Critical Mass

Berthoff's critique of cognitive psychology based development models for writing capability and teaching is thoroughgoing and beautiful. Two points that seem to exemplify the critical attitude stood out to me.
The first is that we must think and question for ourselves. On page 331 in Crosstalk, she points out that “all method, including scientific method, entails interpretation...there are no raw data.” We live in a world where such cliches as “the numbers speak for themselves” and “you can't argue with facts” are considered as common sense. Their implicit authority is overlooked. The truth is, you should argue with facts and only people speak for themselves (and often they simply repeat others words, at that). By blindly accepting the false assumption that scientific evidence is unbiased and objective, we become trapped in a mechanistic worldview that values quantification and classification above all. The inherent problem in this view is that counting and labelling cannot lead to progress, change, or the solving of problems.
The other point is that there is no substitute training of the reflective mind. If we, as writer/teacher/thinkers cannot are unaware of our own conscious actions while doing X, then we mustn't assume that a lack of performance is the same as a lack of ability in doing X, whether that is writing a position paper or making a spicy lamb stew. Berthoff indicates this by her phrase, borrowed from Richards, of “'assisted invitations' to look carefully at what they are doing – observing a weed or drawing up a shopping list – in order to discover how to do it.” [italics hers] Simply put, we are good at things we need to be good at and new things are difficult because we haven't unconsciously practiced them.

And on to Myers. Be warned, after I drop the quote from page 445, you're all going to get a glimpse into the inside of my head. It does not follow a logical, or even chrono-logical order. It is a web of interconnected connotaive hooks. So, from the section titled Leonard and Reality:

“People have no simple unmediated perception of reality; the facts we are likely to take as reality are most likely parts of another ideological structure.”
Consensual Reality. I played that game, it was called Mage: the Ascension. The universe was made of what everybody in it thought it was. Damn Technocracy locked it all down. Leonard? Like Leonard nimoy? Mr. Spock, that's fits with the whole 'logic as king' thing. Still an ideology. Some people's real world is Star Trek. Mine is school and whiskey and friends and (lack of) women. Work pays bills, nothing more. Lying to myself again. The real world is all my life, and theirs. Perception, too, eh? Isn't what I see determined by where I look, what I look for? I only write for what I want audiences to see.