Brief Reports 161

DISCUSSION
Although the questionnaires indicate that the majority of participants
felt the seminar was a worthwhile experience, it is difficult to assess its
impact on the participants and their involvement in their programmes.
However, both the student participants and the planners seem to believe
that participation in the seminar added to the members' personal and
professional development, as well as increasing their involvement in the
counselling programme and the university community. The students
have undertaken to operate their own groups without departmental
supervision and after the madatory group experience has ended. This
would seem to strengthen the positive appraisal of the sessions, thereby
supporting the continuation of the "non-seminar" for future students.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be directed to: David de Rosenroll,
Psychological Foundations in Education, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria,
Victoria, B.C. V8W 2Y2.

Zucchini Mush as a Misguided Way of Knowing

Douglas Flemons, Vancouver, British Columbia

In order to perceive the world, we must necessarily draw distinctions. As

Dell and Goolishian (1981) have said, "without carving the world into
pieces by naming some of its 'parts' we can see nothing" (p. 178).
According to Gregory Bateson, there may be "better and worse ways of
doing this splitting of the universe into nameable parts" (Bateson, 1977,
p. 244). Science is one such way of perceiving:
As a method of perception—and that is all science can claim to be—science, like
all other methods of perception, is limited in its ability to collect the outward
and visible signs of whatever may be truth." (Bateson, 1979, p. 32)
We are limited by the sensitivity of our instruments—by the thres-
holds of our available means of perception. But ultimately, we are
limited by the "eco-systemic" organization of the biological world.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle implicates the observer i n that
which is observed: "Our consciousness, our behavior, becomes part of
the experiment, and there is no clear boundary here between subject
and object" (Berman, 1984, p. 137). As R o l l o M a y (1975) put it, "We
don't study nature, we investigate the investigator's relationship to
nature." In other words, in a world characterized by circular process
and relationship, we must recognize that we exist and observe only in
relation. The assumptions and methods which we bring to our research
actually participate in creating the results we perceive and report. Ifwe
look with object-oriented glasses, we will indeed see insular entities that
appear to have "substance," and "scientific" credibility. But then,
162 Douglas Flemons

"experiment is sometimes a method of torturing nature to give an

answer in terms ofyour epistemology, not in terms of some epistemology
already immanent in nature" (Bateson, 1978, p. 42).
What then of the social sciences? If we start from a premise that as
living beings, and as researchers, we are participants in a circular
process of relation, then it is clear that research problems are not things,
but rather part of a pattern of interaction. Cuttingprocess into atomistic
pieces is analogous "to stop[ping] the music in order to hear it more
clearly," and, as Bergson (1955) notes, when music stops " i t disap-
pears!"
If we study the behaviour of a male tennis player by isolating him
from the context of the game, then we narrow our focus to one side of the
net. We see him swinging a racket and hitting a ball that comes from
"nowhere" and returns, usually at a slightly different angle, to "no-
where." Why does he sometimes j u m p up and down and yell happily,
and then shortly thereafter curse and swear? What needs or instincts or
drives cause him to move his body in such a jerky, almost spasmodic
way? Is this perhaps some special kind of bipolar affective disorder,
complicated by hysterical epilepsy? Perhaps we can figure out how to
measure it.
W h e n we isolate parts of interaction and take them for the whole, it
becomes necessary to create imaginary constructs to explain the things
we think we see. Take for example the notion of "self-esteem." We talk
about it as being high or low, and think of it as somehow residing inside
the individual. A n d to understand it better we create standardized tests
to measure it. Note the physical metaphors: "high," "low," "inside,"
"measure." This abstract construct which was invoked as a way of
explaining observed behaviour and/or described feelings, becomes
virtually " r e a l " from L a t i n res, a thing).

"Why is he so abusive?"
"He has low self-esteem."
"Why is she so confident?"
"She has high self-esteem."

These answers tell us nothing.

The abuse of abstraction is rampant in the social sciences. The
research on dyslexia is a case in point. In an attempt to make a
theoretical contribution to the understanding of learning disabilities,
Blackman and Goldstein (1982) invoke the notion of "cognitive style"
("best understood as a hypothetical construct developed to explain the
relationship between stimuli and responses"), (p. 106). They state: "We
do not know whether learning disabilities are the cause or the result of an
individual's cognitive style..." (p. 106). How on earth can an abstrac-
tion be a cause of anything? O r an effect for that matter? It is a cause of
much confusion, and the result of atomistic thinking.
Brief Reports 163

