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Bateson and wright on number and quantity: How to not separate thinking from its relational context
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Safety and Transport, Measurement Technology. University of California, USA.
2021 (English)In: Symmetry, E-ISSN 2073-8994, Vol. 13, no 8, article id 1415Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

As part of his explication of the epistemological error made in separating thinking from its ecological context, Bateson distinguished counts from measurements. With no reference to Bateson, the measurement theory and practice of Benjamin Wright also recognizes that number and quantity are different logical types. Describing the confusion of counts and measures as schizophrenic, like Bateson, Wright, a physicist and certified psychoanalyst, showed mathematically that convergent stochastic processes informing counts are predictable in ways that facilitate methodical measurements. Wright’s methods experimentally evaluate the complex symmetries of nonlinear and stochastic numeric patterns as a basis for estimating interval quantities. These methods also retain connections with locally situated concrete expressions, mediating the data display by contextualizing it in relation to the abstractly communicable and navigable quantitative unit and its uncertainty. Decades of successful use of Wright’s methods in research and practice are augmented in recent collaborations of metrology engineers and psychometricians who are systematically distinguishing numeric counts from measured quantities in new classes of knowledge infrastructure. Situating Wright’s work in the context of Bateson’s ideas may be useful for infrastructuring new political, economic, and scientific outcomes. © 2021 by the author. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
MDPI AG , 2021. Vol. 13, no 8, article id 1415
Keywords [en]
Epistemology, Logical types, Measurement, Metrology, Networks, Number, Quantity, Stochastic pattern recognition
National Category
Probability Theory and Statistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-55892DOI: 10.3390/sym13081415Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85112171332OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-55892DiVA, id: diva2:1587087
Available from: 2021-08-23 Created: 2021-08-23 Last updated: 2022-05-10Bibliographically approved

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