A Predictable Anomaly
Retrodicting Surprising Observations
Introduction
How would it be most useful for any of us to view anomalies—particularly when they would appear to be significant occurrences, flying in the face of our normal expectations? And especially when something is achieved in practice far faster and more effortlessly than we had any right to expect, at least in theory, and seems almost too good to be true?
Practice is often far ahead of theory, and advances in theory often take their cue from advances in practice.
When what actually transpires seems impossible and too good to be true on our current assumptions, this is not only an invitation to re-examine those assumptions and search for alternatives.
For the revised assumptions, which make the anomaly appear to be no anomaly at all, but something we ought to have expected, typically open up whole new worlds of possibilities to which we had previously been blinded by false tacit assumptions.
This is the way of thinking at the very heart of science, at least ever since the work of Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, the father of modern science in the early 17th Century, and it has always been at the heart of our own work on change over the past half-century, as we shall see in today’s post.
—The Editors
A Predictable Anomaly: Retrodicting Surprising Observations
Newton may have had his apple, but my own work on change began when not an apple but a book fell out of the sky and hit me on the head.
The book was by the then preeminent Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who in 1945 had succeeded the late R. G. Collingwood1 as the University of Oxford’s Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy—even today one of only five professorships (in the UK academic sense) in what is one of the largest departments of philosophy in the world.
Ryle’s radical book, The Concept of Mind, first published in 1949, and which has remained continuously in print ever since, was epoch-making for British philosophy when it appeared. And though widely read up until a generation or so ago, and remaining for more than half a century on required reading lists for British undergraduate students of philosophy, The Concept of Mind is today probably one of the most misunderstood, most-opined-about-while-never-read, and consequently most underrated philosophical classics ever penned, and was probably the masterpiece of arguably the single most underestimated philosophical genius of the past century.
At the time Ryle’s bombshell blew my mind, decades after its publication, my academic preoccupations had only recently moved from arcane branches of higher mathematics such as number theory and proof theory through mathematical logic to the work of Wittgenstein, who had already begun to revolutionize my thinking about absolutely everything.
But for me it was Ryle who finished the job Wittgenstein started, even though Wittgenstein would continue the demolition job anew every time I reread him (which was many, many times) over the succeeding decades. I’ve long ago lost count of how many times I’ve reread Wittgenstein’s (equally misunderstood) Philosophical Investigations and, for all its flaws (which Ryle later corrected dazzlingly), Ryle’s Concept of Mind.
Though the topic is far beyond the scope of today’s modest post, the work of Ryle and his fellow so-called Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophers, on the one hand, and the later work of Wittgenstein and his philosophical followers on the other hand, had plumbed the depths of the nature of reality in two rather different, but equally radically new, compatible and mutually complementary ways.
Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy along with the work of Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinians has in recent years been enjoying something of a renascence in some corners of French academic philosophy, particularly at the Sorbonne.
Though like most academic fields, including most fields of science, sadly, philosophy is even more in thrall to fashion than the rag trade, and in the anglophone world both kindred schools of philosophy are currently out of fashion, though like most fashions, they will doubtless one day be back in fashion once again.
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The Secrets of the Universe
But meanwhile Ryle’s book is chiefly important to today’s discussion for autobiographical and historical (or if we want to be irritatingly pretentious about it, ‘genealogical’) reasons. For I put Ryle’s book down, my head still spinning, with, above all, the germ of a double epiphany emerging, forming two sides of what I intuitively knew at once—beyond any shadow of a doubt and many, many years before I could prove it—must be but a single coin.
Moreover, I had in that same instant the compelling hunch that it would be a coin which, if only I could manage one day to mint it—I had only then to slip it into the slot-machine of reality, pulling the lever to spin the reels, and I would certainly win the ultimate jackpot: the secrets of the universe together with the ultimate change technology.
The double insight triggered in me by Ryle’s book, literally scribbled on the back of an envelope, when unpacked went something like this, as I scribbled at slightly greater length some years later and as I would still characterize that epiphany now:
Whatever we may have learned in school, neither the universe, nor human knowledge, is arrayed in layers with particle physics at the bottom and the human sciences at the top. The secrets of the universe are not hidden from us. Where there are missing answers we simply have not yet asked the right questions, and there is no a priori set order in which they must be asked. There is no reason to expect it all to fit together in an elegant, monolithic structure—not if we want to answer all the multifarious kinds of questions we curious human folk are wont to ask.
