RSStautology
Jul 22
epistemology argument, bateson, description, explanation, logic, validity, value 3 Comments
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)
ThE CLOwN
Jul 22, 2010 @ 12:21:05
Just on the last point, the explanation I read, by Richard Gregory, is that there’s no reversal of top and bottom because the image in the reflection is a rotation of the object being reflected, and that rotation is around the vertical axis only. Does Bateson explain it the same way?
eldon
Jul 25, 2010 @ 00:47:03
not exactly. because actually ‘rotation’ does not come into it. nobody ‘rotates’. the image only is ‘reversed’. although he does say something along those lines by saying that it is actually ‘front and back’ that has been reversed, not left and right…
mainly it’s down to reference points.
left-right cannot be talked about except in relation to individual position. so left-right is ‘meaningless’ outside the POV of the perceiving subject… remember that he is trying to illustrate the idea that description, tautology and explanation are related.
he explains like this:
eldon
Sep 23, 2010 @ 10:19:14
[from ‘mind and nature’]
FATHER: All right. my opinion is that the Creatura, the world of mental process, is both tautological and ecological. I mean that it is a slowly self healing tautology. Left to itself, any large peice of Creatura will tend to settle towards tautology, that is, toward _internal consistency_ of ideas and processes. But every now and then, the consistency gets torn; the tautology breaks up like the surface of a pond when a stone is thrown into it. Then the tautology slowly but immediately starts to heal. And the healing may be ruthless. Whole species may be exterminated in the process.
DAUGHTER: But, Daddy, you could make consistency out of the idea that it always starts to heal.
F: So, the tautology is not broken; it’s only pushed up to the next level of abstraction, the next logical type. That’s so.
D: But how many levels are there?
F: No, that I cannot know. I cannot know whether it is ultimately a tautology nor how many logical levels it has. I am inside it and therefore cannot know its outer limits – if it has any.
D: I think it’s gloomy. What’s the point of it all?
F: No, no. If you were in love, you would not ask that question.
D: Do you mean that love is the point?
F: But again, no. I was saying no to your question, not answering it. It’s a question for an occidental industrialist and an engineer. This whole book is about the wrongness of that question.
D: You never said that in the book.
F: There are a million things I never said. But I’ll answer your question. It has a million – an infinite number of “points” as you call them.
D: But that’s like having no point – Daddy is it a sphere?
F: Ah all right. That will do for a metaphor. A multidimensional sphere, perhaps.
D: Hmmm – a self healing tautology which is also a sphere, a multidimensional sphere.
(224 – 225)