Two Descriptions Are Better Than One

Well, my first post didn't really provide a hook, explaining instead the gistification of this blog project; I hope to make up for that with this post. Specifically, I want to focus on one of my own axioms, choosing from a few of those that have helped structure most fundamentally my thinking and thinking about thinking:

1) Relation is the smallest unit.
2) Two descriptions are better than one.
3) After two, things get complicated real fast.
4) Map is not territory.

Now, the thinking about thinking that I'm doing here in Axiomatix definitely has a goal, and I won't hide it from you: to arrive at and express in an axiomatic way what I call the ecology of everyday life, thereby making a difference in the futures we humans have before us. For some expressions of that end state, see my other blog on sense of wonder, here. For the moment, though, and in reference to the excellent comment my mathematician-philosopher friend Andrew Marshall provided on my first post, let me focus on axiom 2 above, "Two descriptions are better than one." This axiom is drawn from Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979); for anyone interested in axioms of thinking expressed by one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, check out his chapters "Every Schoolboy Knows" and "Multiple Versions of the World", available here.

For me, two descriptions are better than one expresses something vital to my discussion of axioms in general. First off, it suggests that no axiom is "universal". Indeed, anything that is universal - rooted in "one" - is supposed to be true all the time and in every situation. But if two descriptions are better than one, then there is no description which can claim to be the right one, the true one, the "universal". Is it your right eye or your left eye that gets the "right" perspective? Neither, of course: what you see is a composite of the two, giving you three-dimensional vision thanks to parallax. In other words, while one view suggests access to the truth, two views suggest instead that for every situation there are truths. An interesting misunderstanding that derives from this pluralization of the truth is known as "relativism": basically, since all perspectives are true, anything goes. What the doctrine of relativism gets right is that no one perspective can ever capture it all, can ever establish a universal, can ever get to the capital-T Truth. What it fails to take into account is the usefulness of multiple descriptions of the world, and the fact that having access to the so-called truth is not necessary for taking a stand and making a difference in the world that is (alas) the case. I understand the desire to found one's authority in the God-like perspective that capital-T Truth offers, but I advocate instead an ethics of power and knowledge that resituate that authority in myself and my choices, always open to correction and modification through relations with others, never final, never universal. In other words, the axioms I'm discussing here in Axiomatix are situated, local, and very possibly inconsistent. They do not express eternal verities. Instead, with the axioms I express here - and, hopefully, with those my readers offer - I hope to capture those contingent truths that pattern an ecology of everyday life that might lead to not only the survival but also the thrival of human beings on this planet.