ABSTRACT
Reflection helps to draw out the positive aspects of our own and the other's thinking:
Criticism is a relatively easy form of intellectual achievement and much used by mediocre minds who are unable to be creative or constructive… Intellectualism has deservedly got a bad reputation. It is possible to play logical word games in which one concept generates another in a sort of virtuoso ballet of ideas… Traditionally thinking has been in the form of debate, clashes and polemics. This has arisen from our dependence on dialectics as the only form of developmental thinking. This new process of ‘exlectics’ seeks to draw out and improve what is good in an idea rather than to attack what is bad… Because philosophers have largely been involved in word games or mathematical games, logic has come to assume a dominant position in thinking. In practice when we are thinking about the real world rather than some artificially constructed world of words or numbers, perception is very much more important than logic… (De Bono, 1977:68–70)
