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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
From "A Sacred Unity," (Donaldson, ed.), some entries for the new Common Place Book tag (CPB). This actually applies to my complaints with Dawkins's work.
pg76:
One form of habitual error can, however be pilloried. this is the trick of drawing a generalization from the world of external observation, giving it a fancy name, and then asserting that this named abstraction exists inside the organism as an explanatory principle. Instinct theory commonly takes this monstrous form. To say that opium contains a dormitive principle is no explanation of how it puts people to sleep. Or do the people contain a dormitive instinct that is "released" by the opium?
pg134/135:
Other sorts of classification could, of course, be examined. It would be orthodox, for example, to classify information according to its relevance and usefulness for the various "needs" of the organism. The result would be a system of categories resembling "instinct" theory. A large amount of speculation and pseudoexlpanation is already associated with this way of thinking in economics, "functional" anthropology, and animal ethology. Masses of data have been dissected into this procrustean bed but it still seems to me that the explanatory principles, i.e., ""instincts" invoked in these studies resemble the "dormitive principle" proposed by Moliere's learned doctors to explain the physiological effects of opium.
pg170/172:
There are also questions of method. One of the characteristic methods which you have been taught is that science consists in collecting some facts, whatever they are, making a hypothesis, making then a prediction from the hypothesis, and taking that prediction back to the facts. I would maintain that this is mostly nonsense. And it is nonsense of a particular kind, namely that kind which Moliere has stigmatized as the creation of dormitive principles.
Let's say the problem is a Ph.D. examination in which the learned doctors ask the candidate, "Why does opium put people to sleep?" And the candidate, in dreadful Latin, replies, "Because, learned doctors, it contains a dormitive principle," whereupon they all cheer and say, "How right he is." Now about three-quarters of all the hypotheses in the behavioral sciences are fundamentally dormitive principles. "Anxiety" is a dormitive principle. "Emotion" is a dormitive word. It's just like "anxiety."
...Of course it's very difficult to talk about this stuff in a civilization which is, oh, at least seventy percent insane in its major premises about the nature of man and the nature of relationships. One of the interesting insanities is the notion which really came to a head in the nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution, which was helped along by Darwin and other persons, namely that the unit of survival is either an individual or family line or a species or subspecies or something of the kind. Now, in terms of that premise, we have been building machines and fighting the environment. We have now achieved, I hope, empirical proof that that premise won't do any longer; in fact, the unit of survival is organism in environment, and not organism versus environment.
The question of whether it's you versus me, or you and me as part of something which includes us both, is, of course, right at the base of why you might think I was out to do you in, and why you might be right, because, after all, I am a member of this culture.
Question: How "dormitive" is the term "schizophrenia"?
Bateson: Well, a great many people use the term dormitively. that is, they talk as though there were something inside my skin which made me talk funny, you know. On the other hand, talking about schizophrenia in this way has sort of focused attention on some behavioral characteristics which I've paid a good deal of attention to---not supposing that there is a something called schizophrenia inside these patients which makes them do this. In fact, my main question has been, how is schizophrenia related to such things as humor, religion, poetry---obviously something bigger, a genus or family of behaviors which are all somehow related formally. This seems to me a nondormitive way of approaching it. Does that answer your questions? I mean, obviously, the word "schizophrenia" as used in law courts and such places, is being used in mainly a dormitive sense. And then you get the use of the term by the geneticists, who believe that the solution to all problems is to find a gene which will serve as a dormitive principle. Now geneticists are beginning to discover that genetics isn't quite like that...
That last sentence is too optimistic by far, for it fails to take into account the culture's preference for solutions in the form of consumable goods (medicines and machines for treatment, etc.)
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Tags: Bateson, CPB