Bateson’s Zigzag Ladder for Modeling

In Mind and Nature (1979), Bateson proposed the following ladder as a way of modeling “mental” phenomena in biology that takes into consideration the processes as systemic activities. He moves from description to process, that is from the typological labels given to something to the processes involved and then to the next level of labeling that defines that form to the processes that govern and determine it, to the next level, and so on.

In doing this, he uses the mathematical concept of logical levels from Russell and Whitehead to sort out the logical levels that arise or emerge from the processes. He first sorted these things out as his way of demonstrating the validity of his “Criterion 6″ of “mind.”

The Description and Classification of the Processes of Transformation Discloses a Hierarchy of Logical Types Immanent in the Phenomena (p. 122).

That statement is loaded. It summarizes so much in Bateson’s thinking about “mind,” learning, levels, logical, types, experience, processes, etc. He begins with the coding of messages and that stimuli from one person to another are messages but that for person B to know what person A means,

“… there comes into existence another class of information … to tell B about the coding of messages or indications coming from A. Messages of this class will be, not about A or B, but about the coding of messages. They will be of a different logical type. I will call them meta-messages.” (123)

“The whole matter of messages which make some other messages intelligible by putting it in context must be considered…”

Bateson starts here in order to flush out the levels of experience. He says this explicitly.

“All this is premised on the existence of levels whose nature I am here trying to make clear.” (124)

To do that he separates out two kinds of actions. There is the primary state set of actions in a context, then there are those actions or behaviors “which defines context or makes context intelligible.” He calls the second “meta-communication” and acknowledges that he borrowed this term from Whorf (p. 124).

What does the meta-message do? How does it work? What is its function?

“A function, an effect, of the meta-message is in fact to classify the messages that occur within its context.”

In Neuro-Semantics we use this meta-level principle to talk about moving from one state to another state and using the second state to set the frame for the first. It classifies the first. Anger now becomes a member of the class of respect thereby creating a new gestalt, “respectful anger.” In this way, we transcend our first experience and include it inside of a higher state of mind-and-emotion. This allows us to texture our states and to create a new quality to our lives.

Bateson explains this in terms of how he took a mathematical concept and translated it to biology. This was the source for the term that he most frequently used, logical types. It comes from the field of mathematics.

“It is at this point that the theory offered here connects with the work of Russell and Whitehead in the first ten years of this century, finally published in 1910 as Principia Mathematica. What Russell and Whitehead were tackling was a very abstract problem. Logic, in which they believed, was to be salvaged from the tangles created when types, as Russell called them, are maltreated in mathematical presentation.” (124) logical

While Whitehead knew that we are amused and humored by “kidding around with the types” he said that he did not know if they had any idea that their work could be applied to humans.

“I doubt whether he ever made the step from enjoying this game to seeing that the game was non-trivial and would cast light on the whole of biology.”

But Bateson did. That was his genius. He did apply it to biology. He took events or actions at the primary level, and the classes of actions (meta-actions), and then meta-classification and showed how this applies to learning. We can learn what an action means, we can then learn to learn about how we do that, etc. His levels of learning resulted from this application of logical typing. In NLP and Neuro-Semantics we usually speak about this same things using the phraselogical levels rather than logical types. There’s no difference except that types comes from the formal mathematical theory and levels refers to the way we use it in biology and psychology.

Applying it linguistically to the phenomenon of “paradox,” Bateson writes,

“Epimenides was a Cretan who said, ‘Cretans always lie’” C I have presented this paradox here in the form of a quotation within a quotation, and this is precisely how the paradox is generated. The larger quotation becomes a classifier for the smaller, until the smaller quotation takes over and reclassifies the larger, to create contradiction.” (125)

Bateson’s conclusion from this is that “logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored.”

Confuse Logical Types and Reap Neurosis

When there are levels embedded in levels we have to keep them separate. There is a discontinuity between them. We have to discriminate levels recognizing that we are dealing with a different logic at each level. If we do not, the category error or the error in logical typing leads to pathology. This happens when we confuse map and territory, when we fail to recognize one message as classifying another and so don’t know what kind of message it is.

