Bateson
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- "A certain mother habitually rewards her young son with ice cream after he eats his spinach. What additional information would you need to be able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate spinach, b. Come to love or hate ice cream, or c. Come to love or hate mother?"
– Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972, p. xvii
Gregory Bateson is a pivotal figure of constructivist philosophy; like many of the early founders of cybernetics - which provided the base for cognitivism as learning theory - he later turned to a critical review of it. This kind of 'second order cybernetics', to take the notion from Heinz von Foerster, thus became part of radical constructivism:
One can say that he want students not to analyse and re-shape systems of cognisance to greater efficiency, but to reflect on how these systems are arbitrarily created by scientists, educators, politicians, religious leaders, society, individuals.
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Theory of playing and metacommunication
What sets some of Batesons theories up as prime ideas for higher educational game design is his critical view on rule systems. It's easy to recognise the rules of a game of Monopoly (tm) as constructed and external - after all, you get them marked as 'rules' in the player's manual - but it is very difficult to discern them in 'your society' or 'your life' or 'your physical world' (who holds the trademark there?) How do we react to rules we think are unfair or hinder 'play' in a 'game'? How does it influence our actions if we cannot discern these made rules from natural laws?
Bateson proposes that by playing we early on develop the ability to discern between the sign and the real. Chasing something *seems* to be the same, independent of it either being a game of tag or a dead serious manhunt - but the players (should) know that the hunt is purely symbolic, they operate with just a sign for a hunt, not [a real hunt. This is on the one hand a usable approach for media-effects-research, on the other hand a foundation for higher-order learning and playing.
Types of learning
Bateson describes five types of operative knowledge we can acquire (Type IV is omitted here):
- Type 0 is - as the zero indicates - no learning, but something 'hardwired' into our brains, for example a kid enjoying attention and appreciation from her parents, or evading situations connected with ridicule.
- Type I allows to connect a certain reaction or set of reactions to a certain stimulus, like answering "2" when asked for the result of "1 + 1". This may 'organise' Type 0 learning, like getting a smile from your favourite teacher.
- Type II allows for successful strategies and contexts to learn - or organise - Type I knowledge, for example knowing that knowledge consists of well-defined facts that can almost entirely be learned by internet-recherche, or is identical to classic school knowledge. With this type comes a dependence on the mode of acquisition and the reasoning on the validity of one's knowledge tpye II. It defines one's relation to reality and truth, and thus one's identity.
- Type III allows for a changing between or reorganisation of different - and maybe antagonistic - forms of type II knowledge, for example the cognisance that every single 'fact' on the internet is filtered and formed by social and individual paradigmatic approaches, and thus not objective. This may be a painful, humiliating or deeply disorienting experience, and may be very difficult to achieve.
The Role of Failure for Learning
The most important trigger to 'learn', that is to (re)organise knowledge is, according to Bateson, a perceived error.
Two quotes from Bateson on 'error':
- "(...) you can reinforce a rat (positively or negatively) when he investigates a particular strange object, and he will appropriately learn to approach or avoid it. But the very purpose of exploration is to get informaation about what objects should be approached and which avoided. The discovery that a given object is dangerous is therefore a success in the business of getting information. The success will not discourage the rat from future exploration of other strange objects."
- Gregory Bateson, "The Logical Categories of Learning and Communications" in (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.282 (Italics by Bateson)
- "The assumption regarding the meaning of the word 'error' is not trivial and must be examined. There is a sense in which the 'player' can be wrong. For example he may base a decision upon probalistic considerations and then make that move which, in the light of the limited available information, was most probably right. When more information becomes available, he may discover that that move was wrong. But this discovery can contribute nothing to his future skill."
- Gregory Bateson, "The Logical Categories of Learning and Communications" in (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.286 (Italics by Bateson)
Successes just supports and strengthen an existing level of knowledge organisation, while failures urge the learner to rethink of what he thought beforehand was the 'right' way of doing things - and therefore let her or him 'learn' something new.
Each Type of learning brings it's own schema (or interpunction) of what is perceived as a failure.
Types of learning and playing styles (Wey Tan)
One interpretation of Bateson's categories is, that you could relate learning of type I, II and III as different playing styles:
- Type I lets you play as reaction to a certain action you encounter as player.
- Type II lets you build up strategies and tactics to act and react in greater contingency in this special game.
- And type III gives you the possibility to leave the game for another game, to change or reflect on rules of one's game, to see comparisions or contradictions between different games.
If you exchange 'game' and 'play' for 'society' and 'living', Batesons two texts on playing and learning represent a beautiful metaphor on widening one's range of options to cope with complex or antagonistic situations - in reality.
Questions and answers for the text from Bateson (Nora H.)
What is Learning zero, I, II and III? Find examples for each type of learning
Learning zero Learning zero is no learning as there is no change in the person. An example would be a reflex.
Learning I Learning I is 'learning'. The organism learns to react to a certain stimulus due to response and reinforcement. An example would be Pavlov's classical conditioning and learning with the means of rewards and avoidance.
Learning II Learning II means 'learning to learn'. It is for building up values and has consequences for an indivduals' character. Example of Learning II would be human rote learning or a method for mastering one's life.
Learning III Learning III is a change in the progress of Learning II. Learning III changes the organisms framework. One is confronted with Learning III when something is beyond one's level of understanding. This can be due to, for example, a catastrophe or due to great cultural differences experienced by native people when European settlers arrived.
What are contexts and context markers?
We may regard context as a collective term for all those events which tell the organism among what set of alternatives he must make his next choice.
Context markers are signals which classify contexts so that organisms react differently to a stimulus in different contexts: example: someone talking about suicide: people react differently on the streets and in the theatre; other examples include placebo, air raid alarm and a handshake before a boxing fight.
Contributed by Nora H.
Bibliography
Bateson, Gregory: The Logical Categories of Learning and Communications. In Gregory Bateson (1972): Steps to an Ecology of Mind. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2000, pp. 279-308
Complete text (only for members of this seminar: [1])
