INTUITIVE STRATEGIC THINKING: INSIGHT, “FINGERTIP FEELING” AND WAR
Attention Clausewitzians, horizontal thinkers and advocates of “ Fingerspitzegefuhl” :
A provocative article by Dr.William Duggan from the Strategic Studies Institute entitled
” Coup D’Oeil:Strategic Intuition in Army Planning” contrasts the generation and use of insight vs. tradtional Army analytical methodology.
There are some very Zen-like qualities to the mental state the author is encouraging experienced military commanders to habituate. Great commanders and strategists, I would hypothesize, arrive at this kind of ” flow” state because they had developed into horizontal thinkers out of a need to make greater use of a natural bias toward nonverbal thinking – particularly mathematical and spatial reasoning. Consider a few examples:
John Boyd —————————>Fighter pilot, engineer
Stonewall Jackson ——————>Physics, Artillery
Albert Wohlstetter——————>Mathematician
Napoleon Bonaparte—————->Artillery, mathematics
Peter the Great———————–> Artillery, shipbuilding,
Alexander the Great—————–>Philosophy, medicine, science
Herman Kahn————————->Physics and mathematics
Now, this most likely would not hold true for every great commander or strategist but I would wager, on average, you will see considerable abilities in fields that correlate with high levels of nonverbal reasoning.
Hat tip to Dave Dilegge of The Small Wars Council.
December 26th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
Mark,
A passage in one of the articles I have to read for next semester, Metacognition: Definitions and Empirical Foundations by Dr. Doug Hacker, made me think of fingertip feeling
“Tip-of-the-tongue” experiences, feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments, serial recall, allocation of study effort, “seen” judgments, judgments of learning (JOL), and ease-of-learning (EOL) judgments are all metacognitive phenomena that have been used to investigate the notion that people have knowledge of their knowledge and thought processes and can accurately monitor their knowledge and processes. Tip-of-the-tongue experiences, the investigation of which can be traced back to William James (1890), concern a person’s judgment that currently forgotten information is in fact recallable, that is, the memory is on the tip of one’s tongue. Closely related, FOK judgments concern a person’s knowledge that a currently forgotten or unrecallable item can be recognized when presented with other items. Serial recall has been used to determine how accurately people can judge whether a sequence of pictures or words they have seen for a brief period can be recalled. Allocation of study has been used to examine how accurately people can judge the current state of their knowledge, and based on that judgment, whether they allocate greater effort to study items that have not yet been learned. Seen judgments concern a person’s knowledge of whether an item has been seen before; JOLs concern a person’s knowledge of whether an item has been learned; and EOLs are judgments about how difficult it will be to learn new information from a particular domain given what one knows about that domain. Four of these metacognitive phenomena (FOK, serial recall, allocation of study effort, and JOLs) will serve here as illustrations of this category of metacognitive research.
It made me wonder about the relationship between fintertip-feeling and metacognition. While fingertip-feeling isn’t itself reflective, a true tip-of-the-tongue or feeling-of-knowledge isn’t, either. Both are almost physical sensations that relate to knowledge known but not quite grasped.
Earlier I wondered if fingertip-feeling could be found between comprehension and automaticity. Perhaps fingertip-feeling could also be called Expertise, where the sensation is a product of both Decision-led and Orientation-led processes.
December 26th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
“It made me wonder about the relationship between fintertip-feeling and metacognition. While fingertip-feeling isn’t itself reflective, a true tip-of-the-tongue or feeling-of-knowledge isn’t, either. Both are almost physical sensations that relate to knowledge known but not quite grasped.”
Well, as I understand neuroscience experiences that create skills or are emotionally significant create neuronal connections in the brain. Really networks of neuronal connections that can be reinforced by experience ( for example, practicing the guitar) or can fade throug disuse ( ” forgetting” a foreign language you omce knew).
If you think about it – tip of the tongue sensaton is conscious awareness of having knowledge without recalling the correct mnemonic ” key” to access it.
Since an experience might have multiple connections to other neuronal networks – ex. a championship game you saw might be referenced also by whom you were with that day, where you saw it etc. – not just the events themselves. you might be able to more quickly access tip of the tongue data by active metacognition -systematically running through referential categories to see if some other concept or data point ” clicks” with the hidden knowledge.
Fingertip feeling I think is very similar but instead of trying to identify the unavailable info that information is being used in very fast subconscious processing for a decision. Imagine your conscious mind attempting to orient an environment – that is the tip of the iceberg – while the data being drawn in the fingertip feeling is the submerged part of the iceberg