Abstract
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.
Highlights
Multilevel Meanings and Logical Types Difficulties in communication posed by the simultaneous presence of multiple levels of meaning in language have been a perennial topic of investigation for philosophers, logicians, anthropologists, and, more recently, theorists in the areas of complex adaptive systems, autopoiesis, organizational research, and knowledge infrastructure
They have been incorporated unintentionally, as a result of seeming to have no obvious alternative, into the background assumptions, policies, and procedures of contemporary market, governmental, educational, healthcare, and research institutions. These mixed messages continue unabated, in general, even though their root causes have been successfully addressed for decades in specific instances of theory and practice. Important aspects of these solutions were anticipated by Bateson but came to fruition in the work of Benjamin Wright, a physicist and psychoanalyst who made a number of fundamental contributions in measurement modelling, experimental approaches to instrument calibration, parameter estimation, fit analysis, software development, professional development, and applications across multiple fields [4,5]
Bateson [53] identified the source of the problem when he recognized that “ . . . quantity and pattern are of different logical type and do not readily fit together in the same thinking.”
Summary
Cross-level fallacies falsely generalize parts to wholes, or vice versa [9]. When wholes are greater than the sums of their parts, and exist at a higher order level of complexity, valid generalizations must be based in persistent isomorphisms demonstrably exhibiting shared functional relationships [10]. The resolution of the double bind Wright helped to create is widely applied in dozens of fields and thousands of papers published over the last 50 years (as can be readily established via searches of Google Scholar for “Rasch” in association with any of the following: analysis, measurement, scaling, model) This resolution has not, been incorporated into mainstream methods or the background assumptions and infrastructures of research and practice. The answer from the scientific community is complex and twofold: they create objects that are both plastic and coherent through a collective course of action In this context, the question arises as to the general feasibility of a systematic experimental solution to the problem of pervasive cross-level fallacies in communication. What collective courses of action resolve double binds in communication by creating objects that adapt to local circumstances without compromising their coherent comparability?
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