on each one, but we try:

Prediction: Making a prediction about the outcome of actions.

Experiential learning about every day behavior in its most common form - it includes learning about how to travel or eat or get a date for example. In its complex form it is how one learns to be a battlefield commander or a horse race handicapper. One learns through experience by trial and error. The cognitive issue is building up a large case base and indexing that case base according to expectation failures as described in Dynamic Memory. We learn when predications fail. In our courses we expect students to make predication, consciously or subconsciously and attempt to revise these predictions in the face of the experiences they have in the course.
Judgment: Making an objective judgment.

To learn to make objective judgments one needs constant feedback either from a teacher or colleague or from reality. One needs to think about what was decided and why. People who are good at this are good at it because they have analyzed their successes and failures and they can articulate their reasoning. Learning requires repeated practice. In business learning to make objective judgments is critical to success.
Modeling: Building a conscious model of a process.

We need to learn how things work. Processes need to be learned in order or effectively participate in them and in order to propose changes in them. Building a conscious model of a process matter a great deal if you want to make the process work for you. Having the process explained to you may not work that well either because this will not bring complete understanding of it. Designing it, modifying it, and participating in simulations of it work much better as learning methods.
Experimentation: Experimentation and re-planning based on success and failure.

This is probably the most important learning process we engage in while living our lives. We make life decisions and we need to know when we need to change something. Learning to analyze what has worked out what has not and why is part of living a rational life. We learn by talking with others and hearing their stories but we also learn from our own experience as we construct our own stories. We can learn about life experiences through reading and movies as well. The cognitive task here is story creation, comparison, indexing and modification. Most conversation depends upon story exchange. We want the students in our courses to talk about their experiences and decide what they can do better next time.
Describing: Creating and using conscious descriptions of situations to identify faults to be fixed.

When problems exist in any situation we need to be able to describe and analyze those problems. We need to be able to describe them in order to get help from people who may know more about the situation than we do. We need to learn to focus on the critical issues. In order to do this we need also to be able to analyze these situations to see what was supposed to happen and why it isn’t happening. Consultants who try to fix failing businesses do this sort of thing all the time as do doctors when consulting on difficult cases. Learning to create a careful description of a situation is a skill which only be learned through practice.
Managing: Managing operations using a model of processes and handling real time issues; case based planning.

There is a big difference between learning how a process works and managing that process. As we gain more responsibility we tend to have to learn to manage the processes that we are part of. We may become managers of groups we belong to or we may want to start up our own processes. Either way we need to not only know why the process worked the way it did when we arrive, we also need to know how it improve the process. This means building up a series of cases (indexed in terms of their role in the process) about faults in a process and known (or invented) solutions to rely upon when suggesting changes. The cognitive strategy here is called case-based planning.
Step by Step: Learning to execute a step-by-step subconscious process.

Most of what we know how to do we practice on a daily basis. We may have consciously learned each step initially but over time we do things mindlessly. This is why we can talk and drive a car at the same time. We react quickly and easily without knowing the details of what we are doing or how we are doing it. When we try to consciously modify such processes (we tell ourselves to listen more carefully or look at the ball more intently before we swing) we often cannot change our behavior.

We learn by doing in the beginning. Once we have fixed ways of behaving we typically stop learning. To learn to do a subconscious process one simply does it all the time and gradually improves. There is no substitute for this. To really learn a skill one must practice that skill constantly.
Artistry: Improving an artistic (no defined rules) judgment.

There are no rights and wrongs in what we like. It is more a matter of trying to understand what feels right than to understand why it feels right. There is a difference between being someone who can make an artistic judgment and being an art expert. One might learn to notice things that one had failed to notice if someone takes the time to point them out. Practice is a key idea here as is the assembling of a case base to use as a comparison set. Nevertheless the comparison set is not usually conscious. One can like something because it is pleasing without realizing (or caring about) why it is pleasing. Being comfortable making subjective judgments is actually very important in any business situation.
Values: Making a value judgment.

We don’t necessarily know the values we have and we haven’t necessarily learned them consciously. We should value human life over property but whether we do or not we will only find out if the situation arises. It is tempting to try and teach values but this is actually done so early in life and in so many subtle ways that anybody over the age of ten is unlikely to be much affected by what people say to them about what they should value and what they shouldn’t.
Nevertheless we do need to learn to make value based judgments. Doing this requires understanding what are values are. Confronting a person with the rationality of the value system they have unconsciously adopted can help them change, but it isn’t easy. In business value judgment matters a great deal.
Diagnosis: Making a diagnosis of a complex situation by identifying relevant factors and seeking causal explanations.

Diagnosis is a very important skill and one that needs to be learned both in principle and in each domain of knowledge separately. Diagnosis is both a matter of reasoning from evidence and understanding what to look for to gather evidence. Given all the evidence it is easy to make a diagnosis in an area of knowledge you don’t know very well. So, the gathering of the evidence is the most important part. Consultants, scientists, and military officers all do diagnosis. They all reason from evidence. They know what constitutes important evidence and what does not.

