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HEURISTIC CHANGE - THE ENABLING OF CHANGE

Heuristic Change focuses upon the enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves:  A Hands-on or interactive heuristic approach to learning and sharing. Heuristics are efficient mental processes (or mental shortcuts) that help humans solve problems or learn a new concept. In the 1970s, researchers Amos Tversky, and Daniel Kahneman identified three key heuristics:       

  1. Representativeness
         
  2. Anchoring and Adjustment

     

  3. Availability

Heuristics are the strategies derived from previous experiences with similar problems. These strategies depend on using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings, machines, and abstract issues. The concept of Heuristics was originally introduced by the Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, whose original, primary object of research was problem solving that showed that we operate within what he coined the term satisficing, which denotes a situation in which people seek solutions, or accept choices or judgements, which are good enough for their purposes although, they could be optimised. The study of heuristics in human decision making was developed in the 1970s and the 1980s by the psychologists Amos Tversky, and Daniel Khaneman. When an individual applies a heuristic in practice, it generally performs as expected. However, it can alternatively create systematic errors. The most fundamental heuristic is trial and error, which can be used in everything from matching nuts and bolts to finding the values of variables in algebra problems. In mathematics, some common heuristics involve the use of visual representations, additional assumptions, forward/backward reasoning, and simplification.

  1. Here are a few commonly used heuristics from George Pólya’s (eminent mathematician) 1945 book ‘How To Solve It’.

     

  2. If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture.

     

  3. If you cannot find a solution, try assuming you have one and see what you can derive from working backwards.
  4. If the problem is abstract, try examining a concrete example. Try solving a more general problem first (the inventor’s paradox): The more ambitious plan may have more chances of success. In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or inculcated by evolutionary processes, which  have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgements, and solve problems typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information.

RESPECT IN HEURISTIC CHANGE

Respect must be bilateral, it must be earned, and it must be honoured

  1. Both in social science and everyday life, ‘respect’ is an important and widely used term to describe positive conduct of one person towards another. Social theorists view respect as an important property of positive social relations, but  their definitions of the term are often vague and controversial. In psychology respect is an attitude of, or behaviour demonstrating, esteem, honour, regard, concern, and other such positive qualities toward an individual or entity.

  2. Respect has great importance in everyday life. As children we are taught (one hopes) to respect our parents, teachers, and elders, school rules and traffic laws, family and cultural traditions, other people’s feelings and rights, our country’s flag and leaders, the truth and people’s differing opinions. And we come to value respect for such things; when we are older, we may shake our heads (or fists) at people who seem not to have learned to respect them. We develop great respect for people we consider exemplary and lose respect for those we discover to be clay-footed, and so we may try to respect only those who are truly worthy of our respect. We may also come to believe that, at some level, all people are worthy of respect. We may learn that jobs and relationships become unbearable if we receive no respect in them; in certain social milieus we may learn the price of disrespect if we violate the street law: Diss me, and you die.

  3. Calls to respect this or that are increasingly part of public life: Environmentalists exhort us to respect nature, foes of abortion and capital punishment insist on respect for human life, members of racial and ethnic minorities and those  discriminated against because of their gender, sexual orientation, age, religious beliefs, or economic status demand respect both as social and moral equals and for their cultural differences. And it is widely acknowledged that public debates about such demands should take place under terms of mutual respect. We may learn both that our lives together go better when we respect the things that deserve to be respected and that we should respect some things independently of considerations of how our lives would go. We may also learn that how our lives go depends every bit as much on whether we respect ourselves. The value of self-respect may be something we can take for granted, or we may discover how very important it is when our self-respect is threatened, or we lose it and have to work to regain it, or we have to struggle to develop or maintain it in a hostile environment. Some people find that finally being able to respect themselves is what matters most about getting off welfare, kicking a disgusting habit, or defending something they value; others, sadly, discover that life is no longer worth living if self-respect is irretrievably lost.

  4. It is part of everyday wisdom that respect, and self-respect are deeply connected, that it is difficult if not impossible both to respect others if we do not respect ourselves and to respect ourselves if others do not respect us. It is increasingly part of political wisdom both that unjust social institutions can devastatingly damage self-respect and that robust and resilient self-respect can be a potent force in struggles against injustice. The ubiquity and significance of respect and self-respect in everyday life largely explains why philosophers, particularly in moral and political philosophy, have been interested in these two concepts. They turn up in a multiplicity of philosophical contexts, including discussions of  justice and equality, injustice and oppression, autonomy and agency, moral and political rights and duties, moral motivation and moral development, cultural diversity and toleration, punishment and political violence.

The concepts are also invoked in bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, workplace ethics, and a host of other applied ethics contexts. Although a wide variety of things are said to deserve respect, contemporary philosophical interest in respect has been overwhelmingly focused on respect for persons, the idea that all persons should be treated with respect simply because they are persons. Respect for persons is a central concept in many ethical theories; some theories treat it as the very essence of morality and the foundation of all other moral duties and obligations. This focus owes much to the 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who argued that all and only persons (i.e., rational autonomous agents) and the moral law they autonomously legislate are appropriate objects of the morally most significant attitude of respect. Although honour, esteem, and prudential regard played important roles in moral and political theories before him, Kant, was the first major Western philosopher to put respect for persons, including oneself as a person, at the very centre of moral theory, and his insistence that persons are ends in themselves with an absolute dignity who must always be respected has become a core ideal of modern humanism and political liberalism. In recent years, many people have argued that moral respect ought also to be extended to things other than persons, such as nonhuman living things and the natural environment. Despite the widespread acknowledgment of the importance of respect and self-respect in moral and societal life and theory, there is no settled agreement in either everyday thinking or philosophical discussion about such issues as how to understand the concepts, what the appropriate objects of respect are, what is involved in respecting various objects, what the conditions are for self-respect, and what the scope is of any moral requirements regarding respect and self-respect.

RIGHTS IN HEURISTIC CHANGE

It is the duty of every individual to develop a societally positive commitment to common rights and the change of lesser optimal rights to appropriate rights.

  1. We all have the right to be respected, heard, considered and recognised, however these rights must be honoured and analogous. Rights carry responsibility, a fact not always considered, accepted, understood or appreciated. Individual and community rights are no different and in a democratic paradigm are led and delivered by individuals and community as much as Government. The act of an individual seriously affects community rights just as acts of community can restrict or enhance individual positions. There are no excuses for the abrogation of rights, regardless of social standing, age, gender, political or cultural/religious disposition.

  2. Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory. Rights are of essential importance in such disciplines as law and ethics, especially theories of justice and duties.

  3. Rights are fundamental to civilised society and civilization with the history of social conflict often bound in attempts both to define and to redefine them. According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, rights structure, is the form of governments, the content of laws, and the shape of currently perceived morality.

  4. Natural rights are rights which are natural in the sense of not artificial, not man-made, as in rights deriving from human nature or from the edicts of a culture. Natural rights are universal; they apply to all people, and do not derive from the laws of any specific society. They exist necessarily, inherent in every individual, and cannot be taken away. For example, it has been argued that humans have a natural right to life. These are sometimes called moral rights or inalienable rights.

  5. Legal rights, in contrast, are based on a society’s customs, laws, statutes or actions by legislatures. An example of a legal right is the right to vote of citizens. Citizenship, itself, is often considered as the basis for having legal rights and has been defined as the right to have rights. Legal rights are sometimes called civil rights or statutory rights and are culturally and politically relative since they depend on a specific societal context to have meaning.

  6. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments.

  7. While normative ethics addresses such questions as What should one do? Thus, endorsing some ethical evaluations and rejecting others, meta-ethics addresses questions such as What is goodness? And How can we tell what is good from what is bad? Seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations.

RECOGNITION IN HEURISTIC CHANGE

Recognition is positive acknowledgement earned through the demonstration of worthy character.

  1. The advancement of culturally astute focus; Practice, Arts, Language, and Lore, will develop true recognition for the identification of those in the community with deserved cultural and practical abilities.
     
  2. True community governance must allow the knowledge holders and bonafide cultures to again lead communities and arbitrate in change decisions, not simple delivery of alleged legal dominance over rights through perceived or conjured relationships or claims.
     
  3. Recognition in sociology is the public acknowledgement of a person’s status or merits & achievements, virtues, service, etc. In psychology, excessively seeking for recognition can be regarded as one of the defining traits of a narcissistic personality disorder.
     
  4. Another example of recognition is that when a person is accorded a special status, such as recognised title or classification. According to Charles Taylor, recognition of one’s identity is both a fundamental need and a right, and non-or misrecognition is a form of oppression. Recognition has been proven as an excellent motivation practice and found to be one of the most important ingredients in communities. It increases cooperative engagement, continuous improvement behaviour, trust in the congregation, and intention to promote cooperative satisfaction.