Model Overview and Conceptual Tools

• We will employ two conventions throughout this and other instruction modules to help the reader grasp the rather complex notions that are advanced.  An italicized sentence or two written without the use of any technical language will appear before each paragraph with the intent of capturing the gist of the ideas as an advance organizer for more formal concepts that appear in the paragraph.   And frequently throughout the modules exercises designed to help locate the ideas in the context of the readers’s experience are presented.  In this first module, we will acquire the ability to recognize ways of making sense of and acting in the world by becoming aware of four modes of somatic, narrative, scientific, and linguistic rationality.  These conceptual-tools-for-reflection to be acquired and employed in this module can be thought of as an initial set of fundamental tools that are the basis for acquiring more complex tools to be dealt with in modules two and three to follow.  We can think of these concepts as tools that make up our reflection kit or repertoire for developing our competency to live a more fulfilling life.

• We will acquire and use the tools treated in each of the instructional modules by reading the material in the module, completing exercises embedded in the text, applying the concepts to our own lives through reflection, and discussing and critiqueing these activities with the educator\therapist on-line.  This may be done in conjunction with face-to-face and continuing on-line sessions.  In that communication on-line is conducted on an asynchronous basis, you will be able to communicate with and receive a response from the critical educator\therapist in a timely manner.  You may journal on-line at anytime, after each of the exercises, and upon completion of the module.  This way you will be able to respond at just the right time for you, and receive an all but immediate response.

• Upon completing this module, you should be able to reflect upon how you make sense of and act upon controversial events in your life by recognizing and examining your emotional response, critiqueing your story regarding its deviation from the culturally acceptable story of what is deemed to be appropriate action in the circumstances; considering the quality of “formal logic” you employed in justifying your intentions and action; and questioning the meaning of the language you use to convey your intentions.

Ways of Making Sense of the World

Essentially we have two types of intelligence, one that comes naturally and others that must be cultivated.

At this social moment, characterised as it is by such extraordinary change, we should not be surprised to find that our understandings of development -- in our case human development – and the process of nurturing it are also undergoing dramatic change.  Physical as well as social scientists and those working in the humanities are re-examining the perennial nature\nurture question regarding development, including the very question of how knowledge itself is developed.  A concern with the classic heredity\environment question of whether nature or nurture is the dominant force in human development has been reconstructed as a concern with the tension-filled relationship between apparent or polar opposites of biology and culture that when mediated hold the promise of a more fair, just, and equitable form of human being.

Our natural intelligence is always in conflict with our social intelligence.  And of course the folk have other ways of saying this.

In our attempts to better understand the classic heredity\environment question as it pertains to human development and in particular how we can nurture it, we will take the position that human beings’ actions and intentions are thought to be rooted in biology and culture.  We are human animals brought forth and developed biologically in the context of culture.  Our physical being, endowed through biology, makes possible our actions or contact with the natural and social worlds whereas our cultural being, endowed through language, makes possible explicit intentions that shape our actions in the natural and social worlds through the use of cultural artifacts or tools that are constantly being re-produced over time and passed on to ensuing generations.  We will refer to and explore the biological forces that influence our development and lives as somatic intelligence and the cultural forces as narrative, scientific, and linguistic intelligence.  In the course of our exploration of human action and intentions we will focus on how the mediation of these conflicting biological and cultural forces and associated forms of intelligence shapes the development of human beings as people attempt to make sense of their actions and intentions.

Over time modes of human thought and action have emerged with each one enhancing its forebear.

Over the course of human development or the curriculum of the species, we have evolved from prehuman to human primates.  In the process we strive to express our unfulfilled, historically constituted capacities as human beings.  Although this development always occurs in the context of a particular culture that is organized around practical activities that allow it to endure and progress, a certain developmental pattern of human intelligences can be formulated based on the notion of genetic priority.  To this point in time, the historical process of human development is thought to have spawned four forms of human rationality.  First, some forty to fifty million years ago, we were genetically programmed nonhuman primates who possessed somatic intelligence.  Then some fifty thousand years ago, we evolved into human primates possessing language and the capacity to make sense of our lives through storytelling, narrative intelligence.  As recently as the seventeenth century, we developed the capacity to isolate a few aspects of a story and, through experimental protocols, explain, predict and control them, scientific intelligence.  Finally, in the mid sixties, we found ourselves in environmental and social jeopardy and developed the capacity to interrogate our intentions and actions by examining our use of language in such a way as to reveal any over or under use of somatic, narrative and scientific forms of thought and action, linguistic intelligence.

In our exploration of ways of making sense of the world, we will initially turn to the somatic form of intelligence that nonhuman as well as human beings share and then to narrative, scientific and linguistic forms that characterize human beings.

Somatic Intelligence

The biologically based intelligence we began with as nonhuman apes still resides within us today as a powerful mode of rationality.