In his text, Bateson decided to illustrate using the clinical experiment with dogs. It was the experiment wherein dogs were taught to discriminate between two stimuli, between a circle and an ellipse (p. 127). First a dog is trained by positively rewarding him with food when he makes the distinction. Once the dog can tell the difference, the experimenter then pushes the limits of his perception. He makes the ellipse somewhat fatter or the circle somewhat flatter so the contrast becomes less. The dog has to “put out more effort to discriminate between them.” Eventually however he cannot. It is this that then leads the dog to experience experimental neurosis. Some of the dogs become agitated, nervous, and will become aggressive. Other dogs turn lethargic, passive, and give up. Some even become comatose.

What happens that creates this pathology?

How does this relate to the logical typing of messages at different levels?

Once a dog had learned to see the context as one of discrimination, he had come to expect there to be differences. It was as if in his “mind” he was expecting it and organized on the inside with an attitude that there should be a distinction and that he should be able to make it. But when he was consistently made wrong in that context, then he ceases to know how to operate there, hence the emergence of the neurosis. Bateson commented,

… he has been very carefully trained to expect a context for discrimination. He now imposes this interpretation on a context that is not a context for discrimination.” (128)

He is no longer a naive dog. Naive dogs who have not been so taught don’t have the problem, they just guess and leave it at that. But the trained dog has jumped a logical level.

“The naive dog has not been taught not to guess, that is, he has not been taught that the contexts of life are such that guessing is inappropriate.” (129)

But the trained dog had. Guessing is inappropriate for the trained dog. He cannot guess. He must discriminate … but he cannot discriminate. He sees and relates to that context with a higher level learning and having made that jump he cannot go back. To get out of the double-bind, he would have to jump yet another logical level. And yet he does not (cannot) jump yet another logical level to recognize what’s going on. Bateson writes,

“The dog fails to transcend the jump in logical type from ‘context for discrimination’ to ‘context for guessing.’” (130)

It is this shift of logical types or levels that has created the problem for the dogs. They do not deal with the stimuli as mere stimuli, but as “a context for discrimination.” But they cannot make the discrimination. They must, but can’t. Nor are they able to step “out of that frame” and recognize what’s occurring.

Yet dolphins are able to do just that, and do so (pp. 130-132). The dolphins also because very agitated and disturbed.

“The experience of being in the wrong was so disturbing to the dolphin that in order to preserve the relationship between her and her training (i.e., the context of context of context), it was necessary to give many reinforcements to which the porpoise was not entitled. Unearned fish.” (131)

When the dolphins were released back into the training tank after the fourteenth and fifteenth sessions, they were very excited and “put on an elaborate performance that included eight conspicuous pieces of behavior of which four were new and never before observed in this species of animal.”

So what happened?

The discontinuity is a jump between the logical types.

“In all such cases, the step from one logical type to the next higher in a step from information about an event to information about a class of events, or from consider the class to considering the class of classes.” (132)

Adding Systemic Processes to the Modeling

In all of this, Bateson acknowledges that he has approached the matter of hierarchy in mental phenomena from the aspect of coding.

How are things encoded?

He answers that specific actions are like members of a class. This distinguishes members from the classes that we put them in. He notices that Pavlovian conditioning through reinforcement and extension works very well at the first level of actions, but not on the classes of activities. This explains why primary level anchoring will not extinguish meta-level concepts and structures like “exploration.”

The specific activity of a rat sticking its head into a particular hole can be reinforced positively or negatively. Give it pleasure, it will continue. Give it pain, it will stop. But the class of activities that come under the more abstract label, “exploration” will not be affected by either. If the rat is rewarded or punished by looking into a particular hole, in both instances it succeeds in its discovery. It’s “exploration” activity worked. This general (or meta-state) is reinforced by either result.

Figure 1
Meta-Level

This led Bateson to linguistically recognize the difference between what we would call nominalizations and sensory specific language. “Play” is at a different logical level than the games of Chase or Hide-and-Seek. It’s a classification of activities and it points to no one specific activity. So with “crime,” “exploration,” and thousands of other meta-terms. These names describe how we organize or punctuate activities. They are more general than any particular activity that is a member of that class. View it systemically, Bateson says,

“The relationship between the characteristics of a component and the characteristics of the system as a whole as it circles back on itself, is equally a matter of hierarchical organization.” (134)

This brings in the reflexivity of the mind, the central mechanism in Meta-States. As an interactive system of multiple parts, our mind-body-emotion system is just that C a system. And as a system, there are components and then there is the-system-as-a-whole. And these also operate hierarchally.