ix-x Solon was one of ancient Athens' greatest lawmakers... "The hardest
thing of all," Solon avers, "is to recognize the invisible mean of judgment, which alone contains the limits of all things."
p.2 When we perceive, we are making judgments about the world, and thereby making sense of it.
p.4 practical judgment is called for when firm knowledge, moral certainty, and valid rules... do not supply
us with clear solutions to our problems.
p.5 Practical judgment is an aptitude for assessing, evaluating, and choosing in the absence of certainties
or principles that dictate or generate right answers. Judges cannot rely on algorithms.
p.13 Philosophy, Martin Heidegger stated, is correctly understood as "knowledge
of the essence." Might we, with this in mind, develop a philosophy of judgment? Can we gain theoretical access to the essence
of this mysterious faculty? I doubt it.
p.19 Aristotle is indisputably the preeminent ancient theorist of
practical judgment and arguably the foremost authority on the subject to this day. His discussion of phronesis,
primarily in the Nicomachean Ethics, remains unsurpassed for its insight and, one might say, its
intrigue. Aristotelian phronesis might be best thought of as a "resourcefulness of mind and character." It facilitates
understanding of the ethico-political world and one's flourishing within it. Phronesis promotes the achievement of
specific goods in specific contexts by providing a view of the good life as a whole and a sense of how the good life is best
achieved in particular circumstances.
p.47 The faculty of judgment is nourished by the "truthfulness" of seeing
things from multiple perspectives.
p.69 The best judges are generally those who know when, where, how, and
why people (including themselves) are predisposed to misjudgment.
p.75 Multiple fallible indicators are environmental "cues," each of which on its own has limited reliability.
When taken together and well integrated, however, these indicators supply the foundations for sound judgment.
p.84 A gambling device is, by definition, a machine designed to defeat our intuitive predictions.
p.84 The human mind displays its most reliable assessments, evaluations,
and predictions when it can call into play its evolutionary experience.
p.150 The technicians who developed Deep Blue, the computer that first beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov
in 1997, rightly understood their achievement as the construction of a sophisticated calculator, not a machine capable of
artificial intelligence. All efforts by technicians to mimic the integrative judgment of a grandmaster,
rather than simply relying on fast and extensive computational power, have "failed miserably."
p.175 Conceptually, one might imagine the individual as a ship at sea grappling with the winds and
currents of a challenging and ever-changing environment. Reason provides a strong rudder, allowing a specific course
to be consistently pursued. Affect [JLJ - feeling, affection] provides the sails, without which
the ship cannot reach any destination. Absent a means of propulsion, the ship's rudder becomes quite useless. It
cannot govern the ship's progress. A vessel stripped of its sails will simply drift with the current. In the absence of an
emotional thrust that starts the ship in motion and carries it forward, the steering power of reason - its capacity for governance
or communicative control - becomes null and void.
p.176 As Aristotle observed, reason can do nothing by itself; it must be combined
with desire to induce action. The judgments that precede and inform action find in emotion their motivating and sustaining
force. Reason requires emotion to stimulate its use, to recruit and direct its abilities, and to execute its commands. The
most rational judgment would not get out of port without the propulsive force of emotion.
p.204-205 The entire construction of knowledge... depends on the ability to map what happens over
time... one thing followed by another thing, causing another thing, endlessly. Telling stories... is probably a brain
obsession... the brain naturally weaves wordless stories about what happens to an organism immersed in an environment.
p.217 [Daniel] Dennett suggests that storytelling is the human
artifice. It defines us as a species.
p.218 the human self is the product of a narrative way of being...
We speak to ourselves about ourselves in a running dialog.
p.219-220 Notwithstanding the mind's many limitations, an abiding strength
displays itself. We are talented storytellers.
p.220 Compacting the blooming, buzzing world around us into meaningful stories
is almost effortless for homo sapiens. We are hardwired to think in and through narratives, and
our cerebral software develops on the basis of this foundation.
p.220 The unconscious mind sifts through a plethora of stimuli every
moment of the day. It excludes most of this information, and by way of streamlining, contextualization, and filling-in, produces
a coherent narrative. The same holds true for our consciously produced, linguistic stories. Narratives give form to
the flux. They weave the hurly-burly of the phenomenal world into recognizable and recollectible patterns. Narratives
are bite-sized slices of space-time. Human beings cut up and digest reality in stories.
p.220 Hayden White maintains that historical happenings lack the resolution
needed to constitute identifiable events. The eye of the historian provides the focus. In telling his story, the historian
ensures that events "display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary."
