Reading :: Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Steps to an Ecology of Mind

By Gregory Bateson

This book is a classic collection of Bateson's work across decades. I've read it before, but haven't attempted to blog it. And rereading it, I remember why. It's a lot.

My review, alas, is short. Even though watching Bateson's development was fascinating—and he offers retrospective comments in each section, pointing out where he was struggling to develop concepts in each period—not all of this work is of direct interest to me and some of it is of interest primarily due to how it's been picked up elsewhere. In addition, I don't think I am adequately equipped to review parts in detail.

With that in mind, let's hit some highlights.

Bateson is well known for the concept of the double bind, in which someone faces two unsatisfactory and mutually reinforcing alternatives. In "Toward a theory of schizophrenia" (1956, authored by Bateson and colleagues), they theorize the double bind ("a situation in which no matter what a person does, he 'can't win,'" p.201) as a way to explain how schizophrenia develops. In "The group dynamics of schizophrenia" (1960, with colleagues), they add that the double blind is "a paradigm for human relations. Indeed, this sort of dilemma is not rare and it is not confined to the contexts of schizophrenia" (p.238). And in "Double bind" (1969, at a symposium on the double bind), he clarifies that "Double bind theory asserts that there is an experiential component in the determination or etiology of schizophrenic symptoms and related behavioral patterns, such as humor, art, poetry, etc. Notably the theory does not distinguish between these subspecialties" (p.272). (Here Bateson emphasizes the role of feedback loops, trial-and-error, and comparison in understanding systemic change (p.274), elements that John Boyd would later pick up for his OODA framework.) Bateson concludes that "if this pathology can be warded off or resisted, the total experience may promote creativity" (p.278).

The themes of feedback loops and trial-and-error also run through other chapters. For instance, in "The logical categories of learning and communication" (1964), Bateson argues that "all learning ... is to some degree stochastic (i.e., contains components of 'trial and error')" and develops "an hierarchic classification of the types of error which are to be corrected in the various learning processes" (p.287):

Zero learning: "the immediate base of all these acts ... not subject to correction by trial and error"

 

Learning I: "the revision of choice within an unchanged set of alternatives"

Learning II: "the revision of the set from which the choice is to be made" (p.287)

"...and so on," Bateson adds, emphasizing that the classifications can become more meta. Learning II is "learning to learn" (p.294) and "a way of punctuating events" (p.300). 

Learning III "is likely to be difficult and rare even in human beings" but, Bateson says, "something of the sort does from time to time occur in psychotherapy, religious conversion, and in other sequences in which there is profound reorganization of character" (p.301). "If Learning II is a learning of the contexts of Learning I, then Learning III should be a learning of the contexts of those contexts" (p.304). 

This insight leads us to Part III of the book, in which Bateson becomes interested in developing a theory of context—one in which a given utterance or action is part of a context, not a product or effect. Here is where Bateson draws on the concept of "ecology" in the book's title, in which relationships come to the fore and the phenomena with which Bateson has been concerned "become part of the ecology of ideas in systems of 'minds' whose boundaries no longer coincide with the skins of the participant individuals" (p.339). It is in this section, in "Form, substance, and difference," that Bateson gives us the illustration of the blind man and the stick (see my review of A Thousand Plateaus for an extended quote, which I won't reproduce here). Bateson also argues here that separating intellect from emotion, and mind from body, is "monstrous" (p.470). 

This book really is a must-read for those of us who are thinking through thought, cognition, and social systems. It's a lot to assimilate, as any book that summarizes an entire life's worth of thought should be. But it's still (generally) accessible and rewarding. Pick it up.

Presentation : Toward a typology of activities

Last month, I was honored to present a paper (via Skype) to the Helsinki Summer School on Activity Theory and Formative Interventions. The presentation was based on an article that hadn't been accepted yet, so I've been sitting on it, but I've just been informed that the paper has been accepted with minor revisions. So here it is.

