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Dr. Paul Thagard: I don't remember how I came across OmniGraffle and it was just right for me because it's easy to use, it's simple, but it conveyed all the relations that really mattered to me. Similarly, some of the political scientists who got interested in cognifective maps built a tool, I think it's called Valence. And it was useful for their purposes because they were working with people who were drawing the tools, but I never found it that useful because I couldn't make the maps pretty enough because what I really wanted was I wanted the maps to look right on the page so people could understand what I'm doing. And so that's why I've stuck with OmniGraffle.

Andrew J. Mason: You're listening to The Omni Show, where we connect with the amazing community surrounding the Omni Group's award-winning products. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we learn how Paul Thagard uses OmniGraffle. Well, hello and welcome to this episode of The Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we're so delighted to be able to have Paul Thagard with us. He's a distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo, where he founded and directed the cognitive science program. He spent his career working out how brains make meaning, how emotion shapes what we believe, why falsehoods happen to spread, and how minds actually change. And when he needed a way to draw the tangle of feeling beneath our convictions, he invented the cognitive effective map and reached for OmniGraffle to do the job. Paul, we are so honored to be able to have you with us today. Thanks for joining us.

Dr. Paul Thagard: Oh, thank you very much for having me.

Andrew J. Mason: You came into cognitive science from kind of an unusual pair of directions. So you have PhD in philosophy and a master's in computer science. What were you chasing that maybe neither field gave you all of all on its own?

Dr. Paul Thagard: My PhD in philosophy was in the philosophy of science. So I was very much interested in scientific reasoning, how scientists evaluate their theories and how they discovered their theories. So I wasn't involved with cognitive science and I'd never even heard of it. But when I got my first job in Michigan at the University of Michigan in Dearborn, I met some psychologists in Ann Arbor and they got me really interested in how the mind worked. And I realized there was a great fit between their psychological ideas and my philosophical ideas. So that's really how I got into cognitive science. But through reading the psychology literature, I discovered artificial intelligence. I realized that there was a methodology I'd never even heard of, which is by building computer models. And so, because I decided I wanted to build my own computer models, I did a master's in computer science, so the masters came afterwards. But by that point, because of working with the psychologists and background in scientific reasoning and philosophy of science and being able to build computer models, I really had a nice set of tools for working on the cognitive science of science, trying to figure out how we can reason, how we can make discoveries. And so the philosophy and the computation and the psychology really fit together quite beautifully.

Andrew J. Mason: That's a fantastic explanation. And cognitive effective maps that you've developed were your ways of making something that is invisible, visible, the web of feelings that are underneath kind of what a person happens to believe. What was the moment you realized that an argument on the page might not necessarily be enough and it might help us or behoove us to draw it instead?

Dr. Paul Thagard: Oh, that interest came later. After I moved to the University of Waterloo in '92, I had a student who wanted to do her PhD on empathy, and she had a really interesting idea. She thought that empathy was a kind of analogy. And I'd already done a lot of work on analogy in scientific argument and in other kinds of reasoning. And so I was really intrigued by her idea and turned out she was right. Empathy is a kind of analogy because what you do is you see if you want to understand somebody else, you've got to think, well, how is what they're going through analogous to what I've experienced? And so if you're having a rough time, I can think, well, I had a similar experience and this is how I felt, and so I can project my feeling onto you. And contrary to what Elon Musk says, I think this isn't the threat to Western civilization. Actually, I think it's a basis for human civilization because we can actually care about other people. So she got me interested in emotion because I could think of it as a kind of analogy in the case of empathy. But then my interest on emotion just grew enormously for a whole bunch of reasons. I got interested, for example, in motivator reasoning, which is a really important psychological idea about how people reach their conclusions, not on the basis of evidence, but because it fits with their goals, it fits with their interests. So there's been a huge amount of work on this. The seminal paper by my late wife, Ziva Kunda, has been cited more than 12,000 times. And so I though I could understand motivated reasoning, partly in terms of emotion, because when people are reaching their conclusions, it's not based on evidence, it's because their emotions say, "Oh, this is what's got to be true." And undoubtedly, you can think of politicians who are really prone to this, but they don't ignore the evidence. They just think, what suits my goals? What suits my interests? What suits my emotions? And that's how they form their beliefs. So my interest in emotion extended way beyond the empathy to consider lots of other kinds of thinking that go on with emotions. Do you want me to connect it up with the cognitive effective maps?