Somewhere in the vicinity of fifty million years ago our prehuman, primate ancestors became actors on the stage of evolutionary development.  The primordial intelligence that guided their thought and action and underpinned their consciousness was an embodied one, referred to as somatic intelligence.  It sustained them in their life in the trees as well as in their descent to and life on the ground.  And today still remains as a foundational touchstone of human intelligence.

What we pay attention to, what parts of things we select to focus upon, the categories we use to remember them, and the way we think about them is directly influenced by our emotions and appetites.

Nonhuman primates feel, attend, perceive, remember and think in much the same way we do.  Except that these capacities are automatically controlled by genetic imperatives.  Nonhuman primates are unable to split themselves and, from a distance, observe how they are feeling, attending, perceiving, remembering and thinking.  Instead their "consciousness" is informed by a primordial rationality that guides the perpetuation of a species.  When aroused, our nonhuman primate ancestors have a non-linguistic, organic thought and action pattern that guides their mental, physical and social activity.

Although as human beings we posses advanced forms of thinking and doing, we still possess foundational elementary forms that spring from our animal heritage.

As human beings or primates, we too retain the natural proclivities that make it possible for us to acquire the skills and sensitivities to participate in and benefit from group endeavours without explicit attention, perception, memory, and thought.  Indeed many more of our actions are unintentional in this sense than many of us realize.  Originally our intellect -- cognitive processes -- was fused with our affect -- emotional processes.  This allowed for automatic action based on a genetic connection with other members of the species as well as the physical and social environment in general.  Somatic intelligence can be thought of as a biological programme for sustaining animate life.

Other forms are built upon this original form of natural intelligence.

Somatic or natural intelligence is thought to be the bedrock for the ongoing development of other forms of human intelligence.  The key notion here is the original fused-nature of the relation between affect and intellect that accounts for primordial consciousness and forms of attending, perceiving, remembering, and thinking.  These elementary mental functions are thought to have been refined as the affect and intellect became differentiated over the developmental course of pre-human and human primate life and in the present day represent four modes of embodied thought and action.

When we get language, the emotions and appetites continue to influence our thinking but not directly.

As human life makes its appearance on the stage of historical development, the fusion of the affect and intellect is sundered, language evolves from gestures as early human apes develop the capacities to tell stories as a way of making sense of their lives.  Whereas prior to the advent of language and human life the affect directly effected mental functions such as attention, perception, memory and thought, now it mediates and is mediated by them.

When we became human apes our bodies to some extent did become separated from our minds.

We can think of the beginnings of human existence in terms of this defusing of the affect and intellect.  The intellect evolved as language and gestures came into being making it possible for us to decontextualize situations and to some extent transcend the species-specific imperatives of collective action thereby making possible individually-oriented action.  And in the case of the affect, we retained our capacity to engage in genetically guided action.  We can think of our body (soma) being under our control in that we can, to some extent, make it into an object and instrumentalize it to serve us in collective and individual endeavours --cultural forces operate here.  In another sense the body is not under our control.  It is in unison with animate life in general in that it responds in non-volitional ways that contribute to our well being --biological forces operate here.

The animal part or right side of our brain makes it possible for us to develop unconsciously while the left side allows us to create explanations for these unconscious developments.

Neurobiologists and primatologists maintain that one compartment of the mind/brain is made up of numerous modules of networks of associations that are under constant development as a result of our undertakings in the physical and social worlds.  They make it possible to act without our being able to explain how we are able to do so.  For our purposes we can think of this compartment as the organic side of the mind\brain.  Or the right brain, cortex or hemisphere and the centre of somatic intelligence.  Another compartment, the left brain, cortex or hemisphere, referred to as the interpreter, is the seat of narrative, scientific, and linguistic intelligence.  Through the use of narrative and scientific intelligence we are able to infer from the results of actions how they were accomplished without actually being able to observe or know directly how actions are carried out.  We communicate these inferences in narrative and scientific forms. The distinct but not separate cerebral cortexes or hemispheres characterize and differentiate human from nonhuman primates.

Most of the time we tend to downplay emotions as being nonrational or unintelligent, to rule them out of court is a serious mistake.

A principle to be understood regarding the use of somatic intelligence by human beings is that they often have an initial organic or "emotional" response to a situation that has been deemed - -according to contemporary western cultural standards -- to be primitive, subjective, and not overly rational or intelligent.  On the view being advanced here, we would never go by our first impression or sixth sense but neither would we go bye it.  This first impression, our initial organic response, has invaluable potential for the preservation of well-being.  Within this “natural response” lies the capacity to prevent a loss of groundedness in the reality of group life that can easily be disrupted by unbridled technological or social innovation.  This potential to prevent the erosion of the ground of being is thought to reside in a self-serving as well as an altruistic aspect of primordiality.  A matter we will return to shortly in our exploration of narrative intelligence.

Exercise 1 Try to recall an incident where you disregarded an initial emotional reaction and at a later time regretted not having given it more attention.

Human beings are a paradoxical combination of cultural discipline and biological grace.