We learn to do diagnosis and to understand what causes what consciously. This is knowledge that can be taught to us by experts, but it needs to be taught as part of the process of diagnosis. Practice of more and more complex cases in one area of knowledge is what needs to happen to learn diagnosis.
Planning: Learning to plan; needs analysis; conscious understanding of what goals are satisfied by what plans; use of conscious case based planning.

People plan constantly. Often their plans aren’t very complicated. A general makes battlefield plans. A businessman writes business plans. An architect draws up architectural plans. All these have been used before or something quite similar has been used before. People rarely write plans from scratch. When they do, they find the process very difficult and often make many errors.

Learning to plan therefore has two components: being able to create a plan from scratch and being able to modify an existing plan for new purposes. The first one is important to learn how to do, but it is the latter ability that makes one proficient at planning. Planning from first principles is actually quite difficult. Normally people just modify an old plan. One can modify plans from one domain of knowledge to use in another but this is not easy and requires a level of abstraction that is very important to learn. Most creative thinking depends on this ability to abstract plans form one field of knowledge to another. We learn to do this by practicing it.
Causation: Detecting what has caused a sequence of events to occur by relying upon a case base of previous knowledge of similar situations (case based reasoning).

All fields of knowledge study causation; biology, physics, history, economics, they are all about what causes what. The fact that this is an object of study by academics tells us right away that it is not easy and no one knows for sure all of the causes and effects that there are in the world.

Because of this, acquiring a set of known causes and effects tends to make one an expert. A plumber knows what causes sinks to stop up and knows where to look for the culprit. A mechanic knows what causes gas lines to leak and know where to look. A detective knows what causes people to kill and knows where to start when solving a murder case. Causal knowledge is knowledge fixed to a domain of inquiry. Experts have extensive case bases. Case bases are acquired by starting on easy cases and graduating to more complex ones.
Influence: Understanding how others respond to your requests and recognizing consciously and unconsciously how to improve the process.

Human interaction is one of the most important skills of all. We regularly interact with family, friends, colleagues, bosses, romantic interests, professors, service personnel and strangers. Communicating effectively is very important to any success we might want to have in any area of life.

How do we learn to become conscious of inherently unconscious behavior? One can learn to behave differently if one becomes consciously aware of mistakes one is making. We unintentionally return to standard ways of acting in various situations. But, often we treat others in ways in which, if we had realized what we were doing, we might have behaved differently. Getting along with people is a very big part of life. Each of has our own distinct personalities and they often don’t match with one’s own ambitions and desires. To change one’s behavior one needs to practice new behaviors that become as natural to us as our old behaviors. The only way to do this is to do it.
Teamwork: Learning how to achieve goals by using a team, consciously allocating roles, managing inputs from others, coordinating actors, and handling conflicts.

It is the rare individual who works all alone. Most people need to work with others. People are who they are and need to assume roles in any team that are consonant with their personalities. One person plays quarterback and another blocks. People do not have to do the same thing I order to work together. But they do need to get along and function as team. This is no more true of sports than it is f the workplace. People learn to work in teams by working in teams and receiving helpful advice when a team is dysfunctional. Football coaches explicitly teach this. More formal learning situations often don’t which is unfortunate. It really isn’t possible to get along in the real world unless you can assume various roles in a team that fit with who you are.
Negotiation: Making a deal; negotiation/contracts.

Contracts, formal and informal, are the basis of how we function. We reach agreements in business, in marriage, in friendship, in a store, and at school. Parties to those agreements have the right to complain if obligations are not met. Learning to make a contract, legal or not, is a big part of being a rational actor. To make a contract one must negotiate it. Negotiation is often seen as something only politicians and high powered business leaders do. But, actually, we negotiate with waitresses for good service and we negotiate with our children when we give them an allowance. Learning how to negotiate can only be done by trying and learning from failures. The techniques tend to be context-independent, but, there is, of course, special knowledge about real estate and politics for example, that make one a better negotiator in each situations. Again, practice with coaching is the ideal.
Goals: Goal prioritization; managing internal conflicting goals; implicit nonconscious understanding of relative importance; learned by living.

We all have goals. Which ones are more important than the others? We know subconsciously that if there is a fire we try to save the child in the hose before we try to save the house. Perhaps this is taught in fire safety school, but there is no human who does not implicitly understands it.

Goals conflict with each other all the time both internally and externally. Not only must we deal with goal conflicts that are caused by our pursuit of multiple goals at the same time we must also deal with external goal conflicts. We compete for power, status, money, success and so on. All of these are external goal conflicts. Understanding how to manage goal conflicts is extremely important in any business situation.

"People learn best when they are pursuing goals that they really care about and when what they learn helps them attain their goals. The best means of learning has always been experience."
-- Roger Schank