The Reenchantment of the World (33 page)

 

 

Down to some point in the mid-1960s, learning theory was dominated by
the behavioral model, which is most commonly associated with J.B. Watson
and B.F. Skinner. The real grandfather of such work was Ivan Pavlov, who
had managed to immortalize a dog by getting it to salivate when he rang a
bell. What Pavlov did was to set up a context of association. Repeatedly,
bell-ringing was followed by food, until the sound of the bell alone was
enough to trigger the animal's entire gastronomic response. In one of
Skinner's experiments, a rat learned to press a bar and thereby release a
pellet of food. Skinners rat had to contend with a set of rules different
from those that confronted Pavlov's dog, but again a context of (causal)
association was central: event occurs, food appears. Furthermore, all of
these experiments involved a progressively faster rate of learning on
the part of animals. Dog and rat quickly caught on to the rules of the
game. After a number of trials, the dog did not need meat to salivate;
he had learned what the bell meant. Similarly, the rat discovered that
the food pellet was no accident, and began to spend much of its time
pressing the bar.

 

 

What is going on in .such experiments? What do the terms "learn" and
"discover" mean, as I have just employed them? Bateson uses the term
"proto-learning" to characterize the simple solution of a problem. Bell
rings, or bar is presented. The Pavlovian situation requires a passive
response, the Skinnerian situation a more active one, but there is
still a problem to be solved in each case: what does this phenomenon
require of me (dog, rat), and what does it lead to? Solving such a
specific problem is proto-learning, or Learning I. "Deutero-learning,"
or Learning II, Bateson defines as a "progressive change in [the] rate
of proto-learning." In Learning II the subject discovers the nature
of the context itself, that is, he not only solves the problems that
confront him, but becomes more skilled in solving problems in general. He
acquires the habit of expecting the continuity of a particular sequence
or context, and in so doing, "learns to learn." There are, furthermore,
four contexts of positive learning, as opposed to negative learning,
in which the subject learns not to do something. There are the two
already described, Pavlovian contexts and those of instrumental reward;
and there are also contexts of instrumental avoidance (e.g., rat gets an
electric shock if it doesn't press the bar within a certain time interval)
and of serial and rote learning (e.g., word B is always to be uttered
after word A). So proto-learning is the solution of a problem within
such contexts, and deutero-learning is figuring out what the context
itself is -- learning the rules of the game.

 

 

Character and "reality" have their origins in the process of Learning II;
indeed, character and reality prove to be inseparable. A person trained
by a Pavlovian experimenter would have a fatalistic view of life. He
would believe that nothing could affect his state, and for such a person
reality might well consist of deciphering omens. A Skinnerian-trained
individual would be more active in dealing with his or her world, but no
less rigid in his or her view of reality. Western cultures, notes Bateson,
operate in terms of a mixture of instrumental reward and avoidance. Its
citizens deutero-learn the art of manipulating everything around them,
and it is difficult for them to believe that reality might be arranged
on any other basis. The link between fact and value is (a) that such
acquired perceptions are also acquired character traits, and (b) that
they are purely articles of faith. In other words, to take (a) first,
any bit of learning, especially deutero-learning, is the acquisition of
a personality trait, and
what we call "character"
(ethos, in Greek)
is built on premises acquired in learning contexts
. All adjectives
descriptive of character, says Bateson -- "dependent," "hostile,"
"careless," and so on -- are descriptions of possible results of Learning
II. The Pavlovian-trained person not only sees reality in fatalistic
terms; we might also say of him or her, "She is fatalistic," or "He
is a passive type." Most of us raised in Western industrial societies
have been trained in instrumental patterns, and therefore we do not
ordinarily notice these patterns: they constitute our ethos. They are
"normal," and thus invisible. In especially egregious cases, we will say,
"He's only out for himself" -- a character description that is at the same
time an epistemology. Dominant, submissive, passive, self-aggrandizing,
and exhibitionistic -- all are simultaneously character traits and ways
of defining reality, and all are (deutero-) learned from early infancy.

 

 

The second point, that these "realities" are articles of faith, raises the
issue of the "true ideology." If you have been raised with an instrumental
view of life, you will relate to your social and natural environment in
that way. You will test the environment on that basis to obtain positive
reinforcement, and if your premises are not validated, you will probably
not abandon your world view, but classify the negative response, or lack
of response, as an anomaly. In this way you remove the threat to your
view of reality, which is also your character structure. Neither the
witch doctor nor the surgeon gives up magic or science when his methods
fail, as they often do. Behavior, says Bateson, is controlled by Learning
II, and molds the total context to fit in with those expectations. The
self-validating character of deutero-learning is so powerful that it
is normally ineradicable, usually persisting from cradle to grave. Of
course, many individuals go through "conversions" in which they abandon
one paradigm for another. But regardless of the paradigm, the person
remains in the grip of a deutero-pattern, and goes through life finding
"facts" that validate it. In Bateson's view, the only real escape is what
he calls Learning III, in which it is not a matter of one paradigm versus
another, but an understanding of the nature of paradigm itself. Such
changes involve a profound reorganization of personality -- a change in
form, not just content -- and can occur in true religious conversion, in
psychosis, or in psychotherapy. These changes burst open the categories
of Learning II itself, with magnificent or hazardous results. (We shall
deal with Learning III at greater length below.)

