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LFTRC, KCCF & AIA Volume No 21, Issue 1, 2010. pp. 68-92

Human Systems: The Journal of Therapy, Consultation & Training

Bateson, double description, calibration, abduction,

and embodiment:Preparing ourselves for the happening of change

John ShotterUniversity of New Hampshire, USA and University of Bedfordshire

Do we relate to the world around us only through our concepts,

or is there a much more direct, spontaneous, bodily way of our

doing so? I explore this second possibility in terms of Batesons

(1979) notion of double description a phenomenon that oc-

curs when two or more information sources come togeth-er to give information of a sort different from what was in ei-

ther source separately (p. 31). These phenomena are dynamic

phenomena, in that they have their unique existence only with-

in our embodied relations to the temporal unfolding of events in

the two or more relevant sources. As such, as Bateson (1979) put

it, they are of a different logical type (Russell, 1908) to their

source events. They arefeelings or sensings that we can become

aware of if oriented towards their occurrence. Bateson only very

partially connected this important insight to the ways in whichwe can make ourselves ready to relate to the others and other-

nesses around us via the notion ofcalibration. Below, following

Merleau-Ponty (1962), Todes (2001), and Wittgenstein (1953), I

describe the kind ofpreparing activities that can help us come to

feel more at home when living in the midst of complexity and

change processes that connect with Batesons (1979) accounts

ofabduction and calibration, and with our sense of the pattern

that connects.

We can look at the anatomy of a frog and then look around to

find other instances of the same abstract relations recurring in oth-

er creatures, including, in this case, ourselves. This lateral exten-

sion of abstract components of description is called abduction, and

I hope the reader may see it with a fresh eye. The very possibility of

abduction is a little uncanny, and the phenomenon is enormously

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Bateson, double description, calibration, abduction, and embodiment 69

more widespread than he or she might, at first thought, have sup-

posed (Bateson, 1979, p. 157).

... it is not that before you can understand it you need to be spe-cially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between under-

standing the subject and what most people want to see. Because ofthis the very things which are most obvious may become the hard-

est of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficultyhaving to do with the will, rather than with the intellect (Wittgen-

stein, 1980, p. 17).

Theorists have been so preoccupied with the task of investigating

the nature, the source, and the credentials of the theories that weadopt that they have for the most part ignored the question what it

is for someone to know how to perform tasks (Ryle, 1949, p. 28).

Bateson knows something hes not telling us, (something oftensaid, reputedly, by recipients of Batesons thoughts).

Keywords: calibration, abduction, embodiment, double description, orientation.

Bateson (1972, 1979) is usually looked upon as one of the founders of the sci-

ence of Cybernetics and as contributing to advances in cybernetic and sys-

tems theory. However, there are passages in Batesons writings, particularly

when he is talking about the importance of contexts, when it seems to me he

is not so much exploring how we might think about systemic and cybernet-

ic phenomena, as how we might, as professional inquirers, relate ourselves to

them. And it is this that is my central concern in this paper: How, when we

experience the world around us as fluid and as ever-changing, as unamenableto any finalized and complete determinations in short, as complex can we

still nonetheless teach ourselves to make yet more refined discriminations and

to develop more reliable anticipations, thus to feel in our professional practic-

es more at home in the midst of complex situations? In other words, I am not

raising here an epistemological question but an ontological one, to do with

how best we might orient ourselves, as professional inquirers, concerned to

develop and improve not only other peoples practices but also our own. Thus

my concern is not with inquiring into complex situations in general from the

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John Shotter70 Human Systems

outside, but with working on our relations to them on the inside, from within

our own particular involvements in them a focus that attends to the unique-

ly novel features exhibited in all such emergent phenomena (Goldstein, 1999),

that attends to the differences that make a difference (Bateson, 1972, p. 286),

not to any repeatable patterns or regularities.

Two kinds of difficulty, two ways of relating ourselves to our

surroundings

These questions raise for me two central issues: The first is to distinguish be-

tween two very different kinds of difficulty that we can face as we encoun-ter a concrete circumstance in our practical lives together: difficulties that we

might, following Wittgenstein (1980 see above), call respectively difficulties

of the will (or orientational or relational difficulties) and difficulties of the intel-

lect. In brief, an intellectual difficulty can be formulated as aproblem that can

(perhaps) be solvedby the application of a rational method of thought, for-

mulated in the terms implicit in ones initial approach to the circumstance in

question. Whereas, an orientational difficulty, i.e., a difficulty of the will, is to

do with resolvingon that initial approach to that particular circumstance in

the first place,priorto our actually encountering it. Such difficulties cannot

be formulated as problems to be solved by rational methods, for it is the very

terms in which the difficultyshouldbe represented that are in question.

Clearly, this distinction is closely related to Schns (1983) distinction be-

tween the application of technical rationality and the task of problem-set-

ting the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to

be achieved, the means which may be chosen... Problem-setting is a process

in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend andframe

the context in which we will attend to them (p. 40). Until we have resolved on

a specific approach to an uncertain, disorderly, and indeterminate situation,we lack a well-defined set of inter-related entities to which we can apply the

kind of technical ingenuity required for solving the problem they seem to

confront us with. Until we have arrived at a way of orienting ourselves toward

the situation before us a situation in health-care, say whether it requires

a medical, psychological, sociological, or political solution remains radically

unclear to us. But how can we resolve on an approach to each new situation

we meet? How can we carry forward, so to speak, what we learn in past situa-

tions into each new situation we meet?

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Although often unnoticed in the background to our work, this issue is in factcentral to the whole of our functioning as professional inquirers, in which wemust continually draw conclusions from the multiple observations we make.For, as Winch (1958) noted long ago, with respect to our doing Logic, the ac-tual process of drawing an inference, which is after all at the heart of logic, issomething that cannot be represented as a logical formula... Learning to in-fer is not just a matter of being taught about explicit logical relations betweenpropositions; it is learning to do something (p. 57). Where central to our do-ing it, is our experiencing a moment of getting it (Shotter, in press), a spe-cial moment of understanding which consists in seeing connections (Wit-tgenstein, 1953, no. 122) an experienced movement of feeling, as I will call

it, occurs in which, what up until that moment had been a mle of unrelat-ed facts, becomes for us an interrelated whole1. Once this transformation oc-curs, once we know what making a connection feels like, we can not only pickout relevant from irrelevant features of what is before us, we can also look(i.e., mentally move) from one aspect of the whole to another with an expec-tation of what next we will see. It is as if we have come to embody some in-ner standards against which to measure or to gauge the situation we are cur-rently in this, as we shall see later, is connected with what Bateson (1979)calls calibration.

