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<DIV>Two thoughts:</DIV>
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<DIV>1. I can't help noticing that there's some degree of asymmetry to this suggestion. People who agree with this notion of thinking more like other people are probably generally speaking more contextualist than not. The very idea that you can meaningfully and usefully think more like someone else and less like yourself seems to me to require at least some small acknowledgement that human thinking is fundamentally contextual in some way?</DIV>
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<DIV>2. I'd be very surprised if you could get any agreement that Republicans and Democrats think in characteristic ways that are different from each other unless you froze each party at a particular moment in time and did a fairly sophisticated analysis of the common patterns in their reasoning. Party identification certainly seems to draw on ideological committments, I would agree, and to an increasing degree in recent years. Yet it is much less straightforward as to what "think like a party member" means because parties are not simply traditions of reasoning or ideologies. The dramatic recent shift of the Republican party in the U.S. to some sort of odd alliance between almost statist neo-conservatism and religious conservatism, and the shift of the Democratic Party in the U.S. to a relatively amorphous collection of principles seems like a good case in point. </DIV>
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<DIV>Some strategies for trying to think like someone else when their ideas initially appear strange are linked informally to what is known as "Miller's Law" after cognitive psychologist George Miller, who put it in this awkward but oddly elegant way:
<P>"In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true, and try to imagine what it could be true of." (Interview with Elizabeth Hall, Psychology Today, January 1980, pp.38-50 and 97-98)</P></DIV>
<DIV>In practice, figuring out what someone else's odd belief might be true of can be extremely challenging, when you try to apply this to things like different ideological or metaphysical committments, but I think the principle applies very generally if you are willing to be very flexible in interpreting "what it could be true of." That is, in what world and after making what assumptions and accepting what background conceptual models and making what definitions would this person's belief make perfect sense. </DIV>
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<DIV>This is part of the concept behind neurolinguistic programming and (Milton) Ericksonian therapy methods, and they take it so far sometimes as to try to step into the world of the psychotic, with varying degrees of success.</DIV>
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<DIV>kind regards,</DIV>
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<DIV>Todd</DIV>
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<DIV>In a message dated 6/21/2005 5:02:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time, waluk@earthlink.net writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid">Even better is: <PRE wrap=""><!---->If Republicans spent more time trying to think like Democrats and Democrats trying to think like Republicans, understanding would be increased and debates could become more constructive.
Gerry
</PRE><BR><BR>Michael Christopher wrote:
<BLOCKQUOTE cite=mid20050621182328.59070.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com type="cite">
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><PRE wrap="">If absolutists spent more time trying to think like
</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE><PRE wrap=""><!---->contextualists and contextualists trying to think like
absolutists, understanding would be increased and
debates could become more constructive.<<
--That's a great statement. I've never heard it put so
simply.
Michael
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