Let us now return to the matter of the body as both an object that we can control for instrumental purposes and a non-volitional, organic state of being that guarantees our connectedness with the primordial world.  An understanding of somatic intelligence can be enhanced by envisaging our bodies as having two dimensions.  One an objectual-instrumental body, in that we can turn it into an object that can be an instrument for achieving cultural aims.  We can cognitively discipline it to act in culturally prescribed ways.  “Hard bodies" comes to mind here as an example where excessive weight training turns the body into a prized object for display purposes that becomes dysfunctional for organic contact.  We will explore this aspect of the over instrumentalization of our lives more fully as we examine narrative, scientific and linguistic forms of intelligence.  The other dimension is the organizmal body that is not under our conscious control, but functions to maintain groundedness, sanity, health, and general well-being.  Here we mean the spontaneous form and action that is a matter of natural grace rather than discipline.  That subtle sense of social being that marks a sensitive person.

We express ourselves verbally and extraverbally.

Human beings are thought to have three distinct but not separate modes of expression: language and gestures to communicate cognitive meaning, mimic expressive behaviours of paling and blushing to explore feelings, and compulsive or more truly expressive behaviours of laughing and crying to re-establish lost balance between the organizmal and objectual-instrumental bodies that typifies human being.

Language and Gestures

Through language and gestures we are able to tell stories, analyze things scientifically, and consider what we mean by certain words and their combination.

Language and gestures are associated with our cultural life and are under cognitive rational control.  They are fundaments of our cultural life or the way we envision the world we live in.  Through language and gestures, in concert with other human beings, we construct and communicate intentions and artifacts or tools that allow us to shape our mental environment composed of images, stories, common sense or folk theories, and procedural and theoretical models; our social environment composed of arrangements for relating with each other in family, work, sports, and other social situations; and our technical environment composed of machines such as the computational media and those used for purposes of other modes of transportation.  We employ narrative, scientific, and linguistic modes of  intelligence to continually recreate these environments, a matter we will take up shortly after completing our exploration of somatic intelligence.

Mimic-Expressive Behaviours

In certain situations our body sounds out our emotions as a way of considering action.

Mimic-expressive behaviours are involuntary and associated with our affect or organic being.  They make it possible to explore our emotions.  The mimic expressive mode allows the organizmal body to come to the fore as a field of emotion portrayed by the objectual body as a means for exploring contained feelings that reside in our organizmal bodies.  Paling and blushing or becoming rigid and relaxing are expressions of emotional states such as repulsion and attraction that well up in our organizmal body and are expressed involuntarily through the field of our instrumental body.  The face particularly, but also the whole body, is marked by an affect. The instrumental body mimics the emotional state of the organizmal body. In so doing we are able to communicate with others and ourselves extra-verbally.

On occasion we tentatively explore feelings of repulsion and attraction by portraying them with our body.

Paling and blushing and becoming rigid or relaxing can be thought of as forms of communication with ourselves and others regarding our natural, contained emotional states that lie beyond our culturally influenced intentions.  When we become pale, we are entertaining the emotion of repulsion, a desire to move away from an object or person; whereas when we blush, we are sounding out the emotion of attraction, our contained desire to move toward an object or person. The fact that these particular ways of expressing ourselves can only come into being in the presence of and with confirmation from other human beings affirms our earlier discussion about the role of somatic intelligence in preserving our groundedness.  As we shall see later, being aware of these involuntary, organizmal reactions on our part can enhance our participation in the activities of social life.

Exercise 2 Recall an instance of paling and see if you can uncover repulsion. Recall an instance of  blushing and see if you can uncover attraction.

Compulsive-expressive Behaviours

In certain situations our body takes over through emotions.

The compulsive or more truly expressive mode characterized by laughing and crying makes it possible to cope with and rectify disequilibrium between biological and cultural forces. Compulsive-expressive behaviours such as laughing and crying, also associated with our natural or organic being, are means for dealing with emotional states such as jubilation in the case of laughing and embarrassment, despair, pain, rage and pity in the case of crying.  Laughing and crying are involuntary expressions of emotions.

In situations we cannot make any sense of, we often laugh them off ;whereas in situations that threaten to emotionally overwhelm us, we have a good cry.

We laugh when we become momentarily entangled in senseless controversies and can no longer make sense of the relations between our objectual-instrumental and organizimal bodies.  We cry when we find ourselves in a state of personal crisis brought on by being unable to distance ourselves from the situations which generate emotional states such as despair, rage, and pity.  In both situations we surrender to primordial being.  We lose control, without getting out of control, by laughing or crying.  Both of these compulsive-expressive behaviours help us to deal with the awfulness of certain cultural expectations around a given event.

Laughing and crying are ways of extracting ourselves from cultural situations that are unbearable.