I first broached the issue of embodiment in Human Systems in paper with JohnLannamann (Lannamann & Shotter, 2006) and then again in a paper aboutTom Andersen in 2007 (Shotter, 2007). Crucial in all our practical activities inthe world, is our bodily capacity to anticipate the likely next step we must takein relation to our current surroundings. Being able to do this to anticipate atany one moment what might next appear as we look from one aspect of an in-ter-related whole to another is not only central in everyday life in our capac-ity to distinguish between whether outcomes of our actions are as we intended(i.e., expected) or not (i.e., came about by accident). Such a distinction is alsocrucial in the conduct of science: For it is only because we can sense wheth-

er the results of our actions accord with or depart from the expectations en-gendered by our theories, that we can ever put them to empirical test this isthe only way of establishing the nature of a theorys purchase on reality. If wewere unable to distinguish between what happened as a result of our inten-

1. Nowhere, perhaps, is this experience of coming to see connections more clear to us thanin our learning to prove theorems in Euclidian geometry. But we experience it often also ineveryday life, when someone tells us a joke, or tells us a story with a lesson in it. Sometimes,when we dont at first get it, others have to give us hints, or perhaps more familiar examples ofthe connection we need to see.

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tional activity and what just happened, by itself, there would be no scientif-

ic basis for our inquiries at all. This kind of awareness of our own inner move-

ments of feeling, and the action guiding anticipations (Shotter, 2005) to which

they give rise, are thus ignored at our peril. Learning to be someone who can

feel at home in the midst of complexity, is not too different from learning to be

a mathematician, a musician, or an expert practitioner in any other sphere of

professional activity. Its just that we have to learn how to learn, not new facts

in new spheres of knowledge, but new ways ofbeingin new circumstances.

This leads me on to my second issue: Beginning with Bateson (1979) and fol-

lowing Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Todes, whilst also connecting with aspects

of Bakhtin (1986) and Wittgenstein (1980), I want to explore the possibili-ty of there being for us, as living beings, a much more fundamental, unreflec-

tive, pre-conceptual, bodily way of being related to our surroundings than the

ways that become conspicuous to us in our more cognitive reflections, a way

of relating or orientingtoward our surroundings that becomes known to us

only from within the unfolding dynamics of our engaged involvements and

movements within them.

Indeed, to go further, I want to suggest that without this multi-stranded, em-

bodied background (perceptual) understanding of the specific field of possi-

bilities in which, in each changing moment, we are embedded, we would not

only lack all orientation, but in not knowing where we are, we would also, lit-

erally, not know what to do next. In other words, it is a kind of understanding

to do, not with facts or information, but with what kind of contextwe are in,

with what our surroundings require of us, with the calls they exert upon us

to respond within them in appropriate ways, with whatwe seem to see, hear,

etc., within them, perceptually a kind of knowing that shows up in our read-

iness to respondin particular ways, spontaneously, to particular circumstanc-

es. It is, as Todes (2001) puts it, a readiness that is expressed in what we take

to be its anticipated, suspected, character (p. 64, my emphasis)2

.

Such readinesses are especially crucial to us as practitioners, for they are in fact

intertwined into our theorizing and conceptualizing practices without our be-

ing aware of it. Without them, we would not only be incapable of putting our

theoretical proposals to the test, we would also be incapable of any creative or

2. The notion is not, of course, without its history in psychology. The notion of mental set, orof thought directedupon an object (intentionality), was already implicit in the act-psychologytradition dating back to Franz Brentano (1874)

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flexible thought relevant to solving problems for we would lack any sense of

whether our theories or thoughts were in fact related to, i.e., relevant to, the cir-

cumstance before us or not. In fact, we would lack the inner standards against

which we can judge whether what is claimed to be evidence is in fact evidence,

or whether a proof is in fact aproof, and so on. Indeed, this issue to do with

the role and nature of our living relations to our surroundings, i.e., what we

might call the contextual meaning of the events in which we are involved is,

I feel, the long ignored elephant in the room in modern philosophy, and we

shall find that in one guise or another it has made its appearance in the works

of many thinkers without their acknowledgment of its importance3.

Bakhtin (1986), for instance, notes its nature thus: Actual contextual mean-ing inheres not in one (single) meaning, but in two meanings that meet and

accompany one another... [contextual meaning] always exists among other

meanings as a link in a chain of meaning, which in its totality is the only thing

that can be real (p. 146). In other words, real meanings, meanings that influ-

ence and shape our actual actions in practice, are ephemeral, only once-oc-

current events of Being (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 2), and not things that we can cap-

ture in representational theories; they are not things that we can itemize and

talkaboutin isolation from their surroundings. However, as this issue is of

the fish being the last to discover water variety, I want to approach it, not by

trying to describe what I think has not been well-described before, but indi-

rectly4, via an initial discussion of Batesons (1979) notion of double descrip-

tion and his use of Bertrand Russells (1908) theory of logical types. For, as

I shall argue later, the difficulty we face here, is not an intellectual difficulty,

but a difficulty oforientation, a difficulty precisely of seeing (or appreciating)

something boringly familiar with a fresh eye (see Bateson, 1979, and Wittgen-

stein, 1980, p. 17, quoted as epigraphs above).

3. Merleau-Ponty (1962), however, acknowledges its problematic nature explicitly: For if Iam able to talk about dreams and reality, to bother my head about the distinction between

imaginary and real, and cast doubt upon the real, it is because this distinction is already madeby me before any analysis; it is because I have an experience of the real as of the imaginary,and the problem then becomes one of not asking how critical thought can provide for itselfsecondary equivalents of this distinction, but of making explicit our primordial knowledge ofthe real, of describing our perception of the world as that upon which our idea of truth is forever based (p.xvi).4. This is in line with the major switch of focus exemplified in this article, away from the aimof devising yet another new way of thinking, and toward focusing on specifying the kinds of

preparing activities appropriate to getting us ready to notice previously unnoticed eventsoccurring in our surroundings, events relevant to our resolving on a more appropriate line ofaction within them.