Andrew J. Mason: I would love it. Yeah, please.

Dr. Paul Thagard: Okay. So that came later. Sometime around in the 2000s, I got working with a group of political scientists led by Thomas Homer-Dixon, who's a very well-known Canadian political scientist who's worked on problems like climate change. And our group was really interested in ideology. An ideology is a system of ideas that people use to govern what they do. So you could think of a liberal ideology or a conservative ideology. And so what's an ideology? Well, an ideology at one level is a system of concepts. I realized it's not just concepts, it's also values, and values are emotions. So if you think democracy is part of your ideology, that's because you value democracy. You think it's a good thing. You have a positive emotion toward it. And so working with these political scientists, I thought, "Well, it'd be nice to draw maps of these, because I'd done lots of concept maps in the past." That's an old idea that's been around for decades. And I'd use concept maps to describe conceptual change during scientific revolutions. But then I thought, "How are we going to map these concepts that are part of an ideology?" Say conservative versus liberal. And then it occurred to me, well, the regular concept maps aren't good enough because all they do is map the concepts. They don't map the values. They don't map the emotional content of it. And so I got the idea, well, I should be able to do a new kind of map that would, put it really simply, treat positive values as circles. And initially I thought I'd treat the negative concept as diamonds. And you could put them with colors too, because the positive values are things are go, so they'd be green, like a green traffic light. And the negative values would be diamonds, which would be like a red traffic light, a red diamond. So that was the idea, and I immediately just started drawing them. I think the first one I ever did was a map of values about Canada because I'm in Canada. And so I've got lots of positive values about Canada, a few negative ones that contradict with other sorts of values that I don't like. And so I like the fact that Canada's a democratic country and I don't like alternatives to democracy like autocracy where powerful leaders get to control everything. So there you could think you could have a green circle around democracy and a red diamond around autocracy or dictatorship. But when I started drawing these using OmniGraffle, because I've been using that lovely tool for years at that point, I realized that hexagons worked better and the OmniGraffle had a nice tool for doing hexagraphs because you create the words in it. The words fit much better in the hexagon. So I put this together, just a hand-drawn one, and I showed it to the political scientists and they loved it. They thought it provided just a really great idea of simplifying but capturing not just the concepts in an ideology, but the relations between them and especially the emotional values that go with them. So since then, this actually idea's been picked up by quite a few political scientists and quite a few psychologists as well and used in several different countries.

Andrew J. Mason: It's fantastic. And there is something additional that shows up when you're able to see something holistically visually all at once and get handles around it versus sequentially and the ideas progressively being introduced to you. When you're building a map, any given map really, and regardless of whatever software you're using, do you tend to draw the map live while you're still thinking it through or is it after the ideas really started to settle and form? And does the software itself ever end up talking back to you and change where you end up landing? Because now that I see this, oh, it looks a little bit differently. There's a little bit of a recursive feedback there.

Dr. Paul Thagard: Several things that you said are just really important. One is that advantage of the diagram is you get to see it as a whole. So if you're writing, you've got a bunch of sentences and it's all serial. But if you have a picture, you can see the whole configuration. You can see how the configuration of democratic ideas really is different from a configuration of ideas around dictatorship. So the configuration's really important. There are various ways in which I actually draw these. I mean, sometimes I'll just start with a list of the ideas and sometimes I'll just sketch it by hand. But the actual act of drawing it using OmniGraffle is just really informative because it's by drawing it that can start to see what all the relations are and how everything starts to fit together. So I have a rough idea when I begin, but actually drawing it is extremely informative because then I actually fill in the connections and then I can look at and say, "Oh, that's the configuration of values that amounts to democracy ideas. Alternatively, these are the configuration of values that I don't like that goes with dictatorship values."

Andrew J. Mason: It's interesting, there's so many tools for data visualization out there and so many different ways to display data. Maybe how you ended up on OmniGraffle, but also why? Why choosing OmniGraffle?

