Jul 22
eldonepistemology argument, bateson, description, explanation, logic, validity, value
In science, these two types of organization of data (description and explanation) are connected by what is technically called tautology. …
..Von Neumann, in his famous book [“The theory of games and economic behaviour. 1944), expressly points out the differences between his tautological world and the more complex world of human relations. All that is claimed is that if the axioms be such and such and the postulates such and such, then the theorems will be so and so. In other words, all the tautology affords is connections between propositions. The creator of the tautology stakes his reputation on the validity of these connections.
Tautology contains no information whatsoever, and explanation (the mapping of description onto tautology) contains only the information that was present in the description. The “mapping” asserts implicitly that the links which hold the tautology together correspond to relations which obtain in the description. Description, on the other hand, contains information but no logic and no explanation. For some reason, human beings enormously value this combining of ways of organizing information or material.
To illustrate how description, tautology, and explanation fit together, let me cite an assignment which I have given several times to classes. I am indebted to astronomer Jeff Scargle for this problem, but I am responsible for the solution. The problem is:
A man is shaving with his razor in his right hand. He looks into his mirror and sees his image shaving with his left hand. He says, “Oh, there’s been a reversal of right and left. Why is there no reversal of top and bottom?”
(Mind & Nature: 76-77)
Jul 19
eldonepistemology, general observations, language and brain, language and culture, lexico-grammar, mode and modalities, parody
having travelled across australia a third of the way and back just recently, i can confidently assert that there is no grammar today. there is a lot of weather about, and, in rural areas coffee is available but weak and not so milky or firm frothy for the cappuccino-afficionados out there. in addition, one has to invariably state that one would like one’s coffee to be served in a cup, not a mug.
as for grammar, we saw none on the way, and had to make do with random gurgles and unrelated-to-each-other signs or icons.
May 29
eldoneducation and academia, epistemology, systems and logical typing context, knowledge, system
excerpts from the introduction to
System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange.
Second edition
ANTHONY WILDEN 1972 & 1980
INTRODUCTION • XXIX
The reader will already have noted that, if there is one constantly recurring question for a critical and ecosystemic viewpoint, it is the real and material question of context. Obviously, the academic discourse, as well as the dissenting academic discourse, has signification only in terms of the real context in which it occurs. As has been pointed out, the systemic characteristics of this context, with its recognized and unrecognized codings of goals, are ultimately dependent on particular types of socioeconomic organization in history.
One hypothesis of these essays is that the assumption or goal of ‘pure’ knowledge is an outworn rationalization. ALL KNOWLEDGE is INSTRUMENTAL. In the terms of modem communications theory, information (coded variety) is everywhere, but knowledge can occur only within the ecosystemic context of a goalseeking adaptive system peopled by goalseeking [individuals] required to ask how the knowledge has been coded and filtered; and what it is being used for, and for whom.
Thus one of the contexts of knowledge is the temporal context: past, present, and future. But the ideology of pure or objective knowledge to which the academic is expected to owe allegiance – besides protecting teachers and researchers from questions about the actual use value of their work – cannot deal adequately with time and place. It is an absolutist, non-contextual, non-temporal morality akin to that of a fundamentalist religion.
This is a fundamentalism that depends first on the misconstruction of closure and context; second on the correlative lack of understanding that contexts have levels; and third on its inability to deal with the real questions of logical typing in biological and social systems.
For example, the necessary abstraction of a system from its context in order that it may be studied – which should of course be accompanied by an overt attempt to avoid decontextualization by understanding the potentially paradoxical effects of such an abstraction – is quite commonly used, implicitly, to justify the pretended and actual abstraction or isolation of researchers from THEIR many contexts: from their socioeconomic status in a heterarchy of academic privilege, for example; from their actual functions in a system of liberal indoctrination; and from their spoken and unspoken commitments to ideological and political views – all of which the student may expect to find in one transformation or another in their work and in their teaching.
[…] We used to be warned by people who called themselves the ‘Old Left’ in the 1960s not to ‘politicize’ the university – a warning that made little sense to those of us newly arrived in the academic propaganda machine.
As has been pointed out in part, context, whether in theory or praxis, is a question of punctuation or closure – both AT a given level of relationship and, more importantly, BETWEEN levels of relationship.
Moreover, besides its historically peculiar attempts at closure from its real context and indeed from and between many of its own parts, the scientific discourse appears to have been composed by the inhabitants of Flatland (Abbott, 1884). We know that the discourse displays a dogged incapacity to deal adequately with system-environment relations (both practical and theoretical), even when they are considered on a single plane. But this incapacity becomes almost insignificant when understood within the context of the extraordinary ingenuity with which the scientific discourse persistently fails to recognize the realities of LEVELS OF RELATION and of RELATIONS BETWEEN LEVELS in open systems, in their environments, and, above all, between system and environment.
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