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Patterns that connect

Let me begin, then, to introduce Batesons (1979) special notions of double de-scription and abduction by considering a number of different phenomena:

(1) Many, including Wittgenstein (1953), provide a number of differ-ent metaphors for language: e.g., language as a city, as a toolbox, as agame, etc., etc. What is it that allows/enables us to see all of these met-

aphors for language as in fact metaphors?(2) Often, in talking of what can be taken to be a striking moment(Katz & Shotter, 1996), others immediately reply: Oh, I have an exam-ple of that!, and then proceed to tell of something very different, butwhich all concede, is in fact a similar example. What is it that allows usto see the similarity?S (3) We listen to a friend describing a difficulty currently faced. Grad-

ually, we get the picture, we gain a sense of the difficulty described.What is its nature such that we feel that now, we can offer somethinguseful in the resolution of the difficulty?S (4) A mathematician working in number theory, say, notices theproperties of a number sequence and wonders if it is repeated throughthe whole number system. He/she needs to invent/discover a frame-

work within which a proof can be constructed. Initially, he/she looksfor relevant analogies. What guides his/her judgment in choosing apossibly relevant approach?S (5) I listen to a psychotherapists reflections, ponderings, hypoth-eses, interpretations. They all seem irrelevant to me. But suddenly, Ihear an utterance that touches me. Why? What is going on in me suchthat I can be touched in this way?

S (6) A physiotherapist must help a woman who, after breaking hercollarbone on falling off a horse, now holds her right shoulder behindand lower than her left shoulder. Simply telling her to hold it up and

forward is no use at all, the woman soon lets it drop back again. Thephysiotherapist wonders if the woman can think of a word or imagethat might help her keep it lifted forward. At first, nothing occurs toher. Then suddenly, she has the image of a sailing boat flying a spin-

naker, and this does the trick. What could possibly have evoked such asuitable image?

What is it in our involvements with events in our surroundings that makesall these six, and many other such similar phenomena, possible? What is the

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character of a persons inner sense of a circumstance such that it can give

shape to a range of (but not just to any) expressions? What in us allows us

to accept superficially very different events as having a deeper similarity?

How can different surface forms be similar at a deeper level, or similar sur-

face forms be different at a deeper level? What in us functions as a standard

against which we can sense current deviations from it? And so on.

But to go a step further: How is the distinct character of this inner sense of

such current and past circumstances arrived at? What kind of original in-

volvement in a circumstance is required for us to come to embody aspects

of its nature within ourselves as an organic whole, i.e., as a something with

its own unique and specific character that makes it amenable to the attemptsoutlined above to express its detailed features, perhaps in an image of some

kind, but also in other media of expression? In other words, what kinds of

preparing activities5, self-consciously engaged in, can get us ready to notice,immediately and spontaneously, the kinds of events relevant to our acquiring

such relational or orientational understandings where, bybeing ready to dosomething, I mean what we often talk of as being in possession of a habit, aninstinct, an inclination, etc.? I am using the term readiness as I want to sug-

gest both that what is at issue here is to do with our situated expectations and

anticipations, and also, that as such, these attitudes or inclinations, or what-

ever, are much more fluid and open to situated development than has beenpreviously thought.

It is in answer to these kinds of questions that the notion ofabduction (1)

our being carried away unexpectedly by an other or otherness to a place not

previously familiar to us, or (2) of carrying over a deeper similarity to a num-

ber of seemingly rather different situations becomes of central relevance.

To make use of this ability myself to see of something similar in a whole set

of seemingly disparate occasions or events let me say that these phenome-na (along with many many others) are, not only all connected to each other,

5. As we shall see, there is a pervasive temptation in the West, especially among academicsand intellectuals, to approach all the difficulties we face as difficulties of an intellectualkind, asessentialproblems requiring a solution. However, as I have already begun to make clear, I hope,there is in the lives of human beings another whole great sphere of important activities, thatofpreparing activities in which acquire the readinesses to act in many circumstances of ourlives, immediately and spontaneously. Wittgenstein (1953) refers to such activities by means ofthe catch-all term training. for example: ... the teaching of language is not explanation, buttraining (no. 5).

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but further, as I see it, they are also all connected with Batesons (1979) well

known challenge: What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the or-

chid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you? And all six

of us to the amoeba in one direction and the backward-schizophrenic in the

other? (p. 16-17).

In beginning to answer this question, Bateson (1979) draws our attention to

circumstances in which the phenomenon of double description occurs, that

is, to cases in which two or more information sources come together to give

information of a sort different from what was in either source separately

(p.31). As he sees it, double description gives rise to information of a differ-

ent logical type to that in the two (or more) sources, e.g., the interplay be-tween two musical tones gives rise to beats, between two similar visual arrays

to Moir patterns, and in particular, with our two eyes to binocular vision. In-

deed, as he notes here, the seer adds an extra dimension to seeing, (p. 80),

i.e., the dimension of depth. Bateson (1979) explains very well what he means

by saying that the outcome of two of more sources of information combin-

ing is of a different logical type to the sources separately by way of an example

(pp. 132-134) involving Pavlovs dogs, an example which I will discuss more

fully later on. But let me emphasize here, it is what emerges when we orga-

nize an unorganized collection of separate and objective facts into an inter-

connected whole that is of a different logical type to the facts that went into it.

Indeed, as such, it is of a higherlogical type, for it is organized in terms of di-mensions which, to repeat Batesons comment above, we have added to it6.

In line with my overall project in this paper, I will call the different sort of

information7 that emerges here a relational or orientational way8 of know-

ing, a way of knowing that we come to possess and to express in our em-

6. We can connect Batesons use of Russells notion of different logical types being related toeach other in terms of higher and lower degrees of organization here, to Ryles (1949) notion of

category mistakes. A stranger who, after being shown all the colleges, administration blocks,and laboratories of, say Oxford University, still says: Thank you for all of this, but I asked youto show me the University. Can we now go to see it?, is, says Ryle, making a category mistake.Nowhere is this mistake more prevalent, Ryle feels, than in our psychological talk, in which weoften represent the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (orrange of types or categories), when they actually belong to another (p.17).7. I have put Batesons term information in scare quotes, as I myself will not use the term. InBatesons own terms it is, as we shall see, a term of the wrong, or at least inappropriate logicaltype.8. The notion of a way of relating ourselves to events in our surroundings will, later, becomecrucial.

