Misunderstanding Bateson

From: Daryl McCullough (stevendaryl3016_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 03/24/05 

Date: 24 Mar 2005 07:25:34 -0800

Albert Wagner says...

>No. You haven't. And 'infinite' is not a property of anything,
>much less sets. I posted this earlier today but perhaps you
>missed it:
>
>In _MIND AND NATURE: A Necessary Unity_ Gregory Bateson describes
>this faulty logic:
>---------------------------------------
>A common form of empty explanation is the appeal to what I have
>called "dormitive principles", borrowing the word dormitive from
>Molière. There is a coda in dog Latin to Molière's Le Malade
>Imaginaire, and in this coda, we see on the stage a medieval oral
>doctoral examination. The examiners ask the candidate why opium
>puts people to sleep. The candidate triumphantly answers,
>"Because, learned doctors, it contains a dormitive principle."
>
>We can imagine the candidate spending the rest of his life
>fractionating opium in a biochemistry lab and successively
>identifying in which fraction the so-called dormitive principle
>remained.
>
>A better answer to the doctors' question would involve, not the
>opium alone, but a relationship between the opium and the people.
>In other words, the dormitive explanation actually falsifies the
>true facts of the case but what is, I believe, important is that
>dormitive explanations still permit abduction. Having enunciated
>a generality that opium contains a dormitive principle, it is
>then possible to use this type of phrasing for a very large
>number of other phenomena. We can say, for example, that
>adrenalin contains an enlivening principle and reserpine a
>tranquilizing principle. This will give us, albeit inaccurately
>and epistemologically unacceptably, handles with which to grab at
>a very large number of phenomena that appear to be formally
>comparable. And, indeed, they are formally comparable to this
>extent, that invoking a principle inside one component is in fact
>the error that is made in every one of these cases.
>-----------------------------------------

Albert is misunderstanding Bateson. The point of that article is
*not* that there is anything wrong with defining the phrase
"containing a dormative principle" to mean "having the ability
to put someone to sleep". The point of the article is that
dormative principle is not a *cause* of morphine's ability to
put someone to sleep. There is no information conveyed by saying
"morphine contains a dormative principle" that is not conveyed
just as well by "morphine puts people to sleep". So saying
"morphine puts people to sleep because it contains a dormative
principle" is a vaccuous explanation, explaining no more than
saying "morphine puts people to sleep because it puts people
to sleep".

So Bateson was concerned with the notion of *explanation*, not
the notion of *definition*. He is talking about what makes for
a good explanation, not what makes for a good definition.

In practice, whether something is a suitable explanation or not
depends on the knowledge of the person asking for an explanation,
and on what gap in that knowledge the person is trying to fill.
Suppose I know that a particular hospital patient is in severe
pain, and is trying unsuccessfully to get to sleep. The nurse
comes in and gives the patient a shot of morphine. If I ask
the nurse "Why did you give him morphine?" then for the nurse
to answer "Because morphine has dormative powers" is an adequate
explanation for her actions (assuming I already know what "dormative
powers" means). It *isn't* an adequate explanation for why morphine
puts people to sleep. 

--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY