Practice in Dialectical Thinking: Text Analysis

Module: Practice in Dialectical Thinking

Session: Text Analysis

Chapter Headings:

• Looking At A Transcribed Interview Text
• Dialectical Thinking And Dialectical Listening Are Inseparable
• The Thought Form Selection Sheet
• Bit Number 1 From The Example Coding Sheet
• Any Text Can Be Analyzed For Dialectical Structure
• Assigning Thought Forms
• The Case Study Cohort Method
• Seeking Consensus In A Cohort
• Process Thought Form 1
• Process Thought Form 2
• Assigning Weights To Thought Forms
• It Is A Choice How The Speaker Articulates A Situation
• Constraints Imposed By The Interviewer
• The Function Of The Cognitive Interviewer Is To Let The Client Shine
• Probing For Classes Of Thought Forms
• Staying Very Close To The Train Of Thought Of The Interviewee
• Empirical Inquiry Using An Empirical Method Called The CDF Method
• Separating Content From Structure
• A Case Study Combines Interviewing, Text Analysis, and Discussion
• Evaluating Bit Number 16

Topics: Dialectical thinking is/as 

• a method of text analysis and text evaluation; the Cognitive Behavior Graph, Fluidity Index, Phase of Dialectical Thinking

• an adult developmental assessment tool; cognitive interviewing, semi-structured interview protocol, the Three Houses, scoring an interview transcript, providing feedback

Practice dialectical thinking in analyzing different texts, such as, interview fragments, excerpts of policy documents, or theoretical texts. Create a Cognitive Behavior Graph (CBG), summarizing moves in thought in the text. As group members, provide feedback to interviewees or authors.

Practice in dialectical thinking about the structure of one’s own thinking and that of collaborators. 

Simple: recognize the four classes of thought forms (4 TF classes CPRT) as they derive from the four moments of dialectic.

Identify others’ TFs: Analyze and classify pictures and texts using the four classes (4 TF classes CPRT).

Exercising complex tasks: Recognize individual thought forms in speech and text in terms of the compact table of thought forms (28 TFs).

Identify others’ TFs: Analyze a structured interview using the compact table of TFs (28 TFs).

Analyze a structured interview, working from its transcript, following these steps:

Select interview fragments, also called “bits,” unified by a clear, logical, and convincing base concept whose implications they unfold.

First determine the class or classes of TFs involved in the interview fragment, then select a cogent TF within the class.

If more than a single TF apply, determine the relative weight or degree of clarity of each, between 1 and 3 maximally. Then justify your selection and weighting decision.

For an entire interview, select 30 cogent text fragments, and use your evaluation outcome to formulate a “cognitive profile” of the interviewee in the form of a CBG, Cognitive Behavior Graph.

Write a report meant to give feedback to the interviewee regarding their present fluidity in using TFs, following the compact table of TFs.

References to Measuring Hidden Dimensions Volume 2, Figures and Tables (Laske, 2009; MHD V2) 

• Fig. 11.1 The Three Houses of Employees and Managers (MHD V2; p. 333)
• Table 11.5 Thought Form Selection Sheet for Donald’s Cognitive Interview (MHD V2; p. 338-348) 
• Fig. 11.3 Donald’s Cognitive Behavior Graph (CBG) (MHD V2; p. 349)

I would like to use this today to ask, what are dialectical thought forms and how do we use them from the point of text analysis, which implies that we are now listening to somebody. Dialectical thinking and dialectical listening are inseparable, and here we are focusing on what can we hear. Ultimately, to think dialectically you need to be able to hear other people’s dialectical process. That takes time and effort.

You have three columns here in Table 11.5 [Thought Form Selection Sheet for Donald’s Cognitive Interview (MHD V2; p. 338-348)]. In the first column you just have the page number, or in terms of time stamp it could be the time point in the interview. The second column is the bit, which means the fragment (quoted in column 3) taken from the interview, which is the choice of the person transcribing, who has decided that this is a section or bit that he or she wants to evaluate in terms of thought forms.

So this is what the client says in bit number 1 from the example Thought Form Selection Sheet:
“I was a senior collector, and so I had a good amount of authority when it came to evaluating a certain claim I was handling in terms of what we should do given the situation.”
I will explain the context out of which this comes.

You know, this could be an annual report of a bank, or it could be an annual report of some other company, and you are consulting to the executive team of that company and you are taking note of their annual reports and you are intending, at least as a CDF user, to tell them what is the kind of light that their annual report sheds on their thinking and what is missing in their thinking.

In any case, what do you get from this content? What is the structure of this content for you in terms of thought forms now?

We will gradually come to understand the thought forms and what they focus on.

So we can now say, okay, you are pointing to an element of process, can we find it? Can we find it together? What is it?

If the process was thought form 1, then I would consider that as saying, well the speaker is thinking of, or pointing to, the speaker’s situation that in the world that he’s working in, there’s always change or motion in the debtor and the creditor.

If the process was thought form 2, then I would consider that as saying, well the speaker is thinking of potential things that he has to make decisions about and could do or recommend, and these are potentialities that stand against what is the case.

I am sure, you would agree that it is a very weak reference to process, but you could, for instance, say, well, I would score it at a weight level of 0.5. Actually, this is a method we use in case study cohort class, that we initially evaluate thought form use at level 1, but then we become more refined as we learn more and we make distinctions and we code 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, up to 3. So we have six levels of weight in a way.

Now this must seem to you to be incredibly pedantic. And it is. But it is one of the best ways to learn the thought forms, to learn to use them, to learn to hear them. Keeping in mind that the speaker could have chosen many, many different ways of speaking about his situation.

The question might arise, is this also possibly guided by the interviewer? If I were a novice interviewer, could I also constrain the person who is speaking? 

The interviewer could indeed constrain the speaker, simply on account of the limits of his dialectical thinking.

As an interviewer, you are actually challenged to think at your best level, what you can do at this level of cognitive development you are at, and you have the mandate to make the client shine and think at his or her best level. That’s actually the function of the cognitive interviewer, to let the client shine. And to let the client shine as an interviewer, I have to do my very best in how I think about what I’m hearing from the client.

So here, if we look at this first bit where someone might say that there is a very fuzzy but still noticeable relationship to thought form 1, we could now formulate an interview question that would have the purpose of making the interviewee speak more in terms of process than he has done so far. What would be the question we could ask him?

I want to also mention that what’s happening here is that we are not just thinking up a question that we are interested in, but we are using the content that the speaker has given us, and we are basing our question on that content, or our understanding of it. We are staying very close to the train of thought, or we ought to in any case, of the interviewee. We are not jumping off the train of thought.

I would say, going back to what I said previously, on the difference between the actual world and the real world, we are trying to get to what is the real world for the interviewee. We are trying to help ourselves and him or her to see the real world and not get swarmed by what seems to be the actual world. And it’s an empirical inquiry.

Someone might comment that when reading this, they read relationship, because there is a relationship between what he calls the debtor and his company, and the creditor, and himself. Between them there is this, and this arises out of this medium which is the owing of something and the non-payment. So there is a dynamic relationship going on there.

I don’t know whether at this point you find interviewing the most effective way to learn dialectical thinking or text analysis or discussion. In my view, it is the coupling in CDF case studies and the way to them between the interviewing and the text analysis that accounts for the potency of what I think can be learned here. And we always do both.

Going to the texts here, we had spent quite a bit of time on just two or three of these bits in a cognitive coding sheet, and if you go back to that, maybe we can look at one or two more bits. For example, bit number 16, Systemic Thought Form 27, Open Self Transforming Systems. Now the thought forms you find here in this coding sheet are those of a student, and it doesn’t mean that it probably is the correct thought form, but there might be others that he didn’t catch, or she. So here in bit 16 we have a transformational thought form, which means logistically that you have to coordinate thought forms. You have to be able to coordinate thought forms like a process thought form with a context thought form, or a context thought form with a relationship thought form, or a process thought form with a relationship thought form. To think transformationally, you need to coordinate at least two if not three thought forms from different classes. Let’s see what’s happening here in bit 16.