Quote with 2 notes
Nevertheless, psychiatrists and social scientists in the optimistic postwar mood, forgetting how little they knew but fortified by the notion of circular causality and the atomistic view of society, organized worldwide as a group of experts to make global mental health into a new technocratic ideology.
Quote with 1 note
Warren McCulloch “believed in an unrestricted sex life. His was what a later generation titled an ‘open’ marriage. His life style was, in that day, an outrage to the morality espoused by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
For his [Gregory Bateson] own early notions of proto-learning, deutero-learning and higher order learning…he sought a still more abstract and weidely applicable formulation; he found it at the cybernetics conferences by adopting the language of Russelian ‘theory of types’ as a metaphor.
The conceptions of Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow related engineering and high technology to behavior of organisms on a human scale, but they were not particularly to the taste of physicists because they did not reduce description to laws of physics or to molecular building blocks; in that sense were not reductionist enough. Nor did they make contact with quantum theory.
The authentic scientific description was for [Leonard] Savage always operational, mathematical and mechanical, never merely verbal. His outlook was close to the logical positivists. In his wn work the role of concepts and words was to describe actual or contemplated operations that are used to define mathematical symbols, but the words or concepts had no particular importance in themselves. He wanted to get on with a description of technical details.
Page 1 of 5
