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====4.2.2. The Problem of Reflection====
====4.2.2. The Problem of Reflection====
<pre>
Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.
Julius Caesar, 1.2.53 55.
</pre>
The faculty of reflection is the capacity to reflect on one's own conduct. This ability is commonly agreed to be an important ingredient in all of the efforts to improve conduct that are otherwise known as "learning". In this way, one comes to the questions: (1) whether a particular form of conduct is naturally reflective in and of itself, (2) whether it can be rendered reflective through the application of appropriate means, and (3) whether an individual or an organization can become more reflective, and thus more capable of criticizing and improving its own performance. Not too surprisingly, these questions are critical to the enterprises of achieving "reflective practice" and building "learning organizations", in essence, of studying and designing "self aware" and "self organizing" systems.
Reflection is an act of self observation that parallels the observation of others. This simple statement already conceals a host of difficulties. An observation can be simple act or a complex process, taking place at a single point in spacetime or extending over a multitude of dimensions. Even the term "observation" is equivocal, referring in a single breath to both the act and its articulation. With this much leeway in our speech, reflection can incorporate the observation of others and even the kinds of observation that are said to occur in the imagination, as when one speaks of "reflecting on a situation" to mean observing or imagining a situation that one is merely a part of, or only intends to be a party to.
Any form of observation, if it is articulated, issues in a description. A description is a verbal text or a visual image that can be judged according to how well it captures or conveys the nature of what lies under observation. Whether reflection on oneself is easier or harder than the analogous process of observing others — this is another question altogether. My present focus is on the role of reflection in learning or improving conduct.
When we observe a form of conduct in others that we desire to emulate, our task is to describe it well enough to ourselves that we are capable of reproducing the performance, at least, moderately well and more or less in accordance with our own style and taste. When we reflect on a form of conduct in ourselves that we wish to examine, to criticize, and to improve, the question is whether we can judge this performance with the same degree of detachment that we usually take in regard to others. But the first task is the same in either case, to arrive at a description that is clear enough to serve the purpose of improving conduct.
But how does the skill of reflection itself arise? Is it innate or is it learned, and if it is acquired in a succession of stages, then how can it be improved, except through reflection on itself? To put the question more generally, if inquiry is the form of conduct that occupies our interest, and if reflection is an integral part of inquiry, then how is inquiry made reflective, if not through reflection on itself and inquiry into itself? These questions lead to the dilemma of reflective inquiry.
This problem arises from the question: How do we know that our methods of inquiry are any good, that they lead to knowledge as a result? The horns of the dilemma are these:
a. If we say that our methods of inquiry are justified on the basis of authority, then we invite the charge of hypocrisy, and we are guilty of this charge if we continue to maintain that inquiry and authority are fundamentally different ways of deciding questions. Unless we make it clear that all pretence of inquiry reduces to a matter of authority, then we are merely dissembling a question that is already decided and posing it under the guise of a misleading name.
b. If we say that our methods of inquiry are justified on the basis of inquiry, then we invite the charge of begging the question, and we even run the risk of falling into an infinite regress. Unless we have hopes that the recursion of inquiry to itself is not one of those forms of self application that leads to paradox, then there is no good reason to choose the path of inquiry.
The presence of this dilemma at the roots of our reflective tradition and the influence of the various answers to it, as options that fill out the background of our common reflective field — all of these features are adequately illustrated by the way that Aristotle asks the question:
<blockquote>
One might raise the question: if the mind is a simple thing, and not liable to be acted upon, and has nothing in common with anything else, ... how will it think, if thinking is a form of being acted upon? For it is when two things have something in common that we regard one as acting and the other as acted upon. And our second problem is whether the mind itself can be an object of thought. (Aristotle, On the Soul, III.iv.429b24-28, p.169)
</blockquote>
Of the two choices, I confess to favoring the application of inquiry to itself, since I know that it is possible for a properly constructed recursive procedure to terminate with a determinate result and thus to render an account of itself that is ultimately well founded in the end. According to this strategy, which operates in the meantime more as a hope or a regulative principle than as an item of certified knowledge, but without which it is impossible to proceed at all, one acts as if the methods of inquiry can themselves be justified on the basis of inquiry. In order for this to be possible, methods of inquiry that come under suspicion need to be subject to examination by means of an inquiry into their workings, and those that are valid need to be validated through a study that compares their actual effects with their intended ends. Whatever the case, it seems that the sheer self consistency of inquiry as a way of life demands that its principles and methods can themselves be the subjects of inquiry, and unless this form of consistency is discovered to be an illusion then it deserves to be pursued.
====4.2.3. The Problem of Reconstruction====
====4.2.3. The Problem of Reconstruction====
