EPISTEMOLOGICAL ERRORS

When you find an epistemological error, scream bloody murder. Okay, you don’t do that, but do be warned that you are in the presence of something which undermines your ability to think straight and clear and which will lead to all sorts of confusions. In the first article in this series, I quoted this from Gregory Bateson: “... the problems of psychiatry are often all shot through with epistemological difficulties” (A Sacred Unity, 1990, p. 51)

There is such a thing as an epistemological error. There actually lots of them. So wherever you find one, that error is not a good thing. In fact, it is a bad thing. In his search for clarity rather than muddled thinking, Bateson looked for and identified epistemological errors. He found that in psychotherapy, people were making many of these errors. He wrote extensive about these errors in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. What psychiatrists and others thought that they knew about schizophrenia was an epistemological error. How therapists thought about the underlying problem in alcoholism was another epistemological error.

What is the error in schizophrenia or in alcoholism? First of all, these terms sound like ‘things,’ ‘traits,’ or ‘characteristics’ inside of a person. Actually they are words for one end of a relationship. Like the term “dependency,” this is not a thing that you can find in a person. It is a relationship between that person and other persons. The term refers to a regularity of external behavior vis-a-vis other persons. Bateson explains: “One form of habitual error can be pilloried. This is the trick of drawing a generalization from the world of external observation, giving it a fancy name, and then asserting that this named abstraction exists inside the organism as an explanatory principle. Instinct theory commonly takes this monstrous form. To say that opium contains a dormitive principle is no explanation of how it puts people to sleep.” (A Sacred Unity, 1990, p. 76)

In other words, the error is that these words (schizophrenia, alcoholism, dependency, etc.) are fancy-name generalizations that someone invented for certain external behaviors. They invented them to explain experiences. As they erroneously thought about the experience, they generalized, they deleted the rest of the relationship, and thereby distorted a system making it linear as they encoded the problem into a single word.

If epistemology is the process by which you know what you know, a process which describes how your way of thinking leads to what you know (your knowledge), then an epistemological error is a way of thinking and knowing that leads to false conclusions, confusions, and misunderstandings. The problem? The way a person thinks as he reasons and builds up his knowledge and the way he codes the thought into words.

What held back the social and the psychological sciences for centuries? The epistemological errors, to wit, the way people thought. To think about the psychological processes as ‘things,’ ‘traits,’ ‘types, etc. and to think that these ‘things’ work in a linear way (not systemically) is the first epistemological error. To think that psychological problems are ‘caused’ by history, by what happened in the past, is the next epistemological error. Bateson again: “Nor will I agree to the monstrous premise of medieval epistemology which would separate ‘mind’ from ‘body.’” (A Sacred Unity, p. 149)

Ah yes, “medieval epistemology” the old ways of thinking especially the dichotomous thinking of either/or, black-or-white which polarizes things in over-simplistic ways such as “mind” and “body” as it they are separate or can be separated. It was Maslow who repeatedly wrote, “To dichomize is to pathologize.” In this kind of dualistic thinking, you are splitting a system apart, a system that cannot operate apart. In this I hope you are gaining a new appreciation for the value of the Meta-Model.

While Bateson called these erroneous ways of thinking epistemological errors, it is probably easier to think about them as cognitive biases, distortions, and fallacies. These errors in how we think lead to what we ‘know,’ or think we know, and creates all kinds of problems. The solution is simple enough: clear our those distortions and learn to think clearly and accurate —the subject of the next article.