03.16.08
Regarding “Relational and Contextual Reasoning” blog author, Margaret Johnston
Ok, so next we want to consider the work of K. Helmut Reich. In 2002 he published Developing Horizons of the Mind with a subtitle of “Relational and Contextual Reasoning and the Resolution of Cognitive Conflict.”
Well, in a nutshell, what Reich said was that people’s reasoning powers develop over time - or to a greater extent in different people. Those whose reasoning is further developed can resolve cognitive conflict more effectively than those whose reasoning is less mature.
Reich has delineated five levels of reasoning powers. The simplest way to present these is taken directly from the book: “… there are five developmental levels: (i) only one description/explanation/model/theory/interpretation can be right; the others must be wrong; (ii) maybe, there is something valid to both (all) of them; (iii) both (all) are definitely needed to account for the phenomenon under study; (iv) here is how they are related to each other; (v) the overarching synopsis is as follows.” (Reich, 2002, p. 25.)
Well, just think about “cognitive conflict” as it relates to religion and spirituality! In what field of inquiry is there more “cognitive conflict” than the warring camps of believers, all of whom believe they are the only ones who have the right God - yet surely must be intelligent enough to know that there simply can’t be a God who would create all different kinds of people…..and then favor only one small group of them with the chance to gain eternal salvation! And what about all those closet atheists who have figured out that the God of most traditional religions simply can’t have created the world in just the way it says in the Bible, yet who feel the tug of something greater than themselves but have no evidence at all for what it is.
If in fact spiritual development in a given individual is triggered by that person’s powers of reasoning, then obviously the most advanced reasoners are not going to accept the simple pat answers most organized religions offer. I think we can relate Reich’s level i) reasoning with the type of logic we get from most of our Stage Two - Faithful believers: only one religion can be right and of course, it must be theirs.
Without getting too bogged down in the details, Reich specifically states that the form of logic espoused by people in Fowler’s upper stages (which correlate roughly with our Stage Four - Mystics) is typical of his RCR levels III and IV. This is where we have awareness of the paradoxes that must be accepted if a person is to grow beyond Stage Three - Rational beliefs. At Stage Four, a person must be willing to allow that while science and logic are necessary, they may not ever supply all the answers, that there may be Truths in all religions, that all humans are all separate individuals and yet somehow all connected - that god in whatever form could be both a separate entity and yet still a part of every being at the same time.
The highest level of reasoning, Reich’s level V, is apparently about as rare as Fowler’s highest stage - called the Universalizing Faith Stage - typical only of the Ghandi’s and the Mother Teresa’s of the world. This is not to say for certain that those reaching Fowler’s Universalizing Faith Stage all have Reich’s level V reasoning. Reich states only that Fowler’s highest stage is “not in contradiction with RCR level V.” (Reich, 2002, p. 130.)
Obviously, there are other factors that go into spiritual development than just logic and reasoning skills. More on those soon……