The issues of whether we should allow all ideas, both good and bad to flower, and whether bad ideas or fads don’t need to be experienced to be learned, have arisen in the actkm listserv discussion group in the context of my advocacy of critical evaluation of new ideas. This reminds me of the more general notion discussed by Kuhn and Lakatos in the 1960s and ’70s stating that new ideas were often developmentally weak and needed to be protected from criticism and evaluation to give them time to become strong enough to compete with established paradigms, and theories. To put this in my own words, in comparing new ideas to more established ones, it’s unfair to compare carefully worked out ideas with new ones still lacking development, because the competing conjectures and models are not equivalently specified and the new ideas can always be criticized on grounds of greater vagueness and ambiguity than the old ones.
Though at first blush this norm of equivalent specification may seem to support the idea that new ideas shouldn’t be immediately criticized, but instead should be “allowed to develop and flower” without criticism; in actuality this norm is just as well satisfied if we require instead that any comparison involving new and old ideas occur at roughly equivalent levels of specification of both. That is, if new ideas that have not had a chance to develop are compared to old ideas, then that comparison can be carried out at the level of abstraction of the new ideas. If the new ideas are found to be troubled by ambiguity, or have other logical difficulties, these can be corrected and the new ideas can be modified to strengthen them as a competitor to the old ideas before further specification is undertaken. In other words, early critical comparison of novel ideas with established ones can ignite a learning process that hones the new ideas so that they compete more strongly with earlier conjectures.
The idea that one ought to protect new ideas from evaluation by avoiding criticism of them until they are strong enough to withstand it, is a misplaced one. It seems to be based on the idea that our models are like our children, that we need to nurture, before they can be trusted to take care of themselves in the external world. Our models are not like that however.
Instead, they are like works of art that become stronger when we continuously evaluate them critically, recognize problems with them and solve those problems by reformulating them where necessary. In the context of problem solving there is often, and if we are interested in quality, there ought to be, a very interactive dynamic feedback relationship between creating new ideas, or coming up with them in other ways (knowledge claim formulation), and critically evaluating them (knowledge claim evaluation). To suggest that actual verbal criticism of new ideas should be avoided in this critical evaluation process is to remove one of the chief instruments from the evaluation process. It is, generally, to reduce the quality of that process. And that’s why I have little sympathy for the idea that criticism of new ideas should be withheld during until they mature sufficiently to be able to handle it. Such a strategy won’t strengthen ideas; but will only leave them vulnerable to criticisms that might immediately have been confronted and easily overcome at an early stage of development.