Decoupling and Contextualizing

This weekend I stumbled upon a concept that reminded me strongly of some of the skills that we are taught in critical thinking. Described best in John Nerst's blog post, this concept describes two different approaches to argumentation and discussion. "Decouplers" are those who separate ideas from each other and their surrounding context. They isolate arguments and claims from their social and political backdrop and attempt to view things as abstractly and separately as possible. Conversely, "non-decouplers" view events holistically and believe information about the source, historical associations, other relevant issues, etc are imperative to genuinely evaluate a claim. Although defined in my greater detail by Nerst's piece, the difference between decouplers and contextualizers lies in differing beliefs about what information is relevant to a discussion or argument (decouplers having a much narrower scope, and non-decouplers a much broader one). 

Although seemingly unimportant, this "coupling" characteristic is actually strongly correlated with various careers. For example, decouplers tend to be STEM people because of their ability to isolate variables, tease out causality, and formulate claims into carefully delineated hypotheses. Non-decouplers, on the other hand, tend to be novelists, poets, artists, journalists. They are more reliant on thick, rich, and ambiguous meanings, associations, implications, and allusions to evoke feelings in their audience. Of course, this distinction is not as binarisitc as it may seem. Most people exhibit both tendencies depending on the situation and are not strictly one way or another. Still, the ability or preference to isolate ideas is a helpful and effective way to explain the differences between "math/science people" and "humanities people."

After I was introduced to this vocabulary I was immediately reminded of the habits/characteristics of critical thinkers that we studied at the beginning of this semester. I believe in addition to the ones we have established, decoupling could be considered a habit or characteristic of a critical thinker. In order to thoroughly analyze something, one must be able to separate it from surrounding or unnecessary aspects. For example, when evaluating media, a critical thinker must be able to identify and separate the product from the author's intention, account for tools of persuasion that may be used to distract/manipulate, advertising methods, etc. Many of the tools that we have studied regarding media literacy can be described as examples of decoupling.