Laughing often comes upon us when we encounter confused situations in which we are unable to make sense of them through our conventional view of reality and crying when we cannot distance ourselves from a critical turning point in our lives.  They are at the same time both self-assertive and self-abandoning reactions when we are unable to make sense of contradictory or traumatic situations.  They are assertive in that we extract ourselves from cultural constraints thus allowing our animal nature to come to the fore and dominate and abandoning in that they extract us from culture and allow us to enter the world of primordiality.

The laughter we are considering here comes from the belly.

When we engage in laughter, a compulsive-expressive behaviour, we fall into a paroxysm or fit that shakes us out of our rigidified cultural ways of thinking and establishes distance and a temporary breather from the situation. This hiatus enables us to return to the situation with renewed vigour and a spirit to reconstruct it.  The kind of laughter here is of the spontaneous, uncontrollable type that issues from the belly in contrast to socially contrived, polite type of laughter.

Exercise 3 Recall an instance in which you were overtaken by intense laughter. See if you can uncover the controversy or contradiction that called out the laughter.

Crying is a way the body has of putting some distance between an event and the emotion associated with it.

In contrast to laughing as an involuntary response to situations that immobilize us due to self- contradictions that point to the absurdity of a culturally accepted way of acting and making sense, crying is an involuntary response that enables us to distance ourselves from situations in which we can not respond meaningfully given that we are overwhelmed by emotions such as pity, devotion, and rage. When we find ourselves in this situation of acute disorientation and personal crisis, we  abandon the objectual-instrumental body and the organizmal body takes over. Here our contained affect or emotions residing in our organizmal body overwhelm the objectual-instrumental body within which the traumatic situation is consciously experienced and temporarily obliterate it. The idea of weeping may more adequately capture this type of crying where the balance between the objectual-instrumental and the organizmal body is lost given the lack of distance between intense emotions and the situations that call them out. The crying we are considering here is not unlike sobbing that issues deep from within.

Exercise 4 Recall an instance in which you are overtaken by intense crying. See if you can uncover the personal crisis that called out the crying.

Narrative Intelligence

We make sense of our lives by telling stories.

One and a half million to fifty thousand years before present the biologically-based capacity to gesture as a means of communication evolved into human language and the competence to create stories that make sense of the conditions of human life.  A striking contemporary example of one these narratives is the Christian religious narrative of the fall from grace that makes sense of our descent from a relatively abundant and safe tree-life to an existence on the danger-laden, perilous ground.

If we change our stories, we change our actions.

Human beings make sense of their lives by creating stories that explain what has taken place in the past.  As a basis for future actions, these stories also portray what can be expected to take place in the future.  Stories, or narratives as they are more formally referred to, shape our mental processes.    They tell us what to pay attention to, what parts of a thing are important, what to call these parts, and how they are related.  So if we are to change how we make sense of the world and consequently our actions, we must reconstruct the narratives that influence them.

Stories that justify our actions soon become to a degree erased from our memory, making the actions all but automatic.

An ironic part of this storytelling intelligence is that once we have told or created a story that resonates with us and hence becomes a basis for our intentions and actions, it very rapidly becomes “unconscious”.  This is so in order that we do not have to constantly refer to the story or intentions to justify our actions.  The story in a certain sense becomes erased and the action associated with it becomes almost second nature.  When questioned about why we carry on in a certain way, we say  “Well that is the way that we have always done it”.  This aspect of narrative intelligence has its downside in that stories that influence our action are not easily made apparent.  So changing our action is not just a simple matter of implementing a new plan.  Before we can do this, we must also change our story about the matter.  The story that portrays our intentions and the action associated with it are intricately intertwined.

As part of their development, people’s stories, as well as those of the groups to which they belong, are constantly being reconstructed.

In the previous section we explored the idea that cognitive processes or the intellect are organized or focussed by stories and that our emotions or affect influences the extent to which we internalize these organizing narratives.  Now we continue our exploration of narrative intelligence as a way of making sense of the world by looking at canonical and exceptional narratives, their relation to each other, and how their reconstruction or retelling influences the development of individuals and the groups to which they belong.

Canonical Narratives

There are commonly accepted stories within social institutions that depict the proper way to play various roles within them.

The culturally accepted stories about how we are supposed to act in social life generally as a Canadian and in particular about how we should go about acting within specific social institutions such as family, occupation, church, friendship, sports, and government are referred to as canonical narratives.  “What is the moral of the story?”  Every group has morals that are portrayed in its narratives. They are held sacred within a culture.  They portray how things should or ought to be done within a particular group.  In a sense they are its canons, hence the terms canonical narratives.  This fits in with the notion that until the recent ascendance of science as the authoritative source of knowledge the church was the sole keeper and arbiter of the official or sanctioned truth.  The point is that all groups have their official narratives that guide their actions including who they select for membership.

Exercise 5 In a few sentences describe the canonical narrative for one of the social groups in which you hold membership.

Paying one’s dues is a vital part of gaining membership in a group.