Dr. Paul Thagard: Okay. So I don't remember how I started with OmniGraffle. I guess when I did my first concept maps using some Unix tool, this was back in the '80s or early '90s when I was at Princeton, I had a Unix machine. And that was really crappy because it wasn't WYSIWYG, so you couldn't see what you're doing. So I had to sort of guess in multiples. That wasn't good. And when I'm used to Waterloo and changed to Max, I think I used Adobe Illustrator, but that was too complicated for me. I mean, it's obviously it's for really experienced illustrators, which I'm not. Somehow, I don't remember how, I came across OmniGraffle and it was just right for me because it's easy to use, it's simple, but it conveyed all the relations that really mattered to me. Subsequently, a couple of people have tried to build models for drawing the cognifective maps. The first was called Empathica that some engineering students did as a class project after they heard about cognitive effective maps in one of my classes. And that was pretty good. But my main goal wasn't just for building them, it was getting things that I could convey to other people, illustrations that I could put in my articles and books so other people would understood. And I never found that as good as OmniGraffle. Similarly, some of the political scientists who got interested in cognitive effective maps built a tool, I think it's called Valence. And it was useful for their purposes because they were working with people who were drawing the tools, but I never found it that useful because I couldn't make the maps pretty enough. Because what I really wanted was I wanted the maps to look right on the page so people could understand what I'm doing. And so that's why I've stuck with OmniGraffle. My son Dan, who's a software developer, we were in an airport in Victoria a month ago, and he was showing off his vibe coding skills. And he showed me how to use two programs that he used to vibe code a program that could do cognitive effective maps. But the hour we had in the airport wasn't enough to actually get something I could use, but I could imagine something I've got in the future. But for now, I've been perfectly happy with OmniGraffle for serving its needed purpose.

Andrew J. Mason: And when somebody happens to open OmniGraffle tonight and say, just start to map out really anything, I mean, you can take this any directions you want. I'm specifically starting to think of a belief that they're wrestling with on their own or maybe something that they strongly disagree with or just a concept in whole. Where would you tell them to maybe start to flesh these ideas out? And are there any mistakes that you've seen as you're building out these maps that you would say, "Actually steer clear from that, steer away from that."?

Dr. Paul Thagard: Yeah. Well, first of all, you really have to have some background theory. So don't just draw. The maps are a tool for illustration, but underlying them is actually, I think, a quite deep theory of how people think. It's a theory of coherence. And so there are different ways in which people think you might think. You might think you do it all with probabilities and utilities the way economists assume, but that's not how the mind works. We can't work with probabilities very well, and it's hard to compute utilities. What I think we do is make these configurations of what makes sense to us. And for a long time, I developed these theories of coherence, cognitive coherence and emotional coherence. And so you really have to have the theory in the background to think about what you're actually trying to model. Once you've got that and you can figure out what sorts of things you fit together, that'll tell you what links to put in, that'll show you how you connect things up. And it's actually very educational, even to someone who knows the theory well like I do, is when I'm trying to figure out what's going on in a situation, I'll draw a new map. My most recent book is on artificial intelligence. It'll come out next year from MIT Press. I think I used only one cognitive effective map in there, but it was really useful because I was trying to express the difference between a configuration of views based on human needs and a configuration of views based on greed. So Gandhi is supposed to have said something like, "The world is enough for everybody's needs, but not for everyone's greed." And I think that's really crucial. So I did this map that had a whole configuration of needs, both the biological needs that we obviously have for things like air and water and food, but also the psychological needs for which there's lots of evidence based on psychological research. So we all have needs according to the major theory called self-determination theory for relatedness, that is relationships with other people, autonomy, that is freedom to do what we want, and competence, which is the ability to have achievements. And so that goes into that along with the biological needs. So that makes a really good configuration of all things that are positive values. But I have a big... I use dotted lines to indicate incompatibility. And so there are big incompatibility between need and then greed. And greed's associated with things like wealth and power and oligarchy and autocracy. And I think that's a configuration which is very powerful in the world as well, but that really conflicts with the set of needs that I think are fundamental to all human beings. So the act of drawing it really was illuminating for me because I said, "Yes, that's right," because we've got all these needs that I think we should value. And we've got these different kinds of greed that are very powerful in the world today, and you can actually see the ways in which they conflict. So just drawing a simple diagram gives you a really good idea of the difference between these two different worldviews.