The rich, idiosyncratic details that tell us what we actually want to know may be what we demand in an explanation, not a derivation from first principles. Explanation, it struck me, required no bedrock. And if we have not yet found a satisfactory, all-encompassing unity of science, I wondered, perhaps there was none to be found or perhaps (I preferred to think) we may have been looking in the wrong place, and at the wrong level of abstraction.
We may, in the words of Ryle’s younger contemporary and fellow Oxford Ordinary Language Philosopher J. L. Austin’s words, have found ourselves barking a very long way up the wrong gum tree. Or to adapt Ryle’s own description of J. L. Austin’s work, I could see that we needed neither to add anything to the bag of our current ways of thinking nor to remove this or that item from the bag, but to turn the whole bag inside-out and upside-down and give it a damn good shake.
Although I could not make all the connexions at the time, one tantalizing implication beckoned from the very start, part and parcel of the original insight: If indeed we were onto something here, then it ought to be possible in any practical situation, by finding the right questions to ask, the right way to construe matters, systematically to identify the smallest intervention that would be sufficient to create the maximum desired change in one hit, in all-or-none fashion.
And I was particularly intrigued at the time, again inspired chiefly by Ryle’s method as well as his epistemology, by the speculation, in this connexion, that it ought to be possible to reduce the time required for psychotherapy to a single therapeutic session.
And indeed, although I originally trained as an academic philosopher and as a physiologist and what we would today call a biosemiotician, it was in the psychiatric field, at that time the field par excellence devoted chiefly to the study of change, that I began my empirical work to try and mint that magical coin.
Then and there, after Ryle’s book dealt me its knockout blow, I began my lifelong quest to understand the nature of change.
I began the quest on my own, at first, but I was soon joined and accompanied for decades by my philosophical and scientific colleagues at Interchange Research, who would make major contributions to the early theory and practice—of the theoreticians who were no strangers to practice, Dr D. J. Stewart, Prof. W. J. Chandler and Prof. George Gorelik perhaps chief among them, especially in the late 1980s.
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Language and Reality
To try and convey something of Ryle’s highly nuanced and complex take on the relationship between language, reality, mind and action, would be an impossible task in a short post like this one. True originality can never be briefly summarized.
However, at least to give something of the flavour of just how radical the reconceiving of this relationship was, let me cite a much more accessible and rather lyrical passage from Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the extraordinary Polish-Jewish, prose-poetic writer, fine artist and literary critic—a passage which, while expressing a somewhat different thought, remains in something of the same spirit, and was published in Polish some thirteen years before Ryle’s magnum opus:
Poetry happens when short circuits of sense occur between words, a sudden regeneration of the primeval myths.
As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of lost but eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did. Even the soberest of our notions and categories are remote derivatives of myths and ancient oral epics. Not one scrap of an idea of ours does not originate in myth, isn't transformed, mutilated, denatured mythology. The most fundamental function of the spirit is inventing fables, creating tales. The driving force of human knowledge is the conviction that at the end of its researches the sense of the world, the meaning of life, will be found. It seeks out sense at the very top of its scaffoldings and artificial stackings of level upon level. Yet the building materials it uses were used once before; they come from forgotten, fragmented tales or ‘histories’. Poetry recognizes these lost meanings, restores words to their places, connects them by the old semantics. In the poet's mind, the word remembers, so to speak, its essential meaning, blossoms, unfolds spontaneously according to its own inner laws, regains its wholeness. Thus all poetry is mythologizing and strives to restore myths to the world. The mythologizing of the world is not over yet; the process was only halted by the development of knowledge, scientia, diverted into a side channel where it courses on without understanding its identity. But science, too, only fabricates its own world myth because myth is embodied in the very elements themselves, and there is no way of going beyond myth. Poetry reaches the meaning of the world intuitively, deductively, with large, daring shortcuts and approximations. Knowledge seeks the same meaning inductively, methodically, taking into account all the materials of experience. Fundamentally, one and the other are bound for the same goal.
The human spirit is indefatigable in supplying glosses to life by means of myths, in ‘making sense’ of reality. The word itself, left to its own devices, gravitates towards sense.
Sense is the element that involves mankind in the process of realization. It is an absolute given that cannot be derived from other givens. Therefore what makes sense to us cannot be defined. The process of imparting meaning to the word is closely bound up with the world. Language is man’s metaphysical organ. Nonetheless in the course of time the word becomes static and rigid, stops being the conductor of new meanings. The poet restores conductivity to words by new quasi-electric tensions that are produced by an accumulation of charges. Mathematical symbols are extensions of the word into new realms. The image, too, derives from the primal word, the word that was not yet a sign but myth, story, sense.
