Author: gnox

The ‘theory theory’ of an ‘infantile scientific impulse’ and Rosen’s concept of anticipatory systems were both anticipated by Peirce. In a 1901 article, he used ‘a little diagrammatic psychology’ to sketch the origins of the scientific quest for truth:

No man can recall the time when he had not yet begun a theory of the universe, when any particular course of things was so little expected that nothing could surprise him, even though it startled him. The first surprise would naturally be the first thing that would offer sufficient handle for memory to draw it forth from the general background. It was something new. Of course, nothing can appear as definitely new without being contrasted with a background of the old. At this, the infantile scientific impulse,— what becomes developed later into various kinds of intelligence, but we will call it the scientific impulse because it is science that we are now endeavoring to get a general notion of,— this infantile scientific impulse must strive to reconcile the new to the old. The first new feature of this first surprise is, for example, that it is a surprise; and the only way of accounting for that is that there had been before an expectation. Thus it is that all knowledge begins by the discovery that there has been an erroneous expectation of which we had before hardly been conscious. Each branch of science begins with a new phenomenon which violates a sort of negative subconscious expectation, like the frog’s legs of Signore Galvani.

— EP2:87-8

Later on the same page, Peirce integrated emotion into this cognitive picture by observing that ‘the emotion of surprise’ which triggers inquiry ‘is merely the instinctive indication of the logical situation. It is evolution (φύσις) that has provided us with the emotion. The situation is what we have to study.’

Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, distinguished between ‘machines, moved by a mere driving force, bewegende Kraft’ and ‘organisms moved internally by a bildende Kraft, a capacity, a formative force’ (Eco 1997, 93). Bildende could be translated without much distortion as ‘modeling’ or ‘anticipatory’ in Rosen’s sense.

The crucial difference between an organism and a machine, according to Rosen, is that any ‘machine’ has a largest model that can completely describe it, while a living system does not. This is a mathematical expression of the idea that an organism is constantly reinventing itself, and indeed is doing this by modifying its own internal models. Any external model would therefore have to leave room for that creativity by representing its own incompleteness. This could be taken as the point of Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature (see Chapter 10 and 11), and perhaps of Peirce’s remark that an abstract statement could claim to be true only ‘by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness,’ this ‘confession’ being ‘an essential ingredient of truth.’

Building or learning a new model (such as Rosen’s model of modeling or Gendlin’s process model), you first throw a line across (like an orbweaving spider) from your current standpoint to the new one, and then carry terms across this bridge from the old model to the new, one or a few at a time. (Writing consolidates this process, as anyone who has tried it can testify.) This changes the meanings of terms you were using before but are now using for the new model, which becomes the implicit context of your habitual usage of those terms you carried across to it.

What we call ‘knowledge’ is just that property of Rosen’s ‘anticipatory systems’ which enables them to anticipate successfully (to some degree). Karl Popper points in this direction when he says that ‘knowledge has often the character of expectations’ and that ‘most kinds of knowledge, whether of men or animals, are hypothetical or conjectural’ (Popper 1990, 32).

One rendering of Rosen’s original (1991) diagram (described in Chapter 10) looks like this:
It was Rosen who wrote the book on ‘anticipatory systems,’ but it has been widely recognized that anticipation is the key to guidance. Polanyi, for instance, remarked that our ‘whole set of faculties—our conceptions and skills, our perceptual framework and our drives—’ amount to ‘one comprehensive power of anticipation’ (Polanyi 1962, 103). Our meaning-cycle diagram is a way of picturing the form of that power, and the following passage from Polanyi could serve as a caption to it:

Why do we entrust the life and guidance of our thoughts to our conceptions? Because we believe that their manifest rationality is due to their being in contact with domains of reality, of which they have grasped one aspect. This is why the Pygmalion at work in us when we shape a conception is ever prepared to seek guidance from his own creation; and yet, in reliance on his contact with reality, is ready to re-shape his creation, even while he accepts its guidance. We grant authority over ourselves to the conceptions which we have accepted, because we acknowledge them as intimations—derived from the contact we make through them with reality—of an indefinite sequence of novel future occasions, which we may hope to master by developing these conceptions further, relying on our own judgment in its continued contact with reality. The paradox of self-set standards is re-cast here into that of our subjective self-confidence in claiming to recognize an objective reality.

— Polanyi (1962, 104)

According to Howard Pattee (personal communication), Rosen first developed this diagram as a graphical representation of Heinrich Hertz’s description of the modeling process. (Pattee was working with Rosen at the Center for Theoretical Biology at Buffalo in the early 1970s, ‘when he was developing the ideas in Anticipatory Systems where his modeling diagram first appears.’) Hertz described the modeling process as follows:

We form for ourselves images or symbols of external objects; and the form which we give them is such that the logically necessary (denknotwendigen) consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary natural (naturnotwendigen) consequents of the thing pictured.

For our purpose it is not necessary that they [images] should be in conformity with the things in any other respect whatever. As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have we any means of knowing, whether our conception of things are in conformity with them in any other than this one fundamental respect.

— Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, 1-2 (New York: Dover, 1984; original German edition, Prinzipien Mechanik, 1894)

This confirms Einstein’s point that the ‘natural system’ we are modeling is unknowable, in the sense that its inner workings are not directly observable. As modelers, we make an ‘epistemic cut’ (Pattee) between image and reality. The correspondence which defines the modeling relation as such is between the observed “behavior” of the “real” system (arrow #1, ‘causality’) and the ‘logically necessary consequents of the images in thought’ (arrow #3, ‘inference’).

This brings out a crucial point which is not clearly represented in the diagram: that any relevant act of observation takes time. In fact, every ‘observation’ or ‘measurement’ in science must consist of (at least) two measurements: one of the initial conditions, and another (some time later) after the system has ‘behaved’ in the situation we have chosen to focus on. What we call ‘the measurement’ is really the difference between these two measurements (even if it is zero because the system has not changed within the time frame). This is what Bateson calls ‘news of a difference’ (and Rosen calls ‘encoding’ – arrow #2). A theoretical model ‘works’ when that difference corresponds to some specific difference between states of the theoretical image, some aspect of the model’s dynamics.

Pattee adds that the diagram ‘also does not make clear that in a biological system the consequent of the model can be used to control its own state. The genetic description is a kind of model that exercises this kind of control of its own synthesis. This dependence of life on models or descriptions is what motivates the field of biosemiotics.’

To the contemplative, action furnishes material for reflection. To the activist, reflection gives guidance for action. Meaning arises from the interplay between the two.