 

 

It should be clear, then, that the union of fact and value, which modern
science denies in principle, occurs quite naturally in Bateson's analysis
of learning. A system of codification, he says, is not very different
from a system of values. The network of values partially determines the
network of perception. "Man lives by those propositions whose validity is
a function of his belief in them," he writes. Or as he says at a later
point, "faith is an acceptance of deutero-propositions whose validity
is really increased by our acceptance of them."

 

 

But what
is
character structure? If it was an error to reify ethos
in New Guinea, Bateson realized, it was no less fallacious to treat
a character trait as a thing. Adjectives descriptive of character are
really descriptions of "segments of interchange." They are descriptions
of
transactions
, not of entities, and the transactions involved
exist between the person and his or her environment. No person is
"hostile"
or "careless" in a vacuum, despite the contrary contention of Pavlov,
Skinner, and the whole behavioral school. Clearly, Learning II is
equivalent to the acquisition of apperceptive habits, "apperception" being
defined as the mind's perception of itself as a conscious agent. Such
habits can be acquired in more than one way, and the behaviorist is wrong
to believe that habit is formed only through the repeated experience of a
specific kind of learning context. "We are not concerned," writes Bateson,

 

 

with a hypothetical isolated individual in contact with an impersonal
events stream, but rather with real individuals who have complex
emotional patterns of relationship with other individuals. In
such a real world, the individual will be led to acquire or reject
apperceptive habits by the very complex phenomena of personal example,
tone of voice, hostility, love, etc. Many such habits, too, will be
conveyed to him, not through his own naked experience of the stream
of events, for no human beings (not even scientists) are naked in
this sense. The events stream is mediated to them through language,
art, technology and other cultural media which are structured at
every point by tramlines of apperceptive habit.19

 

 

The psychology laboratory is probably the
last
place to learn about
learning, just as the physics laboratory is the last place to learn
about light and color. Both Skinner and Newton were guilty of narrowing
the context to the point that they could have precise control over
the trivial. If you wish to find out about learning, contends Bateson,
study individuals in their cultural context, and study especially the
non-verbal communication that goes on between them. Deutero-learning
proceeds largely in terms of what he would later call "analogue," as
opposed to "digital" cues. It is in this arena that we shall, he believed,
find the source of our character "traits" and our cognitive "realities."

 

 

To enlarge on this for a moment, digital knowledge, which expanded
rapidly after Gutenberg s time, is verbal-rational and abstract. For
example, a word has no particular relationship to what it describes
("cow" is not a big word). Analogue knowledge, on the other hand, is
iconic: the information represents that which is being communicated (a
loud voice indicates strong emotions). This kind of knowledge is tacit,
in Polanyi's sense, and includes poetry, body language, gesture and
intonation, dreams, art, and fantasy. Pascal and Descartes had debated
this distinction between style and nuance on the one hand, the measurement
and geometry on the other. Although at first glance these two forms of
knowledge may seem irreconcilable, Bateson chose to believe that Pascal
was right when he wrote that the heart had its reasons which reason did
not perceive. Perhaps it was time for scientists to start formulating
some cardiac algorithms.

 

 

Bateson recalls that it was in January 1952, while watching monkeys
playing at the Fleishhacker Zoo in San Francisco, that he realized
that their play (the monkeys' captivity notwithstanding) could provide
a foothold on the whole area of nonverbal commumcation. The resulting
article, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," argued: (1) that play between
mammals dealt with 'relata,' rather than manifest content, and in this way
was very similar to primary-process material (or dream and fantasy) in its
structure; (2) that although it was not familiar to our conscious minds,
such material was subject to the analysis of formal logic, specifically
the rules of paradox described by Russell and Whitehead in their classic
work, "Principia Mathematica" (1910-13); (3) that since humans were
mammals, our own learning -- and therefore our character and world view
-- depended on such material; that what we called "personality" and
"reality" were formed by a (deutero-) learning process that permeated
our environment and taught us, in ways that were subtle but definite,
certain allowable patterns that the culture labeled "sane"; and (4) that
conversely, insanity (ostensible lack of coherence of personality and
world view) probably involved the inability to manipulate the relationship
between conscious and unconscious according to the deutero-propositions
of a particular cultural context.

 

 

The theoretical starting point for Bateson's research here was Russell
and Whitehead's "Theory of Logical Types." In itself, the theory simply
states that no class of objects, as defined in logic or mathematics,
can be a member of itself. Let us, for example, conceive of a class of
objects consisting of all of the chairs that currently exist in the
world. Anything we customarily term "chair" will be a member of that
class. But the class itself is not a chair, any more than a particular
chair can be the class of chairs. A chair, and the class of chairs,
are two different levels of abstraction (the class being the higher
level). This axiom, that there is a discontinuity between a class and
its members, seems trivially obvious, until we discover that human
and mammalian communication is constantly violating it to generate
siginficant paradoxes.

 

 

One of the most famous of these paradoxes is known as "Epimenides' Paradox,"
or the "Liar's Paradox" (see Chapter 5, note 30). It might be presented as
in Figure 14:

 

 

 

 

 

We see the problem at once. If the statement is true, it is false,
and if false, it is true. The resolution lies in the Russell-Whitehead
axiom. The word "statements" is being used in both the sense of a class
(the class of statements)