Thoughts about CoPI (3)

Continuing thinking about the nature of CoPI.  Although I have always emphasised the importance of philosophy, and called CoPI ‘philosophising’ – I am now wondering if this is really accurate?

In “Transforming Thinking” I describe the origin and development of CoPI -

” …  I decided it [improvised philosophical dialogue] was worth pursuing: this way of working was so much more interesting than listening to lectures, or having discussions or writing essays. And the opportunity to continue practising this improvising dialogue arose a few months later.

During my third year at university I had joined the Metaphysical Society^[1], only to find that no one attended the lectures. I offered to produce posters and ‘fly post’ around the college, as we did for theatre productions, in order to attract an audience. By virtue of this I was seconded on to the committee as ‘social secretary’. The next year I was the only committee member left, and by default became the Auditor (Chair). The society had a large budget^[2]and no members.

 I had no experience of committees or running a society, but I knew what attracted students – free wine. Taking Plato as the model (and who could be better?) I persuaded my classmates and friends to come to ‘Symposia’. We would sit round a huge oval table and have philosophical dialogues with wine – just like Socrates! Having got an audience through the door with the prospect of free wine we needed something more to keep them, and listening to philosophy lectures was not something most students would choose to do in their free time. So I decided to try the improvised ‘Hegelian’ dialogue that we had used to produce our written dialogues for class. We wrote to various philosophers and explained that we wanted to try a new type of programme for the Metaphysical Society – a short paper followed by a dialogue. To our surprise they all agreed. It turned out that they also preferred to have a dialogue rather than give a lecture in their free time. The dialogues were always rather clumsy, but they improved with practise, and they were fun for everyone.

All university societies had access to funds for field trips (though the Metaphysical Society had not taken advantage of this). So I applied for field trip funds to send two of us students on a field trip to observe Professional philosophers in one of their natural habitats: a philosophy conference.  I wanted to see how Philosophers did philosophy when they were not lecturing. So we set off (abroad to England) to the Northern Universities Conference and there we found something wonderful – a group of Northern Universities philosophers engaging in dialogue with each other. The dialogues were similar to the Metaphysical Society Symposia, but were much more sophisticated and smooth.  Of course the professionals did not use the somewhat rigid structure of thesis, antithesis and synthesis; their dialogues were more fluid and more varied. Moreover the philosophers were using underlying logic that they all understood without having to make it explicit, whereas the students and others who attended the Metaphysical Society Symposia had not internalised logic and needed some kind of external structure.

Not all of the sessions at the conference included dialogue; some of them were more like listening to lectures followed by a short questions and answer session. However in some sessions the paper would be followed by fascinating dialogue in which the structure looked something like this:

 

1) Smith gave his paper explaining a new theory

2) The Chair then asked audience for any questions

3) Five philosophers raised their hands to indicate that they had a question

4) The Chair selected Brown to ask a question.

5) Brown asked a question about one of the claims put forward in the paper

6) The Chair called on Smith to speak

7) Smith then responded by making restating the claim (x) giving an argument (i) to support the claim

8) The Chair then called on Carerra who took the argument (i) and showed that it led to a different conclusion (y)

9) The Chair then called on Davids who came in and gave an example (a) which contradicted (y) and supported (x)

10) The Chair called Evelyn who offered a counter-example (b), which weakened the support for (x), but suggested a new theory (z).

11) The session continued with the Chair calling on different philosophers to enter the dialogue

12) Smith took the new theory (z) and examined whether it was consistent with his original claim (x), using new arguments (ii) and (iii) to show that (x) was stronger than (z)

13) Fredericks then contributed a new argument (iv) which demonstrated that Smith’s original theory (x) had to be altered

 And so it continued.

The dialogue proceeded with contributions from different philosophers, critical but constructive.  While there was a variety of different papers at the conference, those sessions in which dialogue occurred seemed to have some features in common.  The ‘dialogue stimulating’ papers had a kind of ‘human interest’ – you could see their relevance for everyday life, compared with what could be described as technical papers. For example one of the ‘dialogue stimulating’ papers concerned children’s rights^[3], and many of the audience were parents so their examples and arguments came from personal experience.

Perhaps a more important factor that distinguished the dialogue sessions from the more traditional sessions was the skill of the Chair. The Philosophers all knew each other and knew each other’s work and some of the Chairs seemed to be able to call on individual respondents in a sequence which furthered the dialogue. One Chair was exceptionally skilled at this; she would ask for comments from particular Philosophers at particular times, she appeared to have some knowledge as to the kind of argument they would make and how that would ‘play’ within the dialogue. Observing these features [4], I decided to try to incorporate them into the Metaphysical Society Symposia upon our return.”

As sometimes happens, I now think that at least 2 of the footnotes in this chapter are as important as the main text – namely

[1] Having spent as much time working as a Stage Manager in the university theatre as studying philosophy, I had watched writer-directors use improvisation exercises to generate scripts.

[4] The Northern Universities conference was the first philosophy conference we had attended, and we assumed it was typical – however I was to learn later that it was anything but. Attending philosophy conferences over many years since then, I never again saw the kind of exciting dialogue that we observed there.

Firstly the importance of the skills of a theatre director in the development of the role and function of a CoPI Chair. I did not include everything about the development of CoPI in “Transforming Thinking” , as it would have taken a lot of space and I was not sure that it would be interesting. However after graduating I worked for 4 years in professional theatre in the West End and Paris. When I returned to academic postgraduate work I also ran Philosophical Dialogue sessions for Applied Psychology post grads – for fun. By this time I had acquired and practised skills as a theatre director , and I used these skills in the eliciting of philosophical thinking and the shaping of the dialogue, just as I had in eliciting acting and shaping a play.

There were aesthetic elements to my creation of  philosophical dialogue among a group of people just as there are in the production of a play, and these are very difficult to articulate. One of the elements is pacing – there is a beat , a rythm to a play and also to the kind of dialogue I was eliciting and shaping. There is a use of the physical space in combination with the speech – it makes a difference.

Orchestrating the dialogues using all the elements I would use in a play made a difference to the quality of philosophising that emerged. For example , a decade later when I was teaching and training M.Phil students in Glasgow University I used to bring my own lamps in to the lecture room as the quality of the lighting made a difference to how well people could think and articulate their thinking. And not just lamps, I also created a coloured gel that I put on an overhead projector, to create the feel of a stained glass window on a wall of the lecture room (harking back to my time as a lighting designer in theatre).

It is so hard to describe the kind of aesthetic almost musical sense that I use in contrasting and building in a dialogue – weaving (what I see as)  the underlying philosophical assumptions in what participants say together in a way that makes a pleasing or beautiful pattern,  as though the underlying philosophical assumptions are coloured threads and I create a picture out of them.  This is the aspect of chairing a dialogue that I cannot teach. I always knew about this aspect of chairing CoPI, but was surprised to learn in September about how much the feel of a CoPI dialogue is actually created by this, rather than by the reasoning structure.

And then there is footnote 4. What I observed in that one particular conference was not typical of Philosophy conferences. I never did see it again. And yet it was that unique experience that I tried to replicate in what was to become CoPI.

It was that particular Northern Universities conference that inspired me to continue in Philosophy – I thought that I would enter a world where philosophers engaged in this kind of exciting and creative philosophical dialogue, where they actually helped one another with constructive criticism. But this was not to be. I never again saw a real community among professional philosophers either in the UK or the USA.

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