In this sense, White insists, "every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize
the events of which it treats."
p.221 Narrative develops when thick descriptions are linked temporarily
by way of a plot. This thick sequencing of events displays inherent moralizing in the form of attributed causality.
p.221 By way of selective exclusions and filling in, stories "freeze the
shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience of life to produce stable images."
p.221 David Carr observes that narrative... gives the bounded human mind
access to an unbounded and deeply complex world.
p.221 Our attitudes and actions are initiated
and recalled, forecast and recollected, in stories.
p.221-222 To the extent that a story can be told about the world
around us, sense can be made of its complex relationships, and judgments can be levied upon them. The mental
acts of understanding and judging, cognitive psychologists suggest, is achieved through the organization
of perceptions into narrative format, and, subsequently, the integration of newly acquired narratives into available,
already internalized tales.
This capacity arises because narrative, and narrative alone,
allows us to forge a coherent temporal/historical context for existence while making sense, and justifying, actions in terms
of plans and goals. "There is no other cognitive-experiential structure that blends these two basic dimensions of human existence,"
Mark Johnson writes, "Consequently, while we can capture certain aspects of our experience via concepts, models, propositions,
metaphors, and paradigms, only narrative encompasses both the temporality and the purposive organization at the general level
at which we pursue overarching unity and meaning in our lives." By slicing up space-time into bite-sized chunks,
and ensuring that these slices are linked by causation and purpose, narrative allows us to digest a diverse, dynamic
world and evaluate its components.
p.223 David Carr... writes: We are constantly striving, with more or less
success, to occupy the story-teller's position with respect to our own actions... we often need to tell such a story even
to ourselves, in order to become clear on what we are about... narrative activity... is often a constitutive part of action,
and not just an embellishment, commentary or other incidental accompaniment.
p.223 We act in particular ways, in other words, because it corresponds
well to our role in an unfolding tale. Indeed, an act may be defined as a meaningful, intentional, purposeful
effort rather than, say, a behavioral tick, only if it can be embedded within a story. Psychologically
speaking, we are, first and foremost, inhabitants of narrative.
p.223 Narrative frameworks do not simply supply reasons for taking action...
Narratives furnish the opportunity comparatively to assess, evaluate, and choose these reasons.
p.224 Constructing, entertaining, and comparatively
evaluating stories of past, present, and future is the distinguishing mark of human beings, the
central feature of moral development, and the chief activity of the practical judge.
p.224 "Man is always a storyteller!" Jean-Paul Sartre wrote.
"He lives surrounded by his and others' myths. With them he sees everything in his life, no matter what befalls
him."
p.224 Actions are taken because they are perceived to contribute to a plot.
p.225 In literature, as in life, story lines are always open to realignment.
Unexpected actions and events are to be expected. Even in the midst of the most radical realignment, however,
the narrative thread is never completely severed. The autonomous, inventive individual continues to act in response
to or in anticipation of stories in the making.
p.226 Narrative underlines the relative contingency of events. Other
futures are always possible... The... judge traces out the implications of alternative scripts, playing through various
scenes in his mind. In the end, he attempts to settle upon a script that offers the best guide to future action
p.229 Absent narrative foundations, (deontological) [JLJ - the branch of
ethics that deals with right action] principles lose their punch.
p.232 No one starts a story from scratch. Authorship is
always a rewriting.
p.232 The art of narrative redescription is what all revolutionary
thinkers... master, regardless of their field of inquiry or action.
p.234 We learn what is right and good by discovering our roles in a story that concretely situates us in
the world. In the absence of such stories, we would stagger through life.
p.237 Foucault's storytelling is meant to cultivate practical judgment in the face of omnipresent yet ever-changing
threats.
p.240 Narrative... is incident-friendly. It is not forged from thinly
articulated generalities, but from the thick description of specific circumstances that house distinct opportunities
and obstacles. Parsimony is a virtue for theorists, but a vice for storytellers. The rich detail of narrative
provides moral judgment its key resource.
p.240 only practical judgment can determine when, where, and to
whom abstract rules apply and how they should be adjusted to context. "Ethics admits of no exactitude," Aristotle
insists, "Those who are following some line of conduct are forced in every collocation of circumstances to think out for themselves
what is suited to these circumstances."
