J. A. SCOTT KELSO - “…we need a science that embraces not only the extremes, but also the vast world of the in-between (Kelso and Engstrøm 2005). That science is emerging and has gathered a good deal of impetus in the last 25 years or so. In the literature, it has a name: it is called coordination dynamics.
Ask yourself: Why do we talk about “instead of” and “versus” all the time? Why do we partition the