The view of development we are taking is that a person’s development always initially occurs externally and involuntarily in the form of a canonical narrative and only later on a volitional basis.  In this sense we can say that development initially occurs from the outside in.  After all where else would one initially get access to new forms of consciousness.  That is to say we initially inherit our cultural story which organizes and focusses our attention, perception, memory, and thinking.  Indeed if we do not initially, albeit tentatively, accept the story, we are precluded from participating in the given cultural activity or societal institution.  This is what is meant by the “involuntary” part.

The initial aspect of buying into a group’s story is really an emotional matter.

When you think about it, in order to enter any social institution, another word for socially organized ways of acting, we usually swallow hard and repress our emotions, in order to get our foot in the door!  We must to some degree identify with the group.  It is important to remind ourselves that we are referring here to that kind of development that involves a change in consciousness such as taking a view of the world from a particular occupational, religious, or familial perspective.  In keeping with earlier explorations of somatic intelligence, the identification process of taking on a canonical narrative involves both our objectual-instrumental and organizmal bodies.

Exercise 6 Describe an instance in which upon joining a social group you “accepted” the official party line even though parts of it were less than appealing or even unpalatable.

The conventional view of development places individuals at the centre of it, and their highly rational thought processes as its epitome.

It will take a bit of doing to get used to this notion of developing from the outside in as we tend to look at it just the other way around.  That is the liberal view within which people are seen as rational decision-makers who consider as many options as are available and then select the one that is most appealing to them.  This is of course part of the “rugged individualist” ethos that still pervades our western cultural story.  Indeed it is part of our unquestioned vital cultural tradition and thus taken for granted--the erasure problem we discussed above.   But this canonical narrative is currently under reconstruction.  And now to the part an individual plays in both identifying with a canonical narrative and possibly participating in its ongoing reconstruction.

Exceptional Narratives

People tell stories about why the commonly accepted ones limit their potential; some of these exceptional stories represent a positive critique.

The other main type of narrative is exceptional stories that depict why we are not able to precisely enact the official roles portrayed in the canonical narrative.   They too contain a moral as all stories do.  As individuals within a social institution try to enact the social roles portrayed in the canonical narratives they find themselves unable to do this with precision.  And so they create exceptional narrative accounts to make sense of their less than perfect enactment and also to portray a more complex version of the commonly accepted narrative.   They attempt to justify a departure from the canonical story and is so doing portray a potential rewriting to reflect a more inclusive version.  Exceptional narratives represent on the one hand individuals’ attempts to makes sense of their lives and on the other a potential source of social change when these exceptional narrative accounts are adjudicated in the public sphere.

Exercise 7 Briefly tell an exceptional story based on your membership in a particular social group.

Exceptional stories when merged with the commonly accepted story often produce a richer one.

There is a fundamental tension between canonical narratives and individual’s exceptional narratives representing two actively engaged forces whose conflict creates qualitative social change.  Society requires generally acceptable narratives to focus our cognitive processes of attending, perceiving, remembering and thinking and in so doing make it possible for human beings to engage in collaborative activities that ensure the survival and advancement of the species and society.  Human beings are unique and in quest of self-identity, they are chafed by canonical narratives and suffer as they yearn to actualize their unfulfilled historical constituted capacities as human beings.

We only rewrite the commonly accepted stories in times of crisis.

It is important to note that exceptional stories tend to challenge the status quo or canonical narratives only in times of crisis.  As the folk put it, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  When the canonical stories or folk psychology are working for most people in a social institution, exceptional stories do not resonate like they do when the commonly accepted narratives do not provide the majority of the institution’s members with a plausible story about how life should be lived within them.   Another way of saying this is that as long as an institution’s progress at solving problems through conventional solutions is steady, members just keep refining the solutions.  But when over time they encounter intractable problems such as those that characterize the present social moment, members reframe the problems employing narrative intelligence.   

Having paid our dues, we are now in position to offer a critique of the standard way of doing things.

As we develop involuntarily or from the outside in, we inevitably become emotional around certain aspects of the canonical story.  We can think of these emotions as affective charges or markers that store this information for later retrieval at a time that is more appropriate for critiquing the canonical story to decide if we indeed really agree with it or want to put forth an exceptional story that pleads for a reconstruction of it.  Although development does originate from the outside in, the process of development incorporates a series of external and internal oscillations --development from the outside in/development from the inside out-- within which the canonical story is told and retold and in the process reconstructed.

Identifying with the party line or commonly accepted story of a social group involves a developmental rhythm composed of increments or steps of buying in.

Another way of viewing development from the inside out is to return to the notion that stories always originate externally in the culture and are then internalized by an individual and either accepted, rejected, or reconstructed.  And so we can say that when we develop we experience things first on an interpersonal level and then reflect upon them at an intrapersonal level.  Said another way, all reflection is preceded by experience.  Given the western cultural narrative that true knowledge is objective and stored in people’s heads in schematic form, this notion may at first blush seem strange.  But when you think about it from the perspective of the view of the genetic priority of forms of human intelligence explored earlier, it make sense.