Bottom line, I've been trying to characterize different sorts of activities and particularly how hybrids of those types lead to internal contradictions. This is my attempt at a typology. See what you think!

"I watch people work—in a non-creepy way."

My standard description of my research is now a presentation — which I gave at Utah State last week. Take a look.

"I watch people work—in a non-creepy way": Applying genre and sociocultural theory to net work from Clay Spinuzzi

Cynefin and TIMN and I-space and CVF and ...

I've been elbow-deep in examining different frameworks for understanding organizations, including TIMN, CVF, I-Space, and Cynefin. To this point, I've considered Cynefin the odd one out, since it (a) focuses on the environment rather than work organization itself, and (b) consequently doesn't use variants of tribes/clans, institutions/bureaucracies, markets/exchanges, and networks/adhocracies.

But today a stray tweet from Harold Jarche brought my attention to the blogwork he and others have done in relating TIMN and Cynefin. I haven't been able to absorb this work yet, so I'm not ready to endorse it, but it certainly looks interesting:

• "First structure the work system" - Jarche
• "Working together" - Jarche
• "Combined models for pattern recognition" - Tom Haskins (Tom, I think I saw this earlier but lost the thread!)
• "Networks thrive in complexity" - Jarche

As so often happens, people are approaching some of the same problems from different directions—and in some cases, via different measures. As Dave Snowden points out elsewhere, one reason that so many of these frameworks are quadriform is that they emerge from 2x2 matrices. (For instance, in its early days, Cynefin was built on two axes: restricted/open and learning/training.) 

And here I want to inject a note of caution. It's easy to start thinking on the basis of these multiple quadriform frameworks that there's simply four forms—to mistake the map for the territory, so to speak. And once you make that assumption, it's tempting to make straightforward equivalences among the frameworks. 

I don't think any of the authors linked above are doing that, but at the beginning of my investigations, that was my impulse. Now I'm taking a second look at them, reining in that impulse and trying to discern the differences among the frameworks. There are some important lessons here, but also pitfalls. 

Finally, let me bring this back to my home discipline, rhetoric. As I argued a few years ago, understanding the complexities of such models can help rhetoricians, I think. And that's because what is persuasive can change in different sociocultural environments—but we often examine persuasion as if it is founded on eternal principles. We expect arguments to be coherent, well-structured in terms of logos, supplemented appropriately by pathos and ethos. And those characteristics do describe a well-formed argument—for an early-institutional society such as ancient Greece. Do they describe a well-formed argument for a TIMN society? For a company working in the Complex environment described in Cynefin? For an adhocracy in I-space? 

Empirikom 2012: Analyzing computer-mediated communication in professional environments: An activity theory approach

Conf 2012-empirikom3 from spinuzzi

Here's yesterday's presentation to Empirikom 2012 in Aachen. I use the Semoptco case to illustrate three analytical constructs (genre ecologies, activity systems, activity networks) and how they can help us better understand CMC use in professional environments.

Aachen turns out to be a fantastic place, and my hosts have been extraordinarily kind.

Symmetry as a methodological move, part III

I've been discussing the principle of symmetry in actor-network theory on the blog. In previous posts, I've tried to use commonplace examples to demonstrate how, rather than being a form of pantheism or an antihumanist sociology, symmetry is simply a way of getting at certain relationships that are often overlooked or even buried in other approaches. When we examine these relationships in fairly restricted ways—weight requirements in elevators or falling bodies—symmetry makes a great deal of sense. But when we move to more complex phenomena, symmetry seems like a dicier proposition. 

For instance, let's consider cognition.

Latour famously proposed in Science in Action that we institute a ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations of science and technology. (Hakkarainen criticized this moratorium in a 2003 Science and Education issue, complaining that Latour mentions this moratorium every so often, always extending it for ten years.) This moratorium came out of Latour's observations of scientific work, in which he noticed that scientists would assemble a large array of nonhumans and humans—instruments, procedures, lab techs, etc.—to perform science, then attribute the results to cognition. Without all of these nonhuman and human intermediaries, Latour argued, cognition could not have provided an adequate explanation.