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bodied coping with events occurring in the world around us, and only in our

embodied coping (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Todes, 2001). It is a way of knowing

which brings to our attention thepossible relations what we might call therelational dimensions9 that we can anticipate as existing between aspects

of objectively observable phenomena which are not in themselves objectively

observable. Indeed, they have an ephemeral existence, and only become avail-

able to us subjectively10, if and when we are appropriately oriented, bodily, to-

ward the phenomena in question11.

Situations of double description: pictureless thought

Thus, as we shall see, it is not a picturable spatial pattern that does the con-necting in the examples introduced above, but a pattern through time(Bateson, 1979, p.23). Such patterns thus cannot be seen. But they can, like a

piece of music, befeltor sensed. For these are all dynamical phenomena thathave their existence only in our embodiedsensing of the temporal contours of

the events occurring in the interplay between the two or more relevant sourc-es of information as they unfold. And, as we saw above, with binocular vision,

the relation dimension created by our bodies for us in its intertwining of the

two (or more) separate realms of fact, serves to orient us, bodily, in relation to

the circumstances before us. Bateson did not, however, fully extend this im-

portant insight out into thepracticalways in which can make ourselves ready

to relate to the others and othernesses around us.

If we are to relate ourselves to the othernesses around us, then we must ex-

plore both how we can come to intertwine our outgoing activities towards

them in with the incoming activitiesfrom them in a subtlety responsive man-ner, and also, how we can come to use the relational understandings created

in such dynamic interplays in an anticipatory fashion thus to provide our-

selves with the relevant embodied, perceptual skills to be able to go out to

meet even unfamiliar circumstances with appropriate kinds of response atthe ready, so to speak. But as I indicted above, the special relational dimen-

9. Depth is just such a relational dimension in the sense that to see in depth is to be aware ofour bodily relations to our surroundings, that this is near while thatis far, that this is to the rightwhile thatis to the left, and so on.10. Although in many of our professional skills, we must develop inter-subjectively valid waysof making sense of things, ways that others can check out as to whether our expectations andanticipations are indeed the same as theirs.11. For instance, we can only see Moir patterns if, say, two gratings are near to each otherslightly out of line, and perhaps, moving slightly in relation to each other.

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sions we create between aspects of objectively observable phenomena are not

in themselves objectively observable.

Now I have many reasons for adopting this relational and/or orientation-

al terminology, as I will explain further below, but for the moment, let me

simply offer the assurance that it is very much in line with Batesons own ex-

pressed intentions12. However, as Bateson initially expresses the challenge in

his question what pattern connects? he can easily be read as directing us

toward the possibility of there being an as-yet-undescribed but identifiable

thing, a pattern, already out there in the world which, if we can capture it in

an appropriate concept, will give us the key we need to understanding the uni-

ty of the mind and/in nature. For he talks of the existence of a wider knowingwhich is the glue holding together the [growth] of starfishes and sea anemo-

nes and redwood forests and [communication in] human committees... a sin-

gle knowing which characterizes evolution as well as aggregates of humans

(p. 13). What is this wider knowing, this glue? Can we produce a more ex-

plicit description of it?

The temptation to try to conceptualize it in a determinate fashion is hard to

resist. But is that in fact his aim? Clearly, it is not. For he introduces what he

wants to express thus: What must now be said is difficult, appears to be quite

empty, and is of very great and deep importance to you and me (p. 17)13.

Then, after noting that comparisons at a number of different levels parts

with parts of the same creature (first order), the forms of different creatures

with each other (second order), and then, comparisons between the compar-

isons (third order) he goes on to remark that his thesis is, that thepattern

which connects is a metapattern (p. 20).

But what now is that metapattern? How, practically, might we make use of it

in guiding our relations to the biosphere in a more friendly manner? It is at

this point that we begin to get really puzzled, for it certainly cannot be a stat-ic, formal pattern that can be displayed as a spatial picture. As Bateson (1979)

comments: I warned some pages back that we would encounter emptiness,

and indeed it is so. Mind is empty; it is no-thing. It exists only in its ideas, and

these are again no-things. Only the ideas are immanent, embodied in their

12. Again, reference to the example he discusses (pp.132-134) will make this clear.13. And he goes on to add: At this historic juncture, I believe it important to the whole survivalof the whole biosphere, which you know is threatened (p.17), a comment he thought worthmaking even in 1979.

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examples. And the examples are no-things. The claw [of the lobster or crab],

as an example, is not the Ding an sich; it is preciselynotthe thing in itself.Rather, it is what the mind makes of it, namely, an example of something or

other (p.20). We are not far here from Lao Tzus Tao Te Ching: The way thatcan be named is not the true way.

But, nonetheless, these are all useful comments, and I will draw on them lat-

er an attempt to take Batesons notions further, but he still has some further

useful comments to draw on, to steer us away from expecting a visually see-

able pattern, a simple spatial arrangement of parts. In truth, the right way to

begin to think about the pattern which connects is, he says, to think of it as

primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts... (p. 22).

In further developing this aspect of his thesis, he uses a story (which he says

he has used before) of a man who asks his computer: Do you compute that

you will ever think like a human being? The computer replies: That reminds

me of a story... all of which leads Bateson on to asking the questions: What is

a story that it may connect the As and Bs, its parts? And is it true that the gen-

eral fact that parts are connected in this way is at the root of what it is to be

alive? (p. 23), and then on to giving his own answer: I offer you the notion

ofcontext, ofpattern through time (p. 23).

A metapattern, a dance of interacting parts, a story, a context, a pattern

through time... whatever itis that Bateson is trying to grasp here, it is clear-ly difficult to describe. Indeed, once we turn to focus on processes unfoldingin time, then the dream of arriving ultimately at a static pattern, a pattern that

can be thought of as existing all-at-once in space, eludes us. The patterns of

concern to us cannot be visible, spatial patterns that can be pictured; they are

pictureless. They must be likened, say, to musical shapes, to the invisible time

contours of events except, we must add, that they never come to an end, for

life only comes to an end in death! Thus, such ceaselessly unfolding time con-tours cannot be captured in any unchanging spatially arrayed form; there is al-

ways more to come of such activity; it is always unfinished. Further, it always

embodies retentions of understandings from the past, as well as anticipations

of what is next to come in the future. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) puts it:

Our future is not made up exclusively of guesswork and daydreams.

