"Lateral Thinking"

In chess, why does white move first?


                               "Lateral Thinking"

Edward de Bono, a Maltese physician and medical researcher turned his back on academia to become a student of creativity. de Bono’s "Lateral Thinking" is a classic in unexplained psychology. A lot of soft science have imaginative writers. In his first book he attacked traditional logic, identifying it as the enemy of insight and invention:

By far the greatest amount of scientific effort is directed towards the logical enlargement of some accepted hole … Yet great new ideas and great scientific advances have often come about through people ignoring the hole … This hole-hopping is rare because the process of education … is designed to make people appreciate the holes that have been dug by them … Many great discoverers like Faraday had no formal education at all, and others like Darwin or Clerk Maxwell had insufficient to curb their originality.

To demonstrate the limitations of orthodox hole-digging, de Bono proposed this dilemma. Whether it reveals a different thinking process is debatable but it is a clever little story with a folktale feel. But this is what all stories are: insights from another lens. Whether it classifies as a philosophy....

A London merchant owes a large sum to a moneylender, and is in danger of being imprisoned for his debts. The moneylender, who has designs on the merchant’s daughter, suggests a bet. He will take two pebbles from his garden path, one black and one white, and place them in an empty money-bag. The young woman will pick out one of the pebbles. Black: she’ll become the moneylender’s wife, and the debt will be cancelled. White: she’ll stay with her father, and the debt will still be cancelled. Reluctantly, father and daughter accept the bet. However, as they stand in the moneylender’s garden, the young woman notices that the two pebbles that he picks up, placing them quickly in the money-bag, are both black. What should the young woman do? How can she think her way out of her predicament?

According to de Bono, logic demands that she either refuses to take a pebble, or take the black pebble and sacrifice herself. What this situation requires, he maintains, is the wide beam of lateral thinking, which will shift attention from the pebble that is selected to the one left behind. Through lateral thinking, the woman will discover that she has a counter-ruse at hand. Pick a pebble from the bag, fumble and drop it on the path, and while cursing her clumsiness, declare ‘Never mind – if you look into the bag, you will be able to tell which pebble I took.’