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.

http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-philosophy-is-perhaps-one-of-most.html

Why Philosophy is perhaps one of the MOST useful degrees

Here is an excellent resource on why philosophy degrees make especially smart and successful businessmen and women, lawyers, journalists, etc. (you are actually dramatically better off doing a first degree in philosophy than business administration for a career in business).Some very good answers to “Philosophy? What are you going to do with that?” question. Go here for “testimonials”.

Includes GRE test performance (philosophers do staggeringly well – look right), comparative salary information, and various other useful bits of evidence that collectively puncture the peculiar modern myth that philosophy isn’t “useful”.

I previously commented on the GRE scores comparing philosophy students with all other students here.

A quote from Fordham:

“In addition, as the marketplace becomes more competitive, graduate degrees become more desirable, and that entails a strong performance on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the exam most business schools require their applicants to take. Philosophy majors consistently outperform other majors on the GMAT, including all business majors, all humanities majors, and all social sciences majors. Philosophy majors enjoyenormous advantages going into business.”

The first and last testimonials are especially good. Opening quote from the final “testimonial” on linked page:

“Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead.”

The content of the dialogue was very interesting, but it is a different aspect of it that has made me think a lot since. And that aspect is   – several very experienced teacher trainers who took part commented upon how well that dialogue was facilitated. This was a group of about 30 out of which 5 had been trained in CoPI, so I could not use the CoPI reasoning structure (as it can take 20 hours of practice  for folk to learn this). However I chaired the session in the same way – that is I used the skills of a CoPI Chair without doing CoPI. What has made me really wonder was that I could shape a philosophical dialogue almost as well just using those skills as using the skills with the CoPI reasoning structure. I could move the philosophy forward, structure the dialogue, keep a certain pace etc. So there are aspects of CoPI that are very important and that are not directly related to Philosophy.

The second ‘event’ was and is my son’s experience of philosophy at university. I felt as though I had almost mislead him when he was growing up – letting him think that when we were doing CoPI it was philosophy. It was and is philosophising of a kind – but what may be important is the kind of philosophising it is, rather than it being rooted in philosophy.

more in next blog

“When I went to university I made a tremendous discovery: that there was a name for the kind of thinking I had been doing all my life – it was called Philosophy, and moreover it had a 2,000 year history.

I had always been fascinated with questions about: the nature of reality; how we know what is true and what is ‘correct’; what made some actions and decisions fair or just; the nature of good and bad; why some things are beautiful. As a young child I would ask my teachers, but I never seemed to get replies that answered the questions I was actually asking; it seemed as though these were the wrong questions. The teachers at the local village Primary school were (mostly) kind and caring. They thought I was a ‘dreamer’, and they probably thought these were fantastical childish questions, which were distracting me from class work.  Gradually they ‘weaned me off’ asking – but I never stopped wondering.

Then when I was ten years old we had the good fortune to have a wonderful science teacher. When I asked Mr. Howie whether ‘power’ was real in the same way as objects were real, he did not treat it as a ‘silly’ question. We were learning about electrical circuits and another teacher might just have been annoyed at the distraction, but he responded by giving me books on theoretical physics. For the first time I encountered serious thinking about the nature of reality and of the world, and the possibility that there was more than one answer, and further that the answer had to be argued for and demonstrated. It seemed to me that there could be nothing more important!  Although theoretical physics did not address questions of morality or aesthetics, it did raise questions of metaphysics and also of epistemology, (of course at the time I did not know the names for these kinds of questions, or even that they had names). Later, in a new school and studying algebra, I was trying to fathom what ‘tending to infinity’ meant. There was no Mr. Howie to ask. An exasperated teacher told me that it didn’t mean anything; it was just how you describe this graph, and this part of the equation. If anything that answer made the concept even more puzzling!

In encountering the discipline of Philosophy at University, I found the home for all these questions.  It was a revelation and a kind of liberation! It felt as though a great secret had been kept from us all through our childhood and teenage years. It wasn’t because here were the answers to all the questions, but rather that this kind of thinking was important and fundamental.  All my classmates seemed to feel the same way: we were all excited about the topics and we spent hours discussing philosophical puzzles in the coffee bar. But after a year or so we began to feel something was missing. We were learning the canon of Philosophy, and every week we wrote essays putting arguments for and against the theories of great philosophers but not about our own thoughts. “

Now my son has begun Honours Philosophy at university, and he is so disappointed! He is not able to philosophise. At first he just found his tutorials a bit frustrating as there was no structure and the discussions rambled and did not build or lead anywhere. everyone simply put forward their opinion about the philosophical topic, one after another. But he was raised with CoPI, and could see all the missed opportunities where the talk cold have been shaped into a real dialogue. Later he is even more discouraged as the lecturers and tutors have no interest in original thinking about the topics – they only want to see a re-iteration of the history of philosophy they are teaching and not philosophising on the part of the students themselves.

But for him it is so much worse because he has been doing CoPI since he was 5, and so is used to engaging in philosophical reasoning about his own and his classmates’ ideas about philosophical concepts. He expected to continue this at university, but that is not what university Philosophy does!

I invented CoPI precisely to create the opportunity for us and then later for others to do what we were not doing in Honours Philosophy – and that is to do original thinking and to philosophise ourselves!

I thought there was  a huge difference in what I observed professional philosophers doing themselves and what they were teaching us. And over time I created CoPI to capture what I thought the professional philosophers were doing , but in a non academic form. That is I tried to capture the essence of reasoned philosophising and create a format that would allow everyone to do this kind of thinking.

“Then one week we were given the option of writing a modern philosophical dialogue instead of the usual essay. We all chose this option thinking it would be easier – just like a record of our coffee bar discussions. But we were wrong. Writing a philosophical dialogue was much more difficult. We learned that a dialogue is not a discussion. As in a play script the dialogue had to develop, it had to have tension, and it had to have variety and there had to be character development shown through the dialogue itself. But a philosophical dialogue had to do more; it had to show a development in philosophical ideas as well.  Sitting in the library trying to write such a dialogue was not productive, so I decided to try to a theatrical technique to get my classmates to improvise a philosophical dialogue.[1] This was the beginning of what would develop over time into the Community of Philosophical Inquiry method.

The most challenging aspect of improvising or writing a philosophical dialogue was: how to create the development of the philosophical ideas within the dialogue. We had no guidance as to how to do this; in fact we had no guidance in how to write a philosophical dialogue beyond the advice to look at Plato.  However there was one philosopher who wrote about the development of Thought – Hegel. So for the purposes of the improvisation exercise I asked my class mates to use a (simplified) Hegelian structure: the first speaker should put forward a thesis; the second speaker should put forward an antithesis; the third speaker should then offer a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis; the fourth speaker should regard the synthesis as a new thesis; the fifth speaker should then offer a new antithesis and so on.

It was extremely difficult to accomplish, but it was fun to try and we did manage to achieve a kind of development of ideas. There was a problem with the final result of our written dialogues: they all looked similar, and partly because of this we received very low marks. Of course the essays were bound to be similar because they were the product of a collaborative exercise. Setting aside the fact that they were all similar, the written dialogues were not very good and the task was never set again. However, I was fascinated by the fact that the written dialogues did not reflect the energy that had been generated in the improvisation, and did not reflect either the work everyone did or the delight that was produced when someone managed to find a new antithesis or synthesis. I decided it 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.”

However I am now wondering whether what I created (the CoPI Method) IS really a non-academic distillation of what professional philosophers do?

Or is it really something else?

There was another influence on my creation of CoPI that was also important ..  that i will talk about in the next blog