Andrew J. Mason: Do you have any diagrams that you've made thus far as you look back and you say, "You know what? Whether or not it was as complex or less or more complex matters less, but that was one of my favorite insights because I didn't see something, but then after it was created, I see it now. And this is almost like a gift to me or a gift to the world that meant, my gosh, this is new information or a new way of presenting information that just became one of my favorite illustrations or favorite insights that I've come across."?

Dr. Paul Thagard: Yeah. Well, one example is I was asked to write a paper on the psychology of equality or a psychological journal. You can find it on my website. My website is PaulThagard.com. And if people go to my articles page and then they scroll down, they'll find a link to all the cognitive maps, effective maps that have been done by various people, including me. And so, one of the articles there is an article that I was invited to write on equality. And I wasn't constrained in what to write, but I thought, "Hey, this looks like a great way to illustrate different concepts of equality." So one view might say that, "Well, equality means everybody should have whatever they've got." I mean, that would be a kind of libertarian view, which basically dismisses equality and says, "No, what really matters is liberty. What matters is personal freedom. And anybody who interferes with my personal freedom," for example, by wanting to tax me, "is evil. So the fundamental value is freedom." And so I did a cognifective map that shows that view. But I did the ones that are closer to my own view, which is, "Well, no, freedom is important. That's something we should value. That definitely is something we want to have as a fundamental ethical principle, but it's not the only one." We also want people to be able to satisfy their needs. We want people to have enough to eat and drink and have good air and things like that. And so if you want people to have their needs met, if you feel those are values, then there has to be some limitations on freedom. For example, deciding that people should be taxed so they can't be so rich that they can go off and live in a bunker in Hawaii while other people are living and are starving to death in hovels. So I actually found the exercise there of mapping these different conceptions of liberty and democracy and equality was really useful because I think it made sense of the way in which people can have such incredibly different views. And that I think was highly useful for me. And I think it's useful for other people if they want to read my article on equality.

Andrew J. Mason: You've done such an amazing job at representing so many different viewpoints, so many different points of view, and seeing things objectively as they are. If you personally had any single insight or single aha that you could honestly wave a magic wand or have a billboard to the world on and instantly everybody understands it or gets it, that has been a revelation in your career thus far. What would that gift be to the world?

Dr. Paul Thagard: Well, in the most abstract, I'd say the importance of coherence as an alternative to probability is a way of thinking about how people think. But from a more ethical point of view, from the point of view of ideas that will actually make the world better, I think it's the significance of needs. Thinking that you don't have to base ethics just on abstract principles or commandments. You appreciate that people have these needs and everyone has an obligation to care about the needs of other people. So from an ethical point of view, I think that's the most important insight. It's not original to me. Lots of other philosophers have had the spread, but I think I've worked it out in more detail with a lot of people have. And of course I've had this cool tool for mapping needs based on cognitive effective maps.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. Paul, how can folks connect with you? You mentioned your website. Are there any other ways that more folks can find out more about what you're up to or just stay in your orbit?

Dr. Paul Thagard: Two ways. By far the best is the website, PaulThagard.com, where I've got loads of papers and references to lots of things. But from there, you can also find a link to the blog that I do for Psychology Today. So I've got more than a hundred blog posts on Psychology Today. And so if you just Google Thagard Blog, Psychology Today, you probably don't even need the last part. You'll get my blog. And there's been lots of posts about needs at different times and as well as about a lot of these issues. And there's probably, I don't know, at least half a dozen of the posts that have cognitive effective maps in it that were drawn by OmniGraffle.

Andrew J. Mason: So incredible. Paul, grateful to have you on the show with us today. Thankful for your time, and thank you for just this position of giving that I sense you have. I'm so thankful that you... You get a sense sometimes that people exist in order to help make the collective good of everybody better, and I have that for you. So thank you very much.

Dr. Paul Thagard: Oh, thanks for the great questions.

Andrew J. Mason: Hey, and thank all of you for listening today too. You can find us on Mastodon, at TheOmniShow@OmniGroup.com. You can also find out everything that's happening with the Omni Group at OmniGroup.com/blog.