Learning as an Explanatory Principle - a response to Seb Fiedler

Seb Fiedler (University of Hamburg) wrote this (http://seblogging.cognitivearchitects.de/2018/01/11/on-learning-as-an-explanatory-principle/) earlier last week in response to my post about a "logic of learning" (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/a-logic-of-learning.html)

My original post was about the impossibility of saying anything sensible about learning. Bateson's idea of "explanatory principles", which Seb uses, was his way of pointing out the essentially relative nature of anything we say about anything. Gravity? It's an explanatory principle!

Seb highlights Jünger's view that "learning is an explanatory model for the explanation of change".

The effect of any explanatory principle is to allay uncertainty about the environment. We are generally uncomfortable with uncertainty, and seek to explain it away. If it's not  God, it's the Government, or "human nature".... Because we attribute learning to so many aspects of change in the world to which we are uncertain, we have established institutions of learning to do an industrial-scale mopping-up of this uncertainty!

Explanatory principles - particularly when they are institutionalised - wash over the details of different people's interpretations of an explanatory principle. When the institution defines what learning is, individuals - learners and teachers - can find themselves alienated from their own personal explanatory principles. A common experience in education is for a learner to be told that they've learnt something when they feel just as confused (or more so) about the world as they did before they started.

At the heart of Bateson's argument about explanatory principles was the epistemological error which he feared would lead us to ecological catastrophe. He believed, as many believe in cybernetics, that one has to correct the epistemology. Bateson's attempt to articulate the logic upon which the epistemological error was based revolved around his work on the "double-bind". Double bind logic is a dialectical logic of levels of contradiction and resolution at a higher level. This is the logic which I think we should be looking at when we look at education and the discussion about learning. 

The use of the explanatory principle of "learning" is a bit like a move in a strategic game. When x says "this is learning" they are maintaining a distinction through a process of transducing all the different descriptions of their world and what they observe into a category. They then seek to defend their distinction against those who might have other distinctions to make. It's not the distinction that matters. It's the logic of the process whereby the distinction comes to be made and maintained. 

The logic behind the double-bind which produces the distinction is not Aristotelian. Bateson did not fully explore the more formal properties of the double bind logic. Lupasco did, and Joseph Brenner is able to tell us about it. Also I think Nigel Howard's theory of Metagames is also able to articulate a very similar kind of logic in a formal way using game theory.