The features of narratives can be discerned in the behaviours of non-human primates.

Noting the features of narrative may further our understanding of the connections between somatic and scientific intelligence.  Narratives have four features that issue from our animal heritage.   Narratives always portray an individual accomplishing something, this agentivity is characteristic of the behaviours of non-human primates.  Narratives always have a beginning and an end that allows for standardization.  This sequentiality dimension can be seen in the behaviours of non-human primates and the scientific protocols of human beings.  Narratives always have a plot that forges links between the ordinary and the exceptional and manage to record and account for departures from standard interactions.  This awareness of or attention to deviations in standard patterns is manifested in the behaviours of non-human primates.  And finally by their very nature narratives always represent a particular perspective that allows scope for the human imagination.  This perspective can be likened to the marked curiosity of non-human primates.

Through artful storytelling, we can alter the past and transform the future.

A story can be thought of as being part truth and part fiction.  The truth part, verifiability, is how things actually happened.  The fiction part, verisimilitude, is how, in hindsight, things could have happened had we known what we now know!  Verisimilitude is a lifelike portrayal of how it could have happened, with the benefit of reflection.  We tell a story about or recount events after they happen.  We tell it in a certain way that allows us to capitalize on our mistakes or experience.  A good story is told at the intersection of truth and fiction or verifiability and verisimilitude.  Robust exceptional stories constructed from practical experience hold the potential to alter the canonical ones and transform our theories.

The ongoing reconstruction of stories was our main mode of rationality until formal science made its appearance and changed our lives irrevocably.

Narrative as a form of human intelligence is thought to have held sway until the mid-seventeenth century when through certain advances in formal science --the creation of the notion of laboratory science within which the ideas of isolating specific variables and manipulating them while holding all others constant through observational manoeuvres and later-to-come statistical manoeuvres-- the advent of the Protestant reformation and capitalism swept away Catholicism as the reigning narrative, feudalism as the political order of the day, and narrative as the dominant form of human intelligence and replaced them respectively with Protestantism, capitalism and scientism.  And so by now not only had somatic intelligence become underdetermined and relegated to the status of carnal knowledge, the narrative intelligence that made this reformation possible itself had become underdetermined in the wake of the promise of enormous power inherent in scientific intelligence.  A story to which we now turn.

Scientific Intelligence

Rather than depending upon a blend of truth and fiction as is the case with narrative intelligence, scientific intelligence represents a search for a more precise truth that does not include a fictional component.

Human beings have the capacity to be objective when they are thinking about a problem.  To a certain degree we are able to shut off our organizmal body or sensorium that houses our emotions.  In so doing we are able to give ample rein to our instrumental-objectual bodies.  Through the interpreter compartment of the mind/brain, guided by the narrative of science, we are able to focus our energies upon what is verifiable by entering the “scientific laboratory”.  This is a place in which we abstract a particular problem such as financial retirement planning and look at certain verifiable objects or in the jargon of science “variables”.  We do this in order to get a more precise purchase on certain aspects of it by employing the assumption “all other things being equal”.  That is, the influence of other influential factors including some of which we are not aware are assumed to cancel each other out.  A certain form of discipline is exercised through which we are able to screen out feelings and imagination based on the canonical narrative of the awesome power of science.

Our personal plans or identities help us to get started or envision a destination or goal, but as we put them into play we find that due to their ideal or abstract nature they soon require desnagging in order to make sense of unexpected outcomes.

Inside the “laboratory of the mind”, with extraneous factors removed, we are able to explain, predict, and control certain aspects of a problem such as financial retirement planning.  We theorise within the limits of the laboratory conditions under which only certain specified variables are considered while others are factored out.  This analysis of variance which accounts for the influence of only those specified variables we have chosen, gives us leverage in solving the problem through the implementation of a scientifically grounded plan.  With this theory generated through our thought experiment, we enact a plan and if it is a good one, it produces desired results.  Over time however, given the abstractness and dismissal of numerous variables a theory runs into difficulties.  These snags require ever more problem-solving endeavours that call for more iterations of precise, non-emotional, scientific thought and action.

When the difference between an identity, plan, or theory and the necessary desnagging operations becomes acute, we employ our natural and storytelling abilities to reconstruct them.

At some point in time our theory or plan begins to run out as unforseeable events inevitably occur.  As in the case of financial retirement planning all plans and theories invariably do this as they have depended upon the “all things being equal” assumption.  In a sense we have been able to rule out dramatic change in order to gain the stability required for gradual, nonchaotic, sane progress.   When a plan or theory reaches a crisis state where over time its results have reached a point of diminishing returns, we call upon our somatic and narrative intelligence to fashion a new vision or theory from which operations can be cast.  We can think of this process as rewriting or reconstructing an institution’s canonical narrative in order to make sense of desnagging operations that were outside the bounds of conventional or canonical narratives.  For example in the case of a person, one might be pursuing a career in accountancy and discover that excellence in certain relatively minor duties pointed to a career in education or the stage.  Or in the case of  a corporation such as Laidlaw that evolved from a solid waste disposal operation to a major medical services provider.

