たとえば、薬物依存症といった複雑な現象は、ベイトソンが指摘したように、都合よく中毒者の研究に分解することも、さらには、薬物依存症の人格だけに分解することもできません。それは、中毒者とは無関係の化学物質の研究にチャンクダウンすることもできません。
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中毒者 化学物質
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薬物依存症の現象をこのように分解すれば、興味深い有益なパターンを発見することに失敗するに決まっています。このようなプログラムは、最善の場合でも、見当違いに終わります。最悪の場合は、関係性の一部だけを研究した結果、広範囲に多様な「パターン」を発見する研究者は、次の高次の論理レベルで物議をかもし出し、現実世界で実際に薬物依存症のループを扱っている人々を困惑させます。また、彼らは、どの一式の言葉がより適切か議論し始めますが、このことは、人材と財源の浪費を認識している人々の頭痛の種となります。このような活動の結果は、最善の場合でも、人間の分離する能力、すなわち、自然に機能する回路に配慮することなく経験を分解し、分解された弧が世界と関係があるように信じてしまう能力の病的な側面で終わってしまいます。
(「ニューコードNLPの原点−個人的な天才になるための必要条件」p.39-40)
This same phenomena of epistemologically unsound thinking
occurs both at the individual levels and the societal level. We will develop
and propose a well-formedness condition which allows us as individuals and
societies to correct certain epistemological errors in our thinking, namely,
that when decomposing experience of the worldーphenomena which we wish to
examine and understandーthe component we wish to study must itself be an
operating circuit, not simply an arc in some circuit. Science in general and
psychology in particular have made monumental errors in the decomposition of
experience for purposes of study. Typically, a fascinating part of the world is
identified and a study is designed. The designers altogether too frequently
act as if the complex phenomenon, the circuit, may be decomposed into logical
variables, arcs, each of which may be studied in isolation, patterns discerned
and then the logical variables reassembled as if the generalizations which
define the patterning of the arcs additively define the patterning of the
entire circuit.
For
example, the complex phenomenon of addiction cannot, as Bateson points out, be
usefully decomposed into the study of the addict, or worse, the addictive
personality alone; nor can it be chunked down into a study of the chemicals
involved independent of the user.
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Addict Chemical
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Such a decomposition of the phenomenon of addiction will guarantee a failure to discover interesting and useful patterning. Such programs are doomed to irrelevance, at best. At worst the researchers who find widely varying "patterns"ーas a result of the study of only part of a relationshipーwill engage in polemics at the next higher logical level, arguing about whose sets of words are better to the dismay of people who have to deal with the loop of addiction in the real world and to the anguish of those who recognize the waste of human and financial resources. The results of such activity, at best, is the study of the pathological side of our species ability to disassociateーto decompose experience without any sensibility to naturally operating circuits, . . . , and then to believe the decomposed arcs have anything to do with the world.
(TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Prerequisites to Personal Genius, PREFACE p.12-13)