And now I know: He's got nothin'.

Better to have kept quiet and kept us guessing, than open your yap and remove all doubt, Shooterino.

But let's see if we can't salvage a little learning experience, shall we? A little more on the subject of Kegan's Stage 2 Thinking. Although, this doesn't come directly from Kegan. It comes from construct that reasonably overlaps with Kegan's, which I explained in a diary at MyDD sometime back. "Terri Schiavo: We're Too Smart!":

http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/3/24/11202/5953

The basic idea here is that there are three distinct kinds of adult reasoning in this model--which correspond roughly to Kegan's stages 2, 3 and 4. (Doing empirical studies, it can be hard to get your hands on many stage 5s, as they are not that common, and generally tend to be older.)

Here's the quick-and-dirty summaries:

* Sequential thinkers reason "by tracking the world," recognize regularities in sequences of events, but have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences.

* Linear thinkers understand cause and effect, limited to a one-direction, one-cause/one-effect model. The world they perceive has logical order and structure, but the structure is invariably hierarchical, causality flows top-down, and the world is divided neatly into cause and effect.

* Systematic thinkers understand multi-faceted, multi-linear cause and effect, with mutual cause-and-effect relationships between different elements. The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects.

Okay, now we're ready.

Shooter:

If Global Warming is true by virtue of a consensus of scientists, then WMDs were present by virtue of a consensus of politicians.

The key to this little verbal gem is sequential thinking. It contains allusions to rather complicated issues, but the sequential "logic" is not about illuminating or exploring any of them. Rather, it is about stimulating associations with them (so that one thinks one is thinking deep thoughts) and then short-circuiting any actual thought by presenting a simple association instead.

The association is: If X is true by consensus A, then Y is true by consensus B. This is a pattern, pure and simple.

What would make it a linear pattern, as opposed to a sequential one, would be if it were a valid form of logical inference. But, of course, this is not a valid form of logical inference. It's really nothing more than a sort of seductive arrangement of claims, a rhyming of thoughts, as it were.

That's what sequential (or associational) thought looks like: it coveys the feeling of explaining something, because it presents a way of fitting things together. But there's nothing deeper than surface appearance that actually makes them fit together.

The pattern presented draws our attention to certain features, and distracts attention from others. In doing so, if we are lucky it can actually direct us toward relationships that can be reformulated into a linear (causal) relationship. However, it's much more likely to obscure any such relationship, rather than accidentally reveal it. And that's precisely what's happening here. So, to get around the obscuring function, let's take things apart:

(A) If Global Warming is true by virtue of a consensus of scientists

This is both not true, and not what anyone serious and knowledgeable claims. Rather, global warming is really occuring by virtue of passing rigorous, consensually agreed-upon tests, which have over time eliminated alternate explanations.

Those tests are operationalized at different levels of concreteness or abstraction, but can all be summarized under the broad category of peer review. The overall, high-level consensus about global warming is a product of hundreds of papers, and countless thousands, even millions of observations, all of which are subject to much more basic consensus evaluations. Furthermore, the whole process is guided by the principle of (a) not pre-determining outcomes, (b) seeking alternative explanations and (c) testing data against a full range of alternative explanations.

It is only by breaking down the description of how global warminig--or any scientific theory--is established that we can have a firm foundation for determining how well some other decisionmaking process conforms to scientific standards. Once we do so, however, it becomes immediately apparent how inappropriate the WMD comparison is:

(B) Then WMDs were present by virtue of a consensus of politicians.

For one thing, politicians have nothing remotely approaching the sort of rigor for testing basic data that peer review provides. Congress used to have something like this, for some sorts of questions--it was called the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), and it was done away with by Newt Gingrich in September 2005.

For another thing, even the imperfect data that politicians did have was only selectively presented to them. This reduced the entire process to a question of how much one trusted the gatekeepers---a question which no longer had any direct connection to the WMD claims themselves. What was being expressed was not knowledge claims about WMDs, but trust claims about the Bush Administration.

Much more could be said to deconstruct this misleading sequential pattern. But what I've written is already sufficient to indicate why the sequential "logic" does not hold.

The Fool:

I could handle a Fox News if it was honest.

But, then, it wouldn't be Fox News, now would it???

The problem with a con-census is the liar's paradox times the number of people surveyed (N) factorial (N!), no?