Gregory Bateson (1991) famously said that we “cannot claim to have no epistemology. Those who so claim have nothing but a bad epistemology” (p. 178).  Bateson is calling for self-reflection in our epistemology.  He wants it to be recursive, so that in our production of knowledge we do not delude ourselves into thinking that the means of production is independent of what is produced.  Bradford Keeney, cybernetic epistemologist, family therapist, modern day New Orleans-style shaman, and student of Gregory Bateson, notes that recursive epistemology has roots in second-order cybernetics and the recognition (1983) that “any distinction drawn is drawn by an observer. … An observer observes by drawing distinctions. … The starting point of epistemology is therefore an observer drawing distinctions in order to observe” (p. 24). This leads us to a fundamental recursion or non-linearity at the very start of any epistemological endeavor. While non-recursive epistemologies try to mitigate this kind of loopiness, cybernetic epistemology embraces it as the very heart of knowing, using it as a creative generator of change and transformation. Working with a non-lineal epistemology leads to a different kind of knowing, one which “emphasizes ecology, relationship, and whole systems. In contrast to lineal epistemology, it is attuned to interrelation, complexity, and context” (Keeney, 1983, p. 107).

The consequences of lacking a self-reflexive epistemology are dire, leading to real practical and ethical dilemmas.  The structure of the sequence often goes something like this:

• Knowledge is produced on the basis of a non-reflexive epistemology (Bateson’s “bad” epistemology). Ex: You performed an act found to be illegal.
• The knowledge produced is thus assumed to be “objective” and “true” (i.e. independent of the means of its production; ignorant of its genesis). Ex: It doesn’t really matter why you did what you did, you are beholden to the law as written.
• This tends to have a psychologically limiting effect with respect to alternative knowledge and especially alternative modes of knowledge production.  One’s viewpoint becomes ossified. Ex: The judicial system limits its treatment of you as a whole human being only to what is allowable within the strictures that the law defines. You become identified with your act.
• The unreflective assumption of the “truth” of the knowledge becomes justification for its projection, often forcefully, onto other people and processes in the environments surrounding the knower.  A sense of conviction that the world is “like this” leads to inflexible protocols in our institutions and in our modes of interaction with others.  In other words, outer processes are also ossified; they become sclerotic. Ex: Now, instead of being a whole human being who with a completely full and complex life that included the illegal act, your identity shifts to that of a criminal. Your identity shifts, and you are now identified with the label “criminal,” and the judicial system creates places called prisons designed largely to maintain this distinction of your new identity.

The unintended effects of this kind of lineal process knowledge production could fill multiple volumes, from the most subtle aspects of daily life to world-historical events. But recursive epistemology is not in opposition to lineal epistemology; it is rather meant to be a way of maintaining complexity and subtlety (and ideally, wisdom) by calibrating the linearity of standard epistemological practices through higher-order recursion.

Calibration and Self-Calibration.

But what does it mean to have a self-reflexive epistemology?  The difference between the two types of epistemologies, non-self-relfexive and self-reflexive, can be described by the first and second order difference.  A non-self-reflexive epistemology is a first-order epistemology, a process of creating knowledge that operates in a linear fashion.  The knowledge it generates is not explicitly connected to the process of its generation, and thus does not act as a potential corrective to its mode of production.  Epistemology is a tool for knowing; but with a non-self-reflexive epistemology, the tool’s operation does not change the tool, so that no matter what job it is called to do, it re-instances any new creations in the manner and style of its past processes—regardless of what might be new in the situation it encounters.  The kind of newness that comes from a linear epistemology is (more…)