The invocation of imaginary constructs is an attempt to get specific, to

try and make sense of what is being observed. The problem is that the
researcher gets specific at an abstract level. For instance, there is an
assumption that dividing a person into imaginary component parts
somehow gets us to a more basic, a more primary level.1 But a person is
not a thing which can be divided in this way, and the act of division
actually moves the researcher to a more abstract level.
If we keep chopping up a zucchini, we soon reach a point where it
becomes just so much mush. Reified abstractions can be chopped up
forever, though it does create a kind of zucchini mush of the mind.
W i l h e l m Wundt attempted to get down to the building blocks of the
thinking process by splitting it into thousands of primary "elements."
However, when working at the level of constructs, one can't get down to
anything.
Imperfectly defined explanatory notions, Bateson noted (1972) that:
are commonly used in the behavioral sciences—'ego,' 'anxiety,' 'instinct,'
'purpose,' 'mind,' 'self,'... and the like. For the sake of politeness, I call these
"heuristic" concepts; but, in truth, most of them are so loosely derived and so
mutually irrelevant that they mix together to make a sort of conceptual fog
which does much to delay the progress of science, (p. xvii)
The problem here is similar to that which I identified above: each of
these notions is a label for an imaginary, insular thing. We forget that
"anxiety," "self-esteem," and other characterological traits must be
understood in c o n t e x t — a n d that context is interaction. Wholeness cannot
be divorced from process.
What is the alternative to zucchini mush? It is to isolate not entities,
but pathways ofprocess. " I f you want to understand some phenomenon or
appearance, you must consider that phenomenon within the context of
all completed circuits which are relevant to i t " (Bateson, 1971, p. 244).
This means looking at both sides of the tennis net, at the relation
between the players, at the relation between the observer and the
relation between the players, and so on.
The relevant circuits in social science research have to do with the
relationships which join people, including the researcher, in meaningful
patterns of interaction. For example, in their study of self-fulfilling
prophesy in the school system, Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) chal-
lenged the common lineal view that poor children lag behind simply
because they are members of a disadvantaged group. The authors didn't
go looking for evidence of a genetic basis of I.Q., nor even for social and
cultural reasons within the child's ethnic group; rather they looked at the

Indeed, Arnold Lazarus nas coined the acronym "BASIC I.D." to reflect his particular way
of slicing a person into oits.
164 Douglas Flemons

relationship between teacher expectations and student performance.

They hypothesized that
the child does poorly in school because that is what is expected of him. In other
words, his shortcomings may originate not in his different ethnic, cultural and
economic background but in his teachers' response to that background, (p. 19)
Their results "indicated strongly that children from whom teachers
expected greater intellectual gains showed such gains" (p. 22). A student
is only a student in relation to a teacher (or teachers) and thus his or her
scholastic ability does not exist independently of the person who is
assessing it. This ability is not an objective fact, and any attempt to
explain it in isolation will only generate abstract constructs.
Although Rosenthal and Jacobson illuminate the importance of
context, they would have to take two further steps in order to make their
study truly circular. First, they would need to also consider how
student's expectations of the teacher participate in shaping the latter's
expectations. D o children who expect the teacher to have high expecta-
tions of them do better i n school than those students who expect the
teacher to have low expectations of them? A n d second, the authors
would have to take into consideration how their own expectations as
researchers shape the nature of the relationships they are observing. As
Bateson warns us, you can never get rid of the smell of the lab (B. P.
Keeney, personal communication, J u l y 9, 1986). In looking for "the
pattern which connects" (Bateson, 1979, p. 8), one realizes that it is
recursive relationship which is true.

References
Bateson, Gregory. (1971). A systems approach. International Journal of Psychiatry, 9, 242-244.
Cited in Kenney (1979).
Bateson, Gregory. (1972). The science of mind and order. In G. Bateson, Steps to an ecology of
mind. New York: Ballantine.
Bateson, Gregory. (1977). Afterword. In J. Brockman, (Ed.), About Bateson. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Bateson, Gregory. (1978). The birth of a matrix or double bind and epistemology. In M. M.
Berger. (Ed.), Beyond the double bind. New York: Brunner/Mazel.
Bateson, Gregory. (1979). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. New York: Bantam Books.
Bergson, Henri. (1955). An introduction to metaphysics, T. E. Hulme (trans.). New York: Liberal
Arts Press. Cited in Minuchin and Fishman (1981, p. 78).
Berman, Morris. (1984). The reenchantmenl of the world. New York: Bantam Books.
Blackman, S., & Goldstein, K. (1982). Cognitive styles and learning disabilities. Journal of
Learning Disabilities, 15, 106-115.
Dell, Paul, F., & Goolishan, Harold, A. (1981). "Order through fluctuation": An evolution-
ary epistemology for human systems. Austin Journal of Family Therapy, 2(4), 175-184.
May, Rollo. (1975). Opening remarks at session one of the association for humanistic psychology theory
conference. Tuscon Arizona, April 4. Cited in Keeney (1979).
Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. F. (1968). Teacher expectations for the disadvantaged.
Scientific American, April, pp. 19-23.
Correspondence and requests for reprints should be directed to: Douglas Flemons, 22IO-B
35th Street, Lubbock, Texas, U.S.A. 79412