Ahead of what I can see and perceive, there is, it is true, nothing more

actually visible, but my world is carried forward by lines of intentional-

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ity which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come... Hus-

serl uses the terms protentions and retentions for the intentionalities

which anchor me to an environment... [They] do not run from a cen-

tral I, but from my perceptual field itself, which draws along in its wake

its own horizon of retentions, and bites into the future with its proten-

tions. I do not pass through a series of instances of now... With the ar-

rival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change... Time is

not a line but a network of intentionalities (pp. 416-17, my emphasis).

In other words, whether we like it or not, we live out our lives dynamically,

within a multi-stranded, multi-dimensional reality of, literally, unimaginable,

i.e., unpictureable, complexity, complexity of a still incomplete, or unfinal-ized (Bakhtin, 1984), kind.

Approaching the contextwithin which we have our being:

from determinate concepts to how our embodied "situated-

ness" can determine our actions

The importance of our being influenced by the unfolding, invisible time-con-

tours of the events in which we are involved is nowhere more important, clear-

ly, than in our conduct of our everyday, practical affairs. For there, our percep-

tion of the unique meaning of a persons utterance, say, at each precise moment

in a situation, is intertwined in with all the other influences at work on us at

that moment in shaping and directing our precise response to it. But, let me

emphasize, it is not the utterance in itself that exerts a self-contained influence

on our actions; it is the difference that it makes to and in the context of its oc-

currence that matters. And we are a living part of that context, in some kind

of close relation to its dynamically unfolding, continually changing, nature as

a system or network of relations or differences. Indeed, as Bateson (1979, pp.

211-219) suggests (as I will outline further below), it is only because we havedeveloped, in the course of all ourprevious, living involvements in such inter-

activities, an embodied capacity to respond, immediately and spontaneously,

that we can respond in thisflexible, contextedmanner.

It is at this point that I would like to connect with the assurance that I offered

above, that the relationalor orientationalterminology I have adopted is very

much in line with Batesons own expressed intentions. For although, as I said

earlier, I have many reasons for adopting it, let me now draw attention to how

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it connects with the reasons Bateson (1979, pp. 132-134) gives for adopting

Bertrand Russells (1908) idea of logical types: In discussing Pavlovian-style

experiments, in which dogs must discriminate and pick one of two very sim-

ilar shapes to gain a reward, and become very disturbed when the stimuli be-

come too close to choose, he points out that in moving from the statement:

the dog discriminates between the two stimuli to the statement: the dogs dis-

crimination breaks down, researchers have shifted from a statement of one

logical type to another from talk of something (1) out in the world that can

be seen, to talk of something (2) abstract or imaginary, i.e., the dogs discrim-

ination, a mysterious ability located somewhere, perhaps, inside the dog. It

would have been much better, he feels, if from the very beginning, research-

ers had described what the dog was learning in its training, as not simply themeaning of the difference between the two stimuli, but that this is a con-

text for discrimination. That is, that he [the dog] should look for two stimu-

li and should look for the possibility of acting on a difference between them.

For the dog, this is the task which has been set the context in which suc-

cess will be rewarded (p. 133). In other words, Bateson here is attempting

to shift our attention from something epistemological afactto do with the

two stimuli to something ontological the need to orientto its surround-

ings differently.

These comments of Batesons work on us, also, in an orientational fashion:

They shift the context within which we think of and make sense of a specific

phenomenon here, the dogs learning from thinking of the crucial events

as occurring in the dogs head at the moment it looks at the stimuli, to think-

ing of it [the dog] as coming to embody in its training a whole set of new re-

lations to its surroundings. In other words, what the dog learned here was not

a new fact or bit of information, but something very different, something of a

relational or orientational kind to do with the way in which its contextcame

to shape its behaviour. Thus, as Bateson notes, whata dog in Pavlovian dis-crimination experiments learnt, was not simply knowledge of the difference

between two stimuli, but that this is a context for discrimination, and that in

it, the dog should expectto have to discriminate between two possible stimu-

li, and then, as a consequence, should also expectto act in one way or anoth-

er. In other words, as a result of its training, rather than having to correct its

errors on each particular occasion it encountered the stimuli, it becamepre-

pared or ready (at least until it was presented with differences too small for it

to discriminate), in the terms I have used above, to make more and more re-

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fined discriminations and to develop more reliable anticipations as it was pre-

sented with each new stimulus situation.

And like the dog, Bateson is suggesting that we also should see the situa-

tion (of the dogs learning) differently, to see it as having different implicationsfrom those we initially supposed, as pointing toward different future possi-

bilities. Indeed, it is the usually unnoticed, contextual shapingof our behav-iour in and by our spontaneously responsive relations to our surroundings,and how as a result we also can come to be better prepared to meet the con-

tingencies we encounter there, that we need to understand.

Bateson (1979) is well aware of the two different ways in which we (and oth-er organisms) might seek to improve our performances in specific situations.And inMind and Nature, he makes a very important distinction between feed-back and calibration, and comments that in the adjustments a person makesin the feedback process, he or she does not need to change him- [or her-]self

(p. 218), while in the calibration process this is precisely what must happen. Hebrings out the differences by comparing the marksmans firing of a rifle at a stat-ic target with the huntsmans firing of a shotgun at a flying bird. A marksman,he points out, will try to line up the sights of the rifle with the target and pullthe trigger when it appears to have the correct alignment in this case, what

is significant, says Bateson (1979), is that the act of self-correction can occurwithin the single act of shooting (p. 211). Whereas, there is no such possibilityof such a considered act of error-correction within the single act of a huntsmanfiring a shotgun: What must happen [with the huntsman] is that an aggregate

of information is taken in through the sense organs... and [on its basis] the gunis fired... [Thus] the man who would acquire skill with a shotgun... must prac-

tice his art again and again, shooting at skeet or some dummy target. By longpractice, he must adjust the settingof his nerves and muscles so that in the criti-cal event, he will automatically give an optimum performance (p. 211)14.

