Logical Typing <> Research: Bateson

Definitions of Logical Types

In the index of Bateson’s book Mind and Nature (1979), he writes this under the list of “Logical Types.” A series of examines is in order:

1. The name is not the thing named but is of different logical type, higher than the thing named.
2. The class is of different logical type, higher than that of its members.
3. The injunctions issues by, or control emanating from, the bias of the house thermostat is of higher logical type than the control issued by the thermometer.
4. “Acceleration” is of a higher logical type than “velocity.”

In another place Bateson defined logical types in the following way:

Logical Type: 1) The name is not the thing named but is of different logical type, higher than the thing named. 2) The class is of different logical type, higher than that of its members. (Mary Catherine Bateson, 1987, pp. 209-210

This use of language in classification seems to relate to the whole subject of metanarrative, and how qualitative researchers reduce phenomenological compexity to a written / themed analysis.

Mind and Nature (1979)
Angels Fear (1987)

As his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson wrote in her 1999 

Introduction to Steps to an Ecology of Mind, "by giving a portion of his own intellectual 

autobiography, two or three key moments of patterning recognized, he endeavored to lead 

readers along the paths to his own conclusions" (x). His fear of "the monstrous atomistic 

pathology" that spreads virally from individual mind to cybernetic Mind, from obsessive 

self-interest to strident identity politics, from parochial paranoia to nationalistic 

isolationism, is reiterated again and again throughout the course of his body of work. 

Rodney Donaldson writes that "if, as Bateson asserts, all we can know is difference, then 

it becomes at least plausible that the bulk of our personal, interpersonal, international, and ecological problems arise ultimately from the simple turning of a distinction into a 

separation, and the separation into an opposition" (xvi). As we have already read, Badiou 

stresses that alterity is what is—that to exist is to exist in difference, and that self- 

reflection is "by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations" 

also
Bealer A H  (2008) Connecting the work of Gregory Bateson, Giles Deleuze and Alan Badiou

Steps to and Ecology of Mind : Catherine Bateson