Let's use an analogy. Suppose that as you walk home, you spot your neighbor on the roof. Do you think to yourself, "I am amazed that my neighbor can jump so high!" Or do you look for a ladder? Analogically speaking, Latour always looks for the ladder. He sees the alternate explanation—based entirely on human ability—as rather implausible. Yes, it's always a possibility, but (Latour might say) let's look for the ladder first.


This does not mean that actor-network theory is anti-cognition, as Hakkarainen and others have interpreted it to be. ANT is no more anti-cognition than a fork is anti-soup. 


No better demonstration of this point exists than Latour's positive review of Edwin Hutchins' 1995 book Cognition in the Wild. Latour declares: 

The results of Hutchins' inquiry are as devastating for psychology as the results of sociology were for epistemology or those of Shirley Strum for primatology. Everything that was crammed inside the mind of individuals is deployed outside and shared collectively with the culture, through the social connections and with the many cognitive artifacts the group has been able to devise. (p.55)

To put it another way: Hutchins, like Latour, looks for the ladder. 


But more than that, Hutchins refuses to separate cognition from mediating artifacts. In Hutchins' account, "cognition" is not confined to what happens inside the skull, but is instead distributed across a given environment. Latour summarizes the central claim of the book this way: 

cognition has nothing to do with the minds nor with individuals but with the propagation of representations through various media, which are coordinated by a very lightly equipped human subject working in a group, inside a culture, with many artifacts and who might have internalized some parts of the process. (p.56, Latour's italics).

To understand what's happening here, let's dive into Hutchins' book itself. Here's what he says about cognition in Chapter 2:

Having taken ship navigation as it is performed by a team on the bridge of a ship as the unit of cognitive analysis, I will attempt to apply the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation—to the operation of this system. In so doing I do not make any special commitment to the nature of the computations that are going on inside individuals except to say that whatever happens there is part of a larger computational system. But I do believe that the computation observed in the activity of the larger system can be described in the way cognition has been traditionally described—that is, as computation realized through the creation, transformation, and propagation of representational states. (Hutchins, 1995, p. 49)

So Hutchins approaches the notion of cognition by defining it narrowly, as computation. In committing to this computational account, Hutchins takes a radically symmetrical perspective. Rather than drawing lines between what transpires inside and outside one's head, Hutchins examines computation—and thus propagation of representational states—wherever it happens. He brilliantly demonstrates that much of what we might have assumed was expertise or intelligence is instead attributable to how these representational states propagate. For instance, he argues that by all rights the sailors he studied should not have had the depth of experience needed to perform the navigational feats they performed; but these feats were attributable to the entire system of sailors plus other computational media. 


(As a side note, this book had a deep impact on me as I was planning the study for my doctoral dissertation. For instance, as I was developing the notion of the genre ecology in my own work, I ran across Freedman and Smart's 1997 article "Navigating the current of economic policy," in which they coined the term "genre ecology" and modeled it after Hutchins' concept of "tool ecology" in this book. After reading their article, I picked up Hutchins' book, and its influence was key to my understanding of genres as co-mediating each other.) 


To get at what Hutchins is trying to say, let's leave the ship for a moment and look at what he says late in the book about Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Imagine, he says, a room in which John Searle sits. Outside the room, people bring slips of paper on which they have written questions in Chinese. One by one, each person passes her or his slip of paper through a slot in the door; a few moments later, the person receives a reply, also written in Chinese. 