We usually regard the word as the shadow of reality, its symbol. The reverse of this statement would be more correct: reality is the shadow of the word. Philosophy is actually philology, the deep, creative exploration of the word.2
Let that passage, however tangential to Ryle’s very differently slanted and more analytical work, go proxy for Ryle, for our purposes here, to give you just a hint of the sort of reversal of our common understanding of things, especially the relationship between mind, language, action and the world, that sparked more than half a century of in-house research on the part of myself and my colleagues, hundreds of man-years of work all-told, on creating rapid, across-the-board, major transformations in the world of affairs.
It is important to understand, however, that the quest to understand the nature of change and to discover how to create major transformations by minimalist means was by no means an armchair quest. It was more a matter of attempting to create change, looking out for promising anomalies, and seeking to account for them theoretically and thereby to attempt to recreate the apparently impossible which, to our pleasant surprise, had just occurred .
This scientific research involved the continual, iterative zipping and unzipping of Braithwaite’s zip-fastener3 between theory and application of theory. To oversimplify here: the two halves, the scientific theory and the empirical application of theory, are developed separately, in parallel, and then every now and then zipped back together, leading to a modification either in the application of the theory or in its internal structure, and so on, iteratively. The practical applications of the theory were proving so staggeringly powerful that I knew I was on to something.4
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Abductive Reasoning and Retrodiction
In late September or early October of 1976 I had my first success with the then nascent methodology I would later call “minimalist intervention.” But Minimalist Intervention 1.0, as it was nearly five decades ago, began with an anomaly—as did every single advance in the development of our proprietary MI methodology in the succeeding five decades of scientific and methodological innovation and continuous refinement.
In that first successful minimalist intervention, an intractable psychiatric problem dissolved overnight through an intervention on my part consisting of a single, carefully crafted one-sentence communication aimed at doing just that.
I had based that particular experimental foray on a bit of theorizing I had been doing in preparation for the experimental clinical work, drawing both on some psychoanalytic work by a number of authors, most of all by the work of the psychoanalyst Roy Schafer (with whom I had also studied) and especially his work on “action language” (Schafer too had been strongly influenced by Ryle), and on the work of a number of Oxford philosophers including Ryle, Austin, Hampshire and others, as well as by a couple of memorable short passages from the work of Gregory Bateson, one from a 1964 paper of his on learning and one from a 1967 paper on the analysis of Balinese painting.
It was also through my reading of Bateson that I had first became acutely attuned to the primary importance of one’s choice of epistemology in any inquiry—and realizing that one’s epistemology is ultimately always a choice, even if not usually a conscious one—and I took my first hints from Bateson (unfortunately, he gave little more than hints, fairly widely scattered in his work) about the kind of epistemology that followed from the discoveries of cybernetics and which could prove useful in my quest, starting with the seminal work of Ross Ashby.
And so I turned to the study of cybernetics as well as a number of other fields— psychoanalysis, general semantics, and semiotics above all—to look for some of the building blocks which I could use to construct a new epistemology, at first only very roughly cobbled together. Along with a number of my colleagues at Interchange Research I would spend the following couple of decades starting to map out systematically what such a new epistemology might look like, and how it could be more rigorously formulated.
All the same, however, the real progress of our inquiry relied quintessentially on being constantly on the lookout for anomalies discovered through our empirical work and trying to make sense of them.
But what exactly do you do with an anomaly? And how do you go about making sense of it?
Reflecting on the technology of the steam engine, a celebrated Irish physicist (I think it was Sir William Hamilton [1805–1865]) is reported to have remarked, “It works in practice, OK, but does it work in theory?” First the steam engine, later thermodynamics; and much later still, the physical, logical and philosophical foundations of thermodynamic theory, and the broader impact it would have on the future development of physical theory, in far-flung fields of physics.
The American scientist, mathematician and logician C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), one of America’s greatest philosophers of all time, remarked in an oft-cited passage (Collected Papers, Vol. V, p. 189.),
The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
This influential syllogism was perhaps Perice’s most succinct definition of the type of inference he called abduction, which he introduced as a supplement to the better-known forms of inference, deduction and induction.
Now abduction is also known as abductive reasoning or abductive inference, and more rarely as “retroduction” (a rather ugly word I somehow can’t help associating with the image a yellow rubber duck swimming backwards in the bath), but changing the “u” to an “i” (the “you” to an “I”?) gives us the somewhat more ordinary word “retrodiction,” a favourite of Gilbert Ryle’s, which I think captures much of the sense of Peirce’s abductive logic rather well.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “retrodiction” as “the explanation or interpretation of past actions or events inferred from the laws that are assumed to have governed them,” which is not too far away from Peirce’s abductive syllogism we cited above, provided that we regard those laws as precisely what we are out to discover, and why the anomaly we are interested in retrodicting is so interesting to us in the first place.
