Bateson and Wright on Number and Quantity: How to Not Separate Thinking from Its Relational Context

As part of his explication of the epistemological error made in separating thinking from its ecological context, Bateson distinguished counts from measurements. With no reference to Bateson, the measurement theory and practice of Benjamin Wright also recognizes that number and quantity are different logical types. Describing the confusion of counts and measures as schizophrenic, like Bateson, Wright, a physicist and certified psychoanalyst, showed mathematically that convergent stochastic processes informing counts are predictable in ways that facilitate methodical measurements. Wright’s methods experimentally evaluate the complex symmetries of nonlinear and stochastic numeric patterns as a basis for estimating interval quantities. These methods also retain connections with locally situated concrete expressions, mediating the data display by contextualizing it in relation to the abstractly communicable and navigable quantitative unit and its uncertainty. Decades of successful use of Wright’s methods in research and practice are augmented in recent collaborations of metrology engineers and psychometricians who are systematically distinguishing numeric counts from measured quantities in new classes of knowledge infrastructure. Situating Wright’s work in the context of Bateson’s ideas may be useful for infrastructuring new political, economic, and scientific outcomes.

Contextualizing Sustainable Development Metric Standards: Imagining New Entrepreneurial Possibilities

Imagination is more important than knowledge, but if intellect does not provide the needed logical structures, capacities for envisioning new possibilities are overly constrained. The sustainability problems we face today cannot be solved with the same kind of thinking that created them, but clarity on what counts as a new kind of thinking is sorely lacking. This article proposes methodical, model-based ways of heeding Bateson’s warning about the negative consequences for the ecology of mind that follow from ignoring the contexts of relationships. Informed by S. L. Star’s sense of boundary objects, a sequence of increasingly complex logical types distinguishes and interconnects qualitatively different kinds of thinking in ways that liberate imaginative new possibilities for life. The economy of thought instantiated at each level of complexity is only as meaningful, useful, beautiful, ethical, and efficient as the standards informing local adaptive improvisations. Standards mediating the general and specific, global and local, universally transcendent and embodied particulars enable meaningful negotiations, agreements, and communications. Attending to the differences between levels of discourse sets up new possibilities for creative and imaginative entrepreneurial approaches to viable, feasible, and desirable goals for measuring and managing sustainable development.

Contextualizing Sustainable Development Metric Standards: Imagining New Entrepreneurial Possibilities

Imagination is more important than knowledge, but if intellect does not provide the needed logical structures, capacities for envisioning new possibilities are overly constrained. The sustainability problems we face today cannot be solved with the same kind of thinking that created them, but clarity on what counts as a new kind of thinking is sorely lacking. This article proposes methodical, model-based ways of heeding Bateson's warning about the negative consequences for the ecology of mind that follow from ignoring the contexts of relationships. Informed by S. L. Star's sense of boundary objects, a sequence of increasingly complex logical types distinguishes and interconnects qualitatively different kinds of thinking in ways that liberate imaginative new possibilities for life. The economy of thought instantiated at each level of complexity is only as meaningful, useful, beautiful, ethical, and efficient as the standards informing local adaptive improvisations. Standards mediating the general and specific, global and local, universally transcendent and embodied particulars enable meaningful negotiations, agreements, and communications. Attending to the differences between levels of discourse sets up new possibilities for creative and imaginative entrepreneurial approaches to viable, feasible, and desirable goals for measuring and managing sustainable development.

MRI Ideas as a Compass in the Dark: A Beginning Therapist Applies MRI Ideas to Dangerous Situations

The foundational ideas of the Mental Research Institute (MRI) can offer grounding to a therapist when working with dangerous or emotionally fraught situations. In this article, a beginning therapist discusses how these foundational ideas helped her overcome initial biases to work successfully with potentially dangerous court-mandated clients; helped her to handle an emotionally fraught situation in her own family; and clarified her work with a client in a potential domestic violence situation, which might have required reporting to child welfare authorities. Key MRI concepts including the theory of groups; the theory of logical types; first and second order change, cybernetics and positive and negative feedback; context-maintaining behaviors; attempted solutions which become problematic; and therapist maneuverability are discussed. Basic MRI interventions are defined and discussed, including but not limited to the go-slow directive, the dangers of improvement, making a “U-turn,” and how to worsen the problem. A case study is presented.

Analytic, Paradoxical, and Synthetic Sentences on ABC and The Hard Way Song Lyrics

This research aims to identify and classify; analytic, paradoxical, and synthetic sentences which are logical types of sentences in the song lyric of ABC by The Jackson 5 and The Hard Way by The Kinks in order to get the virtue of meanings of the lyrics. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative by analyzing and comparing the data by using Kant’s containment concept. The data used in this research are lyrics from the songs ABC 5 and The Hard Way. The research findings obtained: one analytic sentence in ABC, one paradoxical sentence in The Hard Way and twenty two synthetic sentences in both lyrics. The data indicate that there are more synthetic sentences rather than analytical and paradoxical sentences in the songs. In conclusion, the synthetic sentences used on the song lyrics are more fabricated for the virtue of meanings on the song lyrics than analytic and paradoxical sentences. Therefore, the listeners can express their emotions freely by song lyrics using synthetic sentences.

On the logical makeup of how- and why-questions

We employ wh else-phrases as a novel tool for investigating the logicalmakeup of wh-questions. Applying the wh else-diagnostic to how- and why-questions,we show that they comprise two different logical types, which differ interms of whether or not two of their Hamblin answers can be compatible. How- andwhy-questions can also be classified in grammatical or notional terms (e.g.,Higginbotham 1993, Oshima 2007, Sæbø 2016). Our findings therefore raise thequestion of how the logical typology and grammatical or notional typologies ofhow- and why-questions might be related.

Communication as a Way to Broadcast an Intentional Experience of Local Cultures

Handling of modern communication studies to theoretical and methodological achievments of philosophy of culture is the result of the desire for a holistic vision of the interaction of heterogeneous structures, united in the act of communication. This makes it possible, based on the dialectics of the general, special and individual, as well as relying on the ideas of existential dialectic and personalism, to formulate some principles of a dynamic understanding of the communication process and to identify the conditions of its performance. This approach considers “unity of understanding,” “non-empty” communicative act, taken at the same time in the linguistic and extra-linguistic (ethnopsychological, historical, cognitive, semantic, sociological aspects, etc.) measurements. The functional approach to the study of linguistic measurement of communicative act (distinguishing physical and logical types of existence), in conjunction with antisubstantialism allows to highlight the role of abstract, “metaphysical” concepts (universals) for solving linguistic and communicative tasks. Analysis of the communicative act in the semantic dimension allows us to consider it as a unique communicative event, which has a universal structure, through the allocation of dynamic components of this process, which is a kind of superposition, the interference part of concepts (rhizome). This rhizome unity of concepts not only provides the informational content of the message, but also induces a concomitant “background” knowledge (assessment, links and hyperlinks, intention, modality, imperatives, etc.) that make up the pragmatic level of existence of the concept. Intentional aspect of communication, orienting communicators to “essence”, “purpose” and “meaning” (in the dynamic sense) refers to the Other as a reality and at the same time as open project; sets the “horizon” of communicative events, thus creating a space of dialogue as a space of culture and setting field of open universals that define the possibility of an agreement. The importance of this approach for the sphere of international relations can not be overestimated.