Does Searle know Chinese? Perhaps. Let's suppose that in one scenario, Searle knows how to read and write Chinese and is composing answers on the fly. In a second scenario, Searle doesn't know Chinese, but has several baskets of Chinese characters plus a rulebook that tells him how to combine them to respond to certain strings of characters. (The second scenario is very similar to that of Fred Saberhagen's first Berserker story, "Without a Thought.") In the second scenario, Hutchins argues, Searle doesn't know Chinese, but (for our purposes) the room does. Or to put it another way, the "cognitive properties of the sociocultural system" are different from "the cognitive properties of a person who is manipulating the elements of that system" (p.362). Cognition—in the narrowly defined sense that Hutchins uses the term—is stretched across the human agent and the environment, resulting in accomplishments that could not have resulted from the human agent alone. Searle has a ladder.


And with that, we can see why Latour does something that critics such as Hakkarainen haven't caught. He lifts the moratorium on cognitive explanations:

When I published Science in Action in 1987, I proposed a "moratorium" on cognitive explanations, which had been so freely and cheaply entertained by epistemologists. ... I did not know that I would be able to safely lift the ban, less than 10 years later, since in the meantime, cognitive explanations would have been dissolved past recognition [by Hutchins]." (p.62)

Symmetry as a methodological move, Part II

We've been discussing the oft-misunderstood principle of symmetry in actor-network theory. Last time I emphasized that symmetry is a methodological stance meant to get at certain things and not others–not wholesale anthropomorphization. Let's pursue that line further by performing a thought experiment. I emphasize that this is just a thought experiment for reasons that will become clear below.

Aristotle believed and taught that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, in direct proportion to their weight. Galileo disagreed, and described a classic experiment in which he stood at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with two balls, dropped them, and they hit the ground at about the same time. (It's unclear whether Galileo actually performed the experiment.)

Suppose you want to perform a similar experiment. Since I'm at the University of Texas campus, let's imagine that you ascend UT's Tower to the observation deck. You bring a one-pound weight and a ten-pound weight.

Photo © 1980 Larry D. Moore (CC-BY-SA), available  at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uttower1.jpg

(NOTE: You can only do this as a thought experiment. The observation deck is inaccessible except during guided tours due to a tragic incident. Also, dropping weights from the observation deck is a misdemeanor. Obviously, I do not endorse actually performing this experiment.)

Leaning over the railing, you drop the two weights at the same time. Not surprisingly, you discover that Galileo was right and Aristotle was wrong. The ten-pound weight does not fall ten times faster than the one-pound weight; they hit the ground at roughly the same time.

Interesting, you think. And then you decide to try a second variation of the experiment. You ascend the tower again, this time with a one-pound weight, a ten-pound weight, and a 150-pound hipster.

(NOTE: Again, you can only do this as a thought experiment for obvious legal, moral, and ethical reasons.)

When you reach the observation deck, you repeat the experiment, this time dropping all three objects at the same time. It turns out that no matter how ironically the hipster falls, in terms of gravity, he behaves exactly as the other weights do. For the purposes of the experiment, the hipster is exactly the same as the other two weights; you treat them symmetrically, and so does gravity.

But when you descend the elevator to the bottom of the tower, you discover that what is treated as symmetrical in one network of meaning is not treated as symmetrical in other networks. Dropping the weights is a misdemeanor. Dropping the hipster is a felony. The law of gravity treats them as symmetrical, but state and federal law do not.

When Latour describes humans and nonhumans as symmetrical, he means that differences among actants (both human and nonhuman) are generated within a given actor-network rather than preexisting them; we can't presuppose those differences. Consider Galileo's experiment as well as the previous illustration of elevator capacity: in these narrowly defined situations, humans and nonhumans act in exactly the same way. (If the tower experiment were a physics problem, you wouldn't even specify the materials, you'd just plug in the weight values.) But of course these networks of meaning are always entangled with other networks, as they should be. There are many good reasons why you would never actually perform this experiment, and they go beyond trouble with the law to basic questions of empathy and morality, questions that apply to all people,  few if any artifacts, and to some extent to nonhuman animals. 

