Professor Stebbing, Heuristics, and Propaganda

The Post-Socratic Sandbox

Professor Susan Stebbing was a British philosopher who accomplished a great deal during her relatively short life (1885 to 1943). Her book, A Modern Introduction to Logic became a standard textbook for the study of analytical philosophy. She was a prolific writer and thinker, producing not only academic works but also several publications for the more general reader.
In this episode, I discuss what was perhaps her most widely read work, a handbook on critical thinking called Thinking to Some Purpose (subtitled "a manual of first-aid to clear thinking"). The book was published just as World War II was breaking out in Europe. That was, as it happens, good timing. It seems that the public welcomed Professor Stebbing's wise assistance in identifying and navigating the flow of information, disinformation, opinion, and irrational political utterances that accompanied the British move to a war footing.
For this episode, my particular interest is in chapters six and seven of the book, entitled respectively, "Potted Thinking" and "Propaganda."
In a sense, Stebbing's discussion of "potted thinking" foreshadows the extensive work that psychologists and philosophers have subsequently done in the area of heuristics. Necessarily, we employ lots of intellectual shortcuts in our daily lives. They're useful tools, and in fact life would be spectacularly tedious or maybe even impossible without them. Stebbing's point, though, is that we misuse them when we employ them in order to skate over rational and careful analysis in circumstances where a careful and disciplined use of reason is actually called for. In other words, "potted thinking" or heuristics can cause us to fail to think things through in situations where we really ought to be thinking them through.
And potted thinking (misused) can also serve as the underpinning for propaganda, which further induces a suspension of reason as it seeks to persuade us with appeals to emotion or even just intellectual laziness. An example that occurs to me as I read Stebbing's chapter on propaganda is the proliferation of yard signs during election season. Does the presence of a sign in a yard - or many signs in many yards - somehow make a candidate more suitable for office? On the merits, no, but there is undoubtedly a psychological effect - we're lured in by propaganda that makes use of the familiarity heuristic in a way that involves no subtlety whatsoever! Propaganda is often insidious, Stebbing points out, and this certainly seems borne out in its use of uninspiring banalities to great practical effect.
Although Professor Stebbing's book is now somewhat dated in its language and its references to politicians and cultural phenomena, its essential message is as compelling as ever. The ongoing festival of meme-making, wise-cracking, and popularity contests that comprises much of social media is fertile ground for lazy thinking and propagandizing. Many would argue that since 1939, when the book was published, things have in fact only gotten worse as far as our mainstream culture's continual beat-down of rational discourse is concerned.

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