[Neurons] 2025 Neurons #35 EPISTEMOLOGICAL ERRORS

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2025 Neurons #35

August 25, 2025

NLP as Epistemology #4

 

EPISTEMOLOGICAL ERRORS

 

When you find an epistemological error, scream bloody murder.  Okay, you
don't do that, but do be warned that you are in the presence of something
which undermines your ability to think straight and clear and which will
lead to all sorts of confusions.  In the first article in this series, I
quoted this from Gregory Bateson:

"... the problems of psychiatry are often all shot through with
epistemological difficulties" (A Sacred Unity, 1990, p. 51)

 

There is such a thing as an epistemological error.  There actually lots of
them.  So wherever you find one, that error is not a good thing.  In fact,
it is a bad thing.  In his search for clarity rather than muddled thinking,
Bateson looked for and identified epistemological errors.  He found that in
psychotherapy, people were making many of these errors.  He wrote extensive
about these errors in Steps to an Ecology of Mind.  What psychiatrists and
others thought that they knew about schizophrenia was an epistemological
error.  How therapists thought about the underlying problem in alcoholism
was another epistemological error.

 

What is the error in schizophrenia or in alcoholism?  First of all, these
terms sound like 'things,' 'traits,' or 'characteristics' inside of a
person.  Actually they are words for one end of a relationship.  Like the
term "dependency," this is not a thing that you can find in a person.  It is
a relationship between that person and other persons.  The term refers to a
regularity of external behavior vis-a-vis other persons.  Bateson explains:

"One form of habitual error can be pilloried.  This is the trick of drawing
a generalization from the world of external observation, giving it a fancy
name, and then asserting that this named abstraction exists inside the
organism as an explanatory principle.  Instinct theory commonly takes this
monstrous form.  To say that opium contains a dormitive principle is no
explanation of how it puts people to sleep." (A Sacred Unity, 1990, p.  76)

 

In other words, the error is that these words (schizophrenia, alcoholism,
dependency, etc.) are fancy-name generalizations that someone invented for
certain external behaviors.  They invented them to explain experiences.  As
they erroneously thought about the experience, they generalized, they
deleted the rest of the relationship, and thereby distorted a system making
it linear as they encoded the problem into a single word.

 

If epistemology is the process by which you know what you know, a process
which describes how your way of thinking leads to what you know (your
knowledge), then an epistemological error is a way of thinking and knowing
that leads to false conclusions, confusions, and misunderstandings.  The
problem?  The way a person thinks as he reasons and builds up his knowledge
and the way he codes the thought into words.

 

What held back the social and the psychological sciences for centuries?  The
epistemological errors, to wit, the way people thought.  To think about the
psychological processes as 'things,' 'traits,' 'types, etc. and to think
that these 'things' work in a linear way (not systemically) is the first
epistemological error.  To think that psychological problems are 'caused' by
history, by what happened in the past, is the next epistemological error.
Bateson again:

"Nor will I agree to the monstrous premise of medieval epistemology which
would separate 'mind' from 'body.'" (A Sacred Unity, p. 149)

 

Ah yes, "medieval epistemology" the old ways of thinking especially the
dichotomous thinking of either/or, black-or-white which polarizes things in
over-simplistic ways such as "mind" and "body" as it they are separate or
can be separated.  It was Maslow who repeatedly wrote, "To dichomize is to
pathologize."  In this kind of dualistic thinking, you are splitting a
system apart, a system that cannot operate apart.  In this I hope you are
gaining a new appreciation for the value of the Meta-Model.

 

While Bateson called these erroneous ways of thinking epistemological
errors, it is probably easier to think about them as cognitive biases,
distortions, and fallacies.  These errors in how we think lead to what we
'know,' or think we know, and creates all kinds of problems.  The solution
is simple enough: clear our those distortions and learn to think clearly and
accurate -the subject of the next article.

 

 

 




 

 

 

 



L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

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