In other words, in learning to shoot a rifle, a marksman needs only to learnhow to relate him or herself, bodily, to an alreadydeterminate set of conditions,

14. Bateson (1979) names the process by which we seem to set out and graduate a scale, a set ofinner standards, that we can use to place a range of events in relation to each other, calibration.About it, he remarks, calibration is related to feedback as higher logical type is related to lower.This relation is indicated by the fact that self-correction in the use of the shotgun is necessarilypossible only from information derived from practice (i.e., from a class of past, completedactions) (pp.211-212, my emphasis). Where, in other words, the relevant information is arrivedat only in those events in which double description occurs (see also endnote 16).

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while the shotgun shooter has continually to deal with indeterminate circum-

stances. Thus he or she must develop the capacity to go out to meet an upcom-

ing circumstance with an action already shaped by an appropriate anticipation,

thus to determine it (the circumstance) further in the very moment of action

as one does, say, with ones feet when walking up or down stairs, a fact that be-

comes apparent to one when there is one less or one more step than expected.

Clearly, what Bateson (1979) has to say here is of relevance to our concerns

with embodiment (as I indicated above). Whilst the marksman does not need

to change himself (p.216), the shotgun shooter clearly does; he must some-

how, to repeat, adjust the settingof his nerves and muscles, says Bateson

(p.211). In practical terms, this means that the shooter must come, automat-ically and spontaneously, i.e., without conscious deliberation (for there is no

time for it), to anticipate the flight of the bird and to shoot guided by its influ-

ence in experiential terms, he must build up within him or herself, an ap-

propriate range ofaction guiding anticipations (Shotter, 2005) that are contin-

uously updated in response to environmental changes.

Todes and our embodied ways of inter-relating ourselves with

our surroundings: from ways of thinking to ways of actingBateson (1979) offers us an explanation of these two ways of improvement in

cybernetic terms. He conceptualizes the learning or preparation activities en-

gaged in by the two shooters thus: The rifleman simply goes round his cyber-

netic circuit a number ofseparate times [each time feeding back the error from

the previous shot]; the man with the shotgun must accumulate his skill, pack-

ing his successive experiences, like chinese boxes, each within the context of

information derived from all previous experiences (p. 217). But on receipt of

such an account as this, we are immediately tempted, either to start drawing a

spatial diagram of some kind to representthe possible mechanisms at work,or perhaps to say: Of course I can see that what you are saying makes sense, if

the kinds of processes youve already described are in fact occurring inside me

somewhere. But... if I myselfmust adjust the settingof my muscles and nerves,

is there anything of more practical relevance that you can tell me? How can I

do that? What in your cybernetic account can help me to do that?

This is the trouble with all such explanatory accounts: They are of no practical

help to us as we each wonder as individuals as to how we might improve our own

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practice. They position us on the outside of peoples practices, unable to see into

the inner black box we assume to be responsible for what we can observe. So

what might be of help to us?

Bateson (1979) gives us a clue when he notes, with respect to the riflemans

concern to improve his shooting, that in the third round of the circuit with

another target, he should ideally use information about the difference between

what happened in the first round and what happened in the second round. He

might use the information at a nonverbal, kinesthetic level, saying to himself

in muscular imagery, That's what it felt like to overcorrect (p. 217). However,

with his dominant interest in explanations, Bateson does not pursue this kind

of descriptionfrom the inside any further explicitly. However, implicitly, he as-

sumes in line with the emphasis on preparingactivities that I have adopted

in this article the possibility of our undertaking a series of tasks that can re-

sult in us calibrating ourselves in such a way as to understand what it is that

he is trying to discover, that he is trying to tell us of in Mind and Nature. For

he ends Chapter 9, entitledMultiple versions of relationship, by illustrating the

bonus of information which the combination of information affords (p. 78) in

a set of nine examples, and by commenting: this chapter has defined and ex-

emplified a mannerof search... [what] might be called the method of double or

multiple comparisons (p. 99). And he claims that the whole chapter, in which

instances are placed side by side, [is] a display inviting the reader to achieve in-

sight by comparing the instances one with another (p. 100) in other words,

to exercise within oneself a certain kind of mental method or discipline.

At this point in his exposition, then, the search for thepattern that connects

has given way to the mannerof an activity, to a methodimplicit in that search.

But here again, there is a difference of logical type: the manner of search

Bateson means here is of a quite different kind to that in which we already

know what it is that we are searching for. For, instead of an already determi-

nate entity, our search is for a set of relevant surroundings, a context, within

which to make sense of a bewildering, vague, or otherwise indeterminate cir-

cumstance. For only when we know how we are placed, overall, in relation

to our surroundings, i.e., when we know what our surroundings require of

us, will we know the contextual meaning of the events confronting us. Thus

the manner of the search we must undertake here, is not a search for a way

of thinking, but a search to do with how, bodily, we might relate ourselves to

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what is before us. In other words, it is a search for orientation, for a way ofgaining a grasp on whatthere is or might befor us in these surroundings15.

Thus, to sum up, we can say that an important extension of the circumstanc-es in which two or more information sources come together to give infor-mation of a sort different from what was in either source separately (p. 31),is when we ourselves are one such source, and whatever is out there in theworld around us that can send a response back to us as a result of our outgo-ing activity towards it, is another. And what is special about such a circum-stance, is that the information (sic) created in the resultant dynamical inter-play, is of a different logical type from the objective information we usually

think of ourselves as gathering in our listening to and looking at the world be-fore us. Rather than merely seeing, hearing, or touching whatever there is, ob-

jectively, to see, hear, or touch in our surroundings, something much morecomprehensive occurs. In the course of our many different, everyday, prac-tical involvements with events occurring around us, the settingof our nervesand muscles becomes adjusted to the characterof these events and, as a result,we go out to meet such events in our surroundings with the right kind of re-sponse at the ready, so to speak. In other words, we gain an understandingof the kind ofcontextwithin which we are placed, an understanding that setsthe scene, so to speak, for whatit is that we need to be ready to see, to hear,

to touch, etc., in our current surroundings, in relation to what currently weare trying to do within them.