Most, if not all, experienced psychiatric clinicians will have had cases that were resolved in the first and only psychotherapeutic session. But my colleague Bill O’Hanlon and I, when we discovered in 1982 just how often we had each had that experience in our own psychotherapeutic practice, began a concerted joint effort to study the phenomenon and to regard these occurrences as more than just “flukes.” What shifts in our assumptions and associated ways of working would enable such “flukes” to occur much more often?
As I suspected from the start, based on my findings from 1976 onwards, the shift required was at the epistemological level.
So following Peirce’s syllogism, you come across an anomalous observation, C, something you didn’t expect to see, and instead of shrugging your shoulders or sweeping it under the carpet, or pretending you didn’t see it, or writing it off as a fluke, you ask yourself, “In what universe would this be not only true but routinely expectable? Which of my most fundamental tacit assumptions, if I abandoned it, would make this observation no longer surprising? Where have I seen something like this before?” and so on and so on.
And if you work at it and keep inquiring, and you do your job of relentless inquiry well, and if you are lucky enough, you might just hit upon some proposition A which, if it turned out to true, would mean that the surprising thing shouldn’t have been surprising, that it wasn’t surprising at all, but just what you would naturally expect.
This is precisely how my colleagues and I at Interchange Research managed to hit upon that extraordinary body of truths that formed our radically new epistemology, the key to making Minimalist Intervention possible—that is, the ability, deploying our proprietary technology, to analyze situations in order to create major transformations in one hit with absolute precision by means of small, pinpointed communications idiosyncratic to the situation, typically delivered to just one or two individuals.
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The Search for Precursors
It is no accident that in 1994-96 we declared victory on two fronts at the same time: the completion of the new epistemology, worked out in all its details and derived from first principles, on the one hand, and on the other hand our ability to design an effective minimalist intervention in a single session of three or four hours, and to do so virtually every time.
The new epistemology, which I had devised from scratch mainly between 1976 and 1996, my unique new epistemology of “form-and-pattern, flux-and-constraint,” didn’t acquire so much as a name until 1986, and more or less by accident, when I first called it “E2.”
The occasion was a plenary lecture to a major management conference where I used the “From→To” trope to explain, along 34 orthogonal dimensions, the shift from the prevailing “old” epistemology “E1” to our rival, “new” epistemology, “E2.” And the moniker “E2” somehow stuck. At least it was less of a mouthful than continually having to refer to “the new epistemology,” let alone “an epistemology of form-and-pattern, flux-and-constraint.”
As I’ve written about previously in the pages of Change, a whole new view of science, making possible a science of the singular, that is to say, the rigorous scientific study of one-off situations, emerged from my creation of E2 and opened up vast new realms of possibility.
From the very beginning however, part and parcel of our philosophical and scientific quest, not least in a search for missing pieces of the jigsaw, I operated from the principle that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Surely, I could not have been the only one to have been finding pieces of what was out there just waiting to be discovered, hidden in plain sight?
Someone, somewhere, somehow, I figured, must also have been operating from at least a similar epistemology, even if it had been conceptualized and formulated differently, or more likely, had been operating tacitly and unconsciously, but guiding some successful scientific research efforts all the same.
Thus began my decades-long project, commenced in the mid-1970s and still ongoing, and indeed still motoring along at full throttle, of continually looking for others across an increasing number of fields, who were likewise regularly achieving highly anomalous, too-good-to-be-true results in their own field, and who likewise seemed to be working, whether explicitly or implicitly, from similar epistemological principles.
Those who were still active, or at least still alive from amongst the pioneers of the 20th Century scientific revolution I’ve written so much about here in the pages of Change, and who seemed to be working or at least thinking along broadly similar lines, I actively sought out in order to compare notes, and to sit at their feet, and to learn all I could from them—discovering yet another piece of the jigsaw here, another piece there.
Or at least, in many instances, discovering kindred spirits who took to my E2 like a duck to water. Often we were like the proverbial thieves who meet in the night and need no introduction. It was like that when I met the psychotherapist Bill O’Hanlon in 1982 and it was like that when in 1986 I met the philosopher, psychologist and cybernetician Dr D. J. Stewart who was probably nearest to my own thinking and practice, and who was almost certainly the greatest single influence on my own subsequent scientific work.
