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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
beau wrote
A good friend writes:
In essence, it seems like [Bateson] is saying that people can mistakenly assume a causal relationship based on observing behaviors/effects and physical (in this case) traits.
What Bateson is "pillorying" is not the inference of causal relationships, but, rather, the fatuous assumption of and reification of a singular causal factor thereof and the intellectually dishonest practice of hiding such ignorant assumptions behind a wall of argot. In the Moliere example the honest answer would be "We don't know; let's call it X and get to work finding out what X might be. I have some ideas about how to go about it..." However, Bateson would, I believe, point out that even this arguably more honest answer is still inherently flawed, because it illegitimately pre-frames the question. The morphine alkaloid can be identified as a "dormitive principle" but it is only chief, not singular. And even that answer is epistemologically unsound, for absent neurological receptor sites morphine would have no effect. To take a general observation, "opium makes people sleepy" and from that observation coin a term and then crow one's "findings" as science is more than a simple error of thought, it is the anti-thesis of honest science and critical thinking. We see the same thing in astronomy (at least as offered on Discovery Channel) when we get "reports" that the universe is made up of something like 2/3rds "dark matter." What can that possibly mean other than "we don't know, and can't afford to lose face by saying so"?
I do agree with Dawkins much more often than not and still have not one iota of a clue as to why the term bothers you so much---I can't believe you have some Wittgensteinian ideal of exact, reflexive, one-to-one language sans synonyms.
Was that Wittgenstein? I know Korzybski made that error in spades. I do not make that error, and it's not what I'm talking about at all. Were Dawkins a poet, or even a University Don writing children's stories, I'd use a vorpal blade to cut all necessary slack. He's neither. He's passing himself off as a serious thinker and scientist. I have only sampled his work, and maybe that's skewed my thinking, but I sampled that part of his work which I am best qualified to critique, his write up of the Prisoners' Dilemma. He botched it comlpetely. That, combined with my experience of his fans (typically rabid sociobiology adherents of the "sex-for-meat" variety) (present company totally excluded or we wouldn't be wrestling with this) combined with his (and everyone else's) complete failure to convince me that his most famous "invention" or "discovery" is more than an example of what Bateson might call "the dormitive fallacy" and which clearly violates the guidelines of ontological parsimony, these factors combine to leave me terribly scornful of the man's "work".
Of course one can ask, "So what?" But in this case there are real repercussions, the worst of which is reasoning by false analogy and reinforcement of the "Right Makes Might" gloss on evolutionary thought sponsored by the Social Darwinists.
I see I am introducing themes and theses I have yet to explicate here, which means I should probably put this down until I can take a moment to parse what I have already written.
Preview may be for wussies...but I sure wish this blog had it! B^)