It is, I think, in the remarkable work of Samuel Todes (2001) that we can findthe approach we need to explore more deeply the kind ofpreparing activitiesrequired for us to acquire such embodied readinesses, to calibrate ourselvesto live more well oriented lives within the midst of complexly.

Central to Todess whole approach is a very new and very different approachto human motivation, an approach that places our bodily need to feel at homein our surroundings, so to speak, as basic to the kind of being that we are inthe world a need very different from, say, the need for self-actualization thattops Maslows (1943) hierarchy of needs. For what Maslow sets out in his hi-erarchy are not, as Todes see it, needs but desires, things that we alreadyknowwe want. Whereas, for Todes (2001),

15. This is often expressed as in terms of framing the situation, but again, in my estimation,there is a need to consider whether this also is a term of the required logical type.

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a need, unlike a desire, is originally given as a pure restlessness; as the

consciousness of ones undirected activity. It begins with the sense of

a lack in oneself, withoutany sense of what would remove that lack...

It begins with a sense of loss of something one has never had; where-

as the loss of desire is always of something once had. Now the whole

sense of our exploration and discovery of the world is prompted by the

sense of having been initially lost in the world. We came into the world

lost... Our whole quest of discovery is thus initially prompted by need

rather than desire. It is initially directed not to get what we want but to

discover what we want to get (p. 177).

Perhaps the most obvious circumstance in which we can experience our bodysautomatic search not to be lost in the world, is in our visual relations to our

surroundings. As soon as I switch my gaze from something near to something

far, my two embodied eyes find for themselves a new point of common fixa-

tion, and a new focal length and in so doing, I gain an immediate sense of

how, visually, things around me are arrayed in my world. Until this occurs, we

can be visually disoriented, lacking in what Todes callspoise. Where, the suc-

cess of poise is not in its execution, but in its veryexistence by which the body

is, to begin with, knowingly in touch with the objects around it (p. 66).

What Todes brings to our attention here, then, is the fact that we continually

feel a tension to do with how to be in the world, how to orient toward our sur-

roundings. Not knowing where we are, we dont know what to do next, how

to go on with our lives. We must continually puzzle as to how we might re-

late ourselves to the others and othernesses around us. Thus what Todes focus-

es our attention on is, in Batesons terms, our need to know what kind ofcon-

textwe are currently in, and what it requires of us, what it calls upon us to do.

For each new situation we encounter arouses in us afresh, the need to gain an

orientation towards it, a way of identifying and relating ourselves to the others

and otheresses we encounter within it. Thus before I can come to know some-thing, I first have to catch onto, to get, whatever I know by anticipating it, and

then somehow confirming this anticipation by an actual (present) response to

the thing anticipated. It is the terminal (postanticipatory) response to a thing

that enables me to know it; to fix it as certainly having a certain meaning; to put

an end to the ambiguity of its merely anticipated, suspected character; finally to

de-termine it, to give it a de-termination (Todes, 2001, p. 64). It is this ability

to approach a circumstance with an anticipation of what we can expect it to re-

quire of us, that is crucial to our coming to know it in any precise detail.

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As Bateson (1979) noted above, with respect to the rifleman and the shotgunshooter, while the rifleman does not need to change himself (p. 216), the shot-gun shooter does. He or she must by long practice... adjust the settingof hisnerves and muscles so that in the critical event, he or she will automaticallygive an optimum performance (p. 211), will come, without the need for con-scious deliberation, to anticipate a birds flight and to shoot guided by its influ-ence. But to repeat, preparing him or herself to do this is a matter of long prac-tice in the situation in which the skill must be exercised. Changes of this kindcannot be effected by argument, by giving people good reasons to adopt newthoughts, new beliefs. One must be changed in ones very being, and that canonly be effected by being moved by an other or otherness, by strange or as yet

unfamiliar events that move one in ways that one is unable to move oneself16

.

Conclusions: abduction is pervasive

Central to the approach I have taken above, then, is Todes (2001) claim that,in each new situation we encounter we experience a tension, an unbalance,that motivates in us a primary human need to become oriented towards it,to gain poise within it, to come to be bodily ready to answer to the calls itmakes upon us. Possessing poise, we can take the time required, make the ex-ploratory moves we need to arrive at an articulated sense of its uniqueness.Lacking poise, we are awkward, we lack spontaneity, we think that we mustthink aboutthe difficulty we face, i.e., treat it as an intellectual difficulty, andthat we must work out how to act. But if we do try to overcome a relation-al or orientational difficulty by thinking about it, we will withdraw ourselvesfrom our further involvement in the situation, and make use only of what wealready know. Inevitably, this will result in us failing to appreciate the unique-ness of the situation we face. We will approach it and act within it only interms of the general, one size fits all, concepts we already possess.

But if Todes (2001) is correct, we cannot come to know the unique characterof things and events in our surroundings in this way by seeing, or hearing,or touching them for an instant, and then by turning away from them to buryourselves in thought aboutthem, no matter how good or complex we thinkour theories representing them may be. Our coming to know what is unique-

16. Elsewhere, Arlene Katz and I (Katz & Shotter, 1996, 1998) have developed a whole approachto social inquiry that we call the methods of a social poetics, built around being struck by theoccurrence of a strange or intriguing event.

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ly there before us, in a way that orients us bodily toward it, is an orientation-

al or relational difficulty, not an intellectual one. Resolving it not only takestime, but rather than insight, it also involves a gradual dawning with a veryspecial sequential structure to it. It consists in three phases: An initial prepa-ration phase before beginning to get in touch with it, followed by a tentative,easily reversible, exploration phase for example, we touch something pre-paratory to taking hold of it; we taste before eating; we get a whiff of some-thing before smelling it by taking in a deep breath; we look at or listen to

something in order to see or hear it (Todes, 2001, p. 273) while finally, weget it. We grasp what we have made graspable by arriving at a livable rela-tion between our now readiedbody, and the thing it is now ready to grasp.