Changing our identity is a subtle, gradual, all but unnoticeable change process that appears to suddenly come to fruition. 

From the point of view of social and personal life that we have been pursuing, we can begin to see how gradual or quantitative change takes place by means of day-to-day problem-solving driven by scientific intelligence.   We get through the day or a particular situation in our lives by making do despite the fact that we are not quite able to live up to the narrative of our selves with which we have identified.  We have deviated somewhat from the plan or theory.  We can also begin to see how dramatic or qualitative change takes place through problem-finding driven by somatic, narrative and linguistic intelligence.  We at some point rewrite our narratives so as to make them more in accord with our cumulative deviant actions.  Subtly and unobtrusively by our thought and action over time we have changed our identity through a series of problem-solving endeavours.  Through problem-findings efforts we reconstruct our personal narratives to make sense of this evolving identity.

We change our identity by adjusting it over time through the use of all the types of intelligence.

Expressed in scientific terms --the logic of discovery-- we create a hypothetical identity through the logic of discovery, we employ our somatic intelligence that make it possible through our organizimal bodies to plug into the world of primordiality our source of imagination and creativity.  We then use our narrative intelligence to invent a story or vision that can be subsequently theorized and crafted into an operational plan, our identity.   Having crafted a “theory” through problem-finding we test it.  We deal with only those aspects of our identity that are within our present knowledge base and then only with those over which we can exercise some control.  We concentrate on only a few important variables, ignore all others -the logic of verification-- in order to ensure some practical progress.  The result of these ongoing iterations of problem-solving and problem-finding efforts is and ever-evolving identity.

Exercise 9 Try to recall an event in your life that marked a dramatic change in your identity that occurred after countless conflicts between the identity you were striving to portray and the identity that characterized who you really were.

Although science is a powerful way of making sense of the world, to rely on it solely is to court disaster.

Scientific intelligence is mirrored in common sense. We deal with only those aspects of a problem that are within our present knowledge-base, and then with only those over which we can exercise some control.  In this way we are able to maximize our efforts. But there is a price to be paid for the elegance of simplicity!   As a famous social scientist once put it, “We exclude--And what we exclude haunts us at the walls we set up.  We include--And what we include limps wounded by amputation.  And most of all we must live with our ghosts.”

When and how can we know when to work on changing our identity?

Now we can begin to see how our somatic and narrative intelligence serve as the sources of our creative capacity to dream up more inclusive visions of who we are, that is who we could be.  And our scientific intelligence is where our ability to operationalize these dreams in a do-able, efficient, realistic fashion comes from.  Over time a person’s well being is a function of a combination of timely problem-finding, or magic, and tenacious problem-solving or science. The relation between problem-solving and problem-finding is captured in the folk-saying “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.  We only switch to the problem-finding mode when we are in deep trouble.  Being able to realize when things are broke is what linguistic intelligence is all about, a matter to which we now turn.

Linguistic Intelligence

By the middle sixties social scientists began telling exceptional stories about how scientific intelligence should be employed in trying to understand human being.

A major shift in direction by certain social scientists burgeoned in the 1960's.  Stimulated by the inadequacy of the canonical narrative that favoured formal science to promote the alleviation of widespread social problems of enormous magnitude, certain social scientists took a linguistic turn and began making and telling exceptional stories that called for a human science grounded in the genetically prior and underdetermined somatic and narrative intelligence.  They contrasted this approach with the more commonly accepted one grounded in formal logic and laboratory and experimental protocols.  Their efforts foreshadowed the emergence of a fourth form of human rationality that we refer to as linguistic intelligence.

In the process of changing, social groups and those who belong to them must rethink their roles.

Being able to realize that the narratives that underpin social groups to which we belong and hence our personal narratives and identities requires reconstruction through problem-finding, and not just adjustment for efficiency sake through problem-solving is connected to our capacity to describe our descriptions of reality.  These descriptions of how we are supposed to enact social roles in groups are cast in language that can be examined in the context of their meaning, hence the label linguistic intelligence.

Exercise 10 List the social groups to which you belong or are affiliated with. Select one and briefly describe the canonical narrative.

Individuals take care of their mental health by monitoring the relations between descriptions of their intentions and their actions.

If we believe we are intentional actors, that is we have a rationale for what we do that can be described in words, then the language we use to describe these intentions to our selves and to others can be seen as a primary influence on our actions.  We can say that language mediates rather than controls our actions.  That is they mutually modify each other.  By this we mean that although our intentions guide our practice, practice inevitably diverges from our intentions (or the ”theory”) making it necessary to change our language and intentions so that they more adequately reflect or are more congruent with each other.  This is the linguistic way of making sense of the world by which individuals care for their mental health. The crucial relation to be understood here is between meaning and action.  They are always in state of tension that stands open to mediation.  Recasting our folk knowledge, we can say that rather than “Actions speak louder than words”, “Words speak as loud as actions”.