But Latour talks about situations in which people are actually interacting: scientists, technologists, the public. Aren't these social rather than technical? And in social situations, don't we have to treat humans and nonhumans differently? 

The answer is: it depends on your methodological aims. Even in terms that we consider very human–cognition and persuasion–it sometimes makes sense to take a symmetrical viewpoint in one's methods. We'll see an example in the next post in this series.

Symmetry as a methodological move, part I

"This circulating gene entangles patients and researchers as it goes along. ... we see that the gene is domesticated, tamed, and integrated into a collective that holds it and is held by it. It is a civilized and civilizing gene, performing the collective and performed by it. And this integration into the society of the gene, or insertion into the genetics of society, would have been impossible without a starting point: the parity, the symmetry, between the complementary forms of knowledge that constitutes the foundations of this collective." (Callon & Rabeharisoa 2003, p.201)

This quote from a recent class echoes through your head as you walk down Austin's 6th Street on a beautiful spring day. Callon & Rabeharisoa are talking about a collaboration between research scientists and the French Muscular Dystrophy Association, which was clear enough, but in the latter half of the paper they make this assertion, consistent with the principle of symmetry that actor-network theory embraces.

Symmetry seems ridiculous to you. What's the point of pretending that genes, stars, and rat kidneys are actors in the sense that people are? Why apply the same language to both? Maybe this is one of those "critical theory" moves you've heard people talking about. To you, it seems more like attention-seeking. Latour likes to say that symmetrical language is not metaphorical but that he isn't engaging in anthropomorphism either. Obviously he's trying to have it both ways.

Enough. It's spring break. South by Southwest Interactive is winding down, but South by Southwest Music is just ramping up. You walk past the back of a club, where roadies are struggling to move a ton of sound equipment. It's going to be an exclusive show, evidently, because fourteen undernourished hipsters have already lined up at the front of the club; they're thumbing their iPhones and checking out each others' ironic t-shirts. A little farther on, seven well-nourished tourists on Segways ride along the sidewalk in a neat line, like ducks. And as you pass Jim-Jim's Water Ice, you see a mounted policeman on one horse, holding another horse's reins. The other policeman is in line getting a snow cone. Ah, Austin.

But you don't have time to enjoy the scenes. You hurry on toward the Driskill Hotel, where a temporary job awaits you. When you get there, you find out that the job is pretty easy.

"See this elevator?" your supervisor asks. "It's old. It has a maximum capacity of 2000 pounds. Max. But people try to overload it all the time. Your job is to make sure they don't." He turns on his heel and walks away.

Easy, you think. But then you wonder: about how much is 2000 pounds?

Let's see, you reason to yourself. Two thousand pounds is a ton. Like a ton of stereo equipment, you think whimsically, remembering your walk.

But how many people? Maybe thirteen or fourteen people - like those fourteen undernourished hipsters in front of the club. Or seven well-fed tourists on Segways, you think, imagining the line riding into the elevator. Or two horses and a police officer. Any of these combinations would come out to about 2000 pounds. You resolve that whatever combination of humans and nonhumans might come through the door, if they are above 2000 pounds, they can't ride together.

Humans and nonhumans? You laugh a little, thinking back to the notion of symmetry. What if the hipsters argued: "But we're not horses! Hello? Do horses have an encyclopedic knowledge of craft brews? Did horses listen to Mumford and Sons long before they were cool? Do horses have iPhones? Of course not! Horses don't even have thumbs!"And you imagine yourself retorting: "Maybe that matters if you're trying to get backstage. But not here. All that matters is how much you weigh."

You don't believe for a minute that hipsters are the "same" as horses, that stereo equipment is the same as overfed tourists, or that policemen are the same as Segways. But for the purposes of your job, they are judged by exactly the same criteria. Four hours later, it occurs to you that you are indeed performing a kind of symmetric analysis.

More than that: If you don't, the elevator will.