But in what can such an understanding, as a set of readinesses, consist? It can-not simply be in a set of already determinate forms or templates, for as we havealready seen, we are not so much searching for a particular entity as searching

for a style of approach, an orientation, a way of relating ourselves to our sur-roundings, globally. What seems to be entailed, is our gradually coming to em-body a sense of the distinctive mental movement required to feel at home in

our surroundings, a manner of search, as Bateson (1979, p. 99) calls it, whichinvolves us in paying sequential attention to features in our surroundings inrelation to, both how we move around in them, andto what next to expect

as a result of each movement. As a result of our coming to embody such amanner of search appropriate to our current circumstances, as Todes (2001)puts it,our [perceptual] skills [become] inscribed in the flesh of our percipient

body as outwardly directed dispositions ready for deployment in grasping ob-jects. As such, they are modifications of our interior readiness (p. 267).

Our experiences with visually ambiguous figures can, perhaps, be informative

here as to what such an ability is like. For instance, with the well known faces/vase or duck/rabbit figures, if we first look with the overall schema of a face toguide us in our expectations, we could first lookfrom what could possibly be a

forehead to an expected eye region, and then to an expected nose region, andso on, looking eventuallyfrom all these details (if each of these expectations isto an extent fulfilled) to the overall perception of a face in short, a face-way-of-looking can thus be satisfied by the figure. Similarly, with a vase-way-of-

looking, we can lookfrom a bowl region to a stem region to a base region, andfind that thatcan be satisfied by the figure too. Thus generally, we can say thatour ways of looking, listening, etc., work in terms of a precise sequence of an-

ticipations as to what next to expect to see or hear, given what we have seenor heard so far. But more than this: the faces/vase ambiguous figure present-

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ed to us may be large or small, elongated or widened, drawn in many different

colours and/or styles, and yet we can still see either faces or a vase in it.

Thus here we can see that the pattern that connects that connects the crab

to the lobster... and to you and me in one direction, and all six of us to the

amoeba in one direction and to a schizophrenic person in the other (Bateson,

1979, pp. 16-17) cannot be a pattern of a merely formal kind, it cannot con-

sist in a static, spatial shape. What influences us must be in a dynamical pat-

tern, unfolding in time, in which all the beings mentioned as connected above,

are all connected by our looking over them in the same way, by our applyingthe same, chaotically structured, manner of search to them, with the aim of ar-

riving at (in Todess sense) apoisedway of relating ourselves to them all.

It is our embodied readiness to approach a whole range of different eventswith a similar style or way of looking, listening, etc., with a similar set of an-ticipations at the ready, so to speak, that I see as exemplifying what Bateson

(1979) calls, following C. S. Peirce (1903), abduction the lateral extensionof abstract components of description (p. 157) across from one situation to

another, often very different, situation.

However, when C.S. Peirce (1903) introduced the notion ofabduction, he in-

troduced it as being the first stage of a deliberately conducted form of scien-tific inquiry, an inquiry that could begin with the disappointment of an ex-

pectation, the noticing of an anomaly or a surprising fact, or being struck or

touched by an event to which, at first, one seems to lack an appropriate re-

sponse. Thus he saw abduction as a source of initial hypotheses. But in logicas such, abductively derived hypotheses have always had a bad press, for they

seem in themselves to lack anydeterminingforce; no necessary consequencescan be drawn from such abductively derived inferences or formulations. And,

as we have now seen, this criticism is entirely justified. But, as we have also

seen, it is to pitch the primary importance of abduction in quite the wrong

sphere of concern. If thepreparing activities we have discussed can be seen asbeing the source of distinctly shaped mental movements that can guide us in

our actions, in our talk, and in other relevant judgments in our practical ev-

eryday activities, then it will not be in our thinking, but in our acting, in our

practices, that abduction can manifest its a very powerful determining force.

But this, of course, is just to treat of one aspect of abduction the second as-

pect mentioned above to do with carrying over a similarity ofnot a mere-ly formal kindinto a number of seemingly rather different situations. What

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of the first aspect: our being carried away by a unique other or otherness to

a place not previously familiar to us? It is this that is its most puzzling aspect,

for it has to do not only with our coming to deal with such events when they

occur for a very first time, but also with our coming to know the unique char-

acter of a uniquely new something, to know it in its uniqueness without as-

similating it into a category of things already well-known to us... and later, to

face the secondary task of characterizing its uniqueness in words.

Facing a new situation, a new event, a new piece of music or painting, a new

piece of text, a set of forms that we have not previously encountered, we look

over it or them puzzled. We need to discover a new way of looking at, over,

or into such figures or sequence of forms, etc., to see in it or them the possi-bilities they might express or portray, we need a new way or ways of looking

quite different from those we already embody. Thus at first, our inquiries be-

gin with our disquiets, with a sense of a restlessness, a consciousness of not

yet being wholly at home in our surroundings, a sense of a lack in oneself

withoutany sense at first of what would remove that lack. This is the first step

in the practice of our inquiries, not our theorizing. And our theorizing must

find its guidancefrom within our initial attempts, not to get what we want, but

to discover what it is that we want to get (Todes, 2001).

Thus, as we look over each new circumstance we encounter, from one focal

feature to another pausing at each step to try to make a comparison be-

tween this felt movement, and felt movements already known to us we can

begin to develop within ourselves a sense of a felt movement both appropri-

ate to it andto our need to feel at home in relation to it. And, as I begin to

orient myself toward what is before me an orientation that is achieved by

my body spontaneously adjusting its relations to its surroundings in such a

way as to receive back from the world the responses it anticipates in the way I

go out towards it I begin to find that my body, spontaneously, teaches me a

way or style of relating myself to what is before me. As Merleau-Ponty (1964)puts it: more clearly(but not differently) in my experience of others than in

my experience of speech or the perceived world, I inevitably grasp my body

as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way ex-cept through it(p. 93).

Thus, if the work above is correct, then, there is for us, as living beings, a

much more fundamental, unreflective, bodily way of our being related to our

surroundings than those that have become known to us through our theo-

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rizing, a way of relating or orienting toward our surroundings that becomes

known to us from within the unfolding dynamics of our engaged involve-

ments and movements around and within them. But also, it is a way of re-

lating to our surroundings that we, as academics and intellectuals, can easily

come to lack, if we fail to take the trouble to actively involve ourselves in the

practical,preparing activities, productive of such embodied understandings, if

we fail to take to trouble to calibrate ourselves for the task of conducting our

professional lives from within the midst of complexity. This, I think, is what is

at issue when people said: Bateson knows something hes not telling us.

Please address correspondence about this article to: Professor John Shotter at

[email protected]

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