p.241 Only the narrative itself, filled with particular
characters fighting their way through particular plots, provides a "collocation of circumstances" ripe for assessment,
evaluation, and choice... Only practical judgment, immersed in the fray of the stage production, can provide adequate
direction to the characters involved.
p.241 Narratives... facilitate understanding. The
listener or reader, Louis Mink states, must render meaningful "a complex event by seeing things together in a total and synoptic
judgment which cannot be replaced by an analytical technique." In this respect, narratives cultivate the development of hermeneutic
skills. These skills, Heidegger and Gadamer observe, are essentially phronetic in nature. The interpretation of narrative
relies on the same sort of skill as the exercise of practical judgment.
To interpret a story is to discern a plot,
to transform a chronicle of discontinuous events into a sequence of meaningful relationships. It demands
a synoptic vision that lays out the contribution of each of the parts to the whole.
p.245 Moral imagination is the capacity to situate oneself in competing
and complementary narratives, to play these narratives out into possible futures, and comparatively to assess their dangers
and merits. [JLJ - if so, then we need imagination to play a game]
p.247 Formulae and precepts are easy to learn. But they are difficult to
apply in an ever-changing world.
p.247 Henry James observed that "Character is plot." The
idea is that a writer first creates strong characters, and the events that naturally follow as these characters interact
drive the plot. To forecast how the plot of life will unfold given the characters at hand (and how characters, in
turn, will be rescripted by the plot) is the task of the practical judge. Indeed, practical judgment might be defined
as the faculty that allows one to apprehend stories in progress - to predict with some assurance what events will
occur based on the characters involved and the circumstances at hand, and to state with some authority what events should
occur to achieve the best practicable results.
p.255 Just as we tacitly apprehend how to ride a bicycle without knowing
how we know it, so we learn from a novel. When we do attempt an explanation, it typically lacks both the depth and breadth
of our embodied knowledge.
p.262 Practical judgment cannot be distilled into algorithms.
It is both reliant upon (alternative) narratives in its formation and, retrospectively, is best explained
by way of narratives that describe its exercise.
p.264 To consider something meaningful is to understand it as part of a
greater whole, and, often, as an element in a series of cause and effect relationships.
p.264 The word narrative derives from the Latin narrare, which
means to relate. It is, in turn, rooted in the Greek gno, which refers to knowing and knowledge. To know is to relate
or connect. Narrative knowledge is a knowing of relationships.
p.264-265 As Hayden White observes, "The absence of narrative capacity
or a refusal of narrative indicates an absence or refusal of meaning itself." Humans are in the meaning business.
And the coin of the realm is narrative.
p.265 To judge the particular is to bring it within the purview of
an overarching design, to insert it in a narrative that gives it durability and resilience... human action... is redeemed
by judgment, understood as the retrospective imposition of narrativity.
p.267-268 Practical judgment is grounded in narrative knowledge.
The practical judge assesses which stories provide the optimal narrative nests in any particular context... He seeks to discover
the narrative nest that captures the most important lessons to be learned from any particular situation. He then assesses
how the plot might (best) unfold.
p.269 The problem arises when meta-narrative becomes the substitute for
- rather than the stimulant of - ongoing discovery and learning.
p.270 Rules and principles are important components
of moral life. But they gain significance only within a narrative that tells the story of how they came to be developed and
legitimated, and how they reflect, and aid, good judgment. Their virtue arises not from their foundational status,
but from their role within a narrative that outlines a history of moral development.
p.274 the inspired reader acknowledges, as MacIntyre observed, that the
question "What is to be done?" can only be answered after first figuring out one's place in a story.
p.275 A narrative, most fundamentally, is not what the author says it is
but what it does in the world.
p.287 Aristotle insisted that practical wisdom concerns matters given to change, things that are temporally
and spatially variable. As such, practical wisdom pertains to matters that cannot be defined by a singular truth but
may, nonetheless, be illuminated by diverse narratives.
p.290 To act... is always, in part, an endeavor of hope.
p.290 Wrestling with fortune is always an adventure.
p.291 Shahrazad keeps her head about her, and undermines
tyrannical ambition. Her practical wisdom finds its ultimate resource in narrative.
p.291 For those who share the ideal of a meditative culture, wise
judgments follow from inspired readings of a deeply complex world. And what is an ideal but a tale that wants to
be told.