Raising our intentions from an implicit to an explicit level allows us to more adequately check them against our actions.

We can examine our language that describes our actions to ensure that what we say we mean is what we really mean.  We can do this by examining the disparity between what we say and what we do, or between theory and practice.    We examine the language we use to describe our daily activities within social groups and the social relationships within which these activities are embedded.  By bringing to the fore taken-for-granted assumptions that pervade our language at the tacit level, we are better able to scrutinize them.  A problem here, as we previously discussed, is that our language, especially our narrative, over time becomes implicit or erased.  And, as actions occur in a complex world, they always transcend the meaning that resides in our often implicit descriptions of reality.  By bringing to the fore taken-for-granted assumptions that pervade our language and intentions at the tacit or implicit level, we are  better able to scrutinize them.  As we can see, describing our descriptions of reality is a challenging and not a straight forward task!

Exercise 11 Using the previously selected social group, describe your actions within it. Then see if they are in any way incongruent with your exceptional story that justifies the actions.

We only take to describing our descriptions of reality when contradictions in our lives become unbearable.

When the discrepancy between our descriptions and reality is not wide, we continue on with our scientific problem-solving endeavours.  In terms of our previously mentioned maxim, this is akin to “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”  But how would we know when “broke  means broke”   At strategic moments --when contradictions become no longer bearable-- we examine our narratives, descriptions of reality that emanate from them, and associated actions to determine whether our intentions reflect an underuse of somatic and narrative and an overuse of scientific intelligence.  We can do this by employing the notion of languages as discourses that incorporate-- not only words, theories and narratives-- but also other components of intentions such as the values we embrace, the way in which we hold our bodies, the clothes we wear, and the attitudes we manifest.  By so doing we make our intentions more explicit and amenable to reconstruction.

Exercise 12 Continuing with the previous exercise, explore the language you used to portray the contradictions and your exceptional story to be sure you really meant what you said. If you find any ambivalence regarding your descriptions or narrative, you are now in a position to change your language and hence your intentions.

Being able to reflect on our actions and intentions by examining our language requires the view that the everpresent tension between our body and our mind is a potentially positive source of change when mediated.

Linguistic intelligence is a tool for reflecting on our intentions and practice.  It is dependent upon a view of human being that recognises the inherent conflict between somatic ways of making sense of the world --biology-- and narrative and scientific ways --culture.  It is through an examination of our everyday language in which our exceptional narratives are couched and the more “official” language of the canonical narratives that we are able to detect and mediate this conflict.  Now we can begin to see how our somatic and narrative intelligence serve as the sources of our creative capacity to dream up more inclusive visions of who we are and who we might become.  And how scientific intelligence serves to operationalize our dreams in a do-able, efficient, realistic fashion.  Over time a person’s capacity to be is a function of timely problem-finding and tenacious problem-solving.

Glossary

Agentivity is the notion that human beings are, to some degree, in control of their destiny in that they have conscious plans that guide their actions, they are intentional agents.

Compulsive-Expressive Behaviours are involuntary, organic-based responses of laughing that helps us to deal with situations of meaninglessness and disorientation and crying that helps us to deal with situations of overwhelming personal crises.Affect is the emotional aspect of consciousness that involves the emotions.

Consciousness comprises our mental process of attending to an event, perceiving certain parts of that event, naming and remembering the perceived parts, and thinking about the relationships of the perceived parts (attention, perception, memory, and thought) that are grounded in culture and the emotional processes that are grounded in biology.. 

Genetic Priority is the idea that our ways of making sense and acting in the world  --somatic, narrative, scientific, and linguistic intelligence— evolved and tend to be employed by us sequentially.  We initially experience things emotionally, narrativize them, later formally analyze them, and finally critique the meaning they hold for us.

Intellect is the cognitive aspect of consciousness or being that involves attending, perceiving, remembering, and thinking.

Language and gestures are the human abilities to create symbols that make possible a symbolic world that can enrich our social and physical worlds.

Mimic-Expressive Behaviours are involuntary, organic-based responses of paling that allows us to sound out emotions of repulsion and blushing that allows us to sound out emotions of attraction.
Objectual-Instrumental body is that aspect of the human body that can be diverted from its natural function in order to achieve cultural imperatives.

Organizimal body, that aspect of the human body that functions automatically to ensure physical survival. 

Perspective is the notion that individuals have a particular take on matters that represents their imaginative power.

Plot is the notion that although being can be seen as standardized we can expect and account for anomalies or glitches in the pattern.

Problem-finding, driven by somatic, narrative, and linguistic intelligence, is the process of identifying with a reconstructed, more appropriate version of who we are and strive to be.

Problem-solving, driven by scientific intelligence, is the process of living our life in accordance with our identity given a less than perfect fit.