Most of those working tacitly from something fairly near, in one respect or another, to our own epistemology, E2, were to be found in the biological sciences, particularly in physiology where I myself had started out, as well as in cybernetics, and perhaps above all in psychiatry, particularly in psychoanalytic psychiatry in institutional settings as I have written about elsewhere.
The two principal contributions to science and to the world of my own career-long pursuit of “the thing in the bushes”5 and of the half-century of concerted work by my firm Interchange Research, thus went hand-in-hand:
The construction of our unique, fully-fledged, radically new epistemology (E2), rigorously grounded logically and philosophically and put to the test scientifically over decades of in-house empirical work, and
our development of the empirical and (in the broadest sense of the word) “clinical” side of our scientific work—the construction of an innovative, proprietary technology, Minimalist Intervention, for rapidly analyzing any system (or real-world situation) in advance of intervening in it, to identify the smallest catalytic intervention into that system or situation that will flip it at once from the existing state to the desired state with absolute precision (MI).
Indeed, it is not only impossible for me or my team to imagine our having arrived at the one without having arrived at the same time at the other—for the fact is, that we could never have developed MI without developing E2, and we could never have developed E2 without developing MI.
The two were inseparable; indeed they are to a great extent, two different ways of looking at much the same thing. MI and E2 were the two sides of one coin to which I referred above in describing my epiphany when Ryle’s book hit me like a bolt out of the blue.
And until our two-sided coin was finally minted in 1994-96 and slipped into the slot-machine of reality, as we pulled the lever and really did hit the scientific jackpot, no one had ever managed (perhaps in part because none had tried in such a concerted fashion over such a long period of time), not only to delineate the new epistemology E2 in any detail, but to rigorously derive the new epistemology in all its detail and ramifications from a handful of incontestable, logical first principles.
Yet along the way, as I pursued my research over the years, I found there was hardly a field of science in which I could not find other anomaly-producing mavericks tacitly sharing some or even many (very occasionally most) of the same epistemological principles I had been searching for and formulating from the outset, physics being the last science to be added to the list where kindred epistemological spirits were to be found.
So a third strand to my research all these years has been that of an historian of ideas: not at all doing a kind of Whig history in which all of the history of ideas led inexorably to E2—far from it. For if Ryle’s book hadn’t landed on my head, E2 might not yet have seen the light of day.
Rather I have been methodically constructing a kind of genealogy of the ideas that led to E2, following the thread of influences of one philosopher or scientist upon another working in countless fields, making complex sociograms and tracing personal and intellectual connections down through the centuries, as I managed to trace the threads back as far as the early 17th Century in England, and especially to the 18th Century in Central Europe.
That detailed genealogy is the subject of one of the books on which I have been labouring for many years, and it must remain a story for another day. Unsurprisingly, though, it is a story of anomalies, and of the contrarian efforts of multitudes of forgotten thinkers and investigators to make sense of those anomalies in startling new ways.
© Copyright 2024 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Some of Collingwood’s work is discussed at length here in the pages of Change, particularly in “Questioning Truth” and in the eight-part series, “A World of Questions and Answers.”
The italics, marking an oft-cited epigram of Schulz’s, are mine. The passage is from Bruno Schulz, “The Mythologizing of Reality” (1936) in his Collected Works, pp. 372-73. It was originally published in Studio, a short-lived Polish magazine published by Zofia Nalkowska, who in 1933 had discovered Schulz, then an unknown, self-deprecating high-school art teacher. She is responsible for bringing Schulz to the attention of the Polish and wider European literary world. Although most of Schulz's literary and artistic work was destroyed in the Holocaust and though his career was cut tragically short when he himself was murdered by a Nazi in 1942, and though his literary output that survives is meagre, he is regarded by many authorities as one of the most gifted writers in the Polish language; and particularly in France, he is lauded as one of Europe’s great 20th Century intellectuals. This passage along with much of what little remains of Schulz’s views on the philosophy of language, bears comparison with the work of some of the Inklings, especially the work of the philosopher and philologist Owen Barfield (I’m thinking here particularly of his Poetic Diction, but also of his History in English Words, and Saving the Appearances), of the writer, philologist and theologian C. S. Lewis (particularly his Studies in Words), and the writer and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien.
Richard Braithwaite, Scientific explanation; a study of the function of theory, probability and law in science, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1953
Note that these two halves have nothing to do with the two sides of the coin I’d been speaking about earlier.
I’ve borrowed this rather superb metaphor from Lynn Hoffman, Foundations of family therapy: A conceptual framework for systemic change. New York: Basic Books, 1981, p. 176