Cognitive Shielding
Here's a concept I'm playing with and may soon have occasion to deploy in my work on introspection: cognitive shielding.
Normally when I reach judgments, the processes driving the judgment are wild. I don't attempt to control the influences on my judgment. I just let the judgment flow from whatever processes might drive and affect it. I look out the window and think about whether it will rain. I'm not sure what exactly causes me to conclude that it will. Presumably the appearance of the clouds is a major factor, but maybe I'm also influenced by my knowledge of what month it is and how common rain is this time of year. Maybe I'm influenced, too, by wind and by temperature, reflecting sensitivity to contingencies between those and oncoming rain -- contingencies I may have no conscious knowledge of. Maybe I'm influenced by knowledge of yesterday's weather, of this morning's weather report, and who knows what else. I don't attempt to control any of this, and the judgment comes.
Sometimes, I intentionally launch processes with the aim of having those processes influence my judgment. So, for example, I might think to myself: "In the northern hemisphere, storms spin in such a way that the wind of the leading edge tends to come from the south. So I really should consider the direction of the wind in reaching my judgment about the likelihood of rain." [How true this generalization actually is, I don't know.] I notice that the wind is indeed from the south and this increases my confidence that it will soon rain. The decision to consider a particular factor launched a process that would not otherwise have occurred, with an influence on the conclusion.
And finally, sometimes I try to shield my judgments from certain influences. Maybe I know that I'm overly pessimistic and am biased toward anticipating rain whenever I'm planning a picnic. I am in fact planning a picnic, and I don't want the resulting pessimism to affect my judgment, so I attempt to put the picnic out of mind or compensate somehow for the bias it would otherwise introduce. Or -- a familiar example for professors -- in grading student essays I might be legitimately concerned that my like or dislike for the student as an individual might bias my grading. I might attempt to compensate for this by not looking at the names on the essays, and then no cognitive shielding is necessary. But sometimes I do know who has written the essay I am grading. I might then try to shield my judgment about the essay's quality from that potentially biasing influence. Wild judgment might unfairly favor the student if I like her, so I try to reach a judgment uninfluenced by my opinion about her as a person.
Two issues:
(1.) It's not always clear whether some series of thoughts is wild or launched. Similarly for shielding. Possibly there is a large gray area here. But if the distinction between spontaneously considering certain factors and intentionally considering (or setting aside) certain factors makes sense -- and I think it does -- then I think these distinctions can fly, despite the gray area.
(2.) It seems that launching will normally be successful. Shielding on the other hand, may be difficult to execute successfully. One might try not to be influenced by certain things and yet nonetheless be influenced. But this is no objection to this taxonomy as long as it's clear that we can try to shield our judgments from certain influences.
Thoughts? Reactions? Does this make sense? Is there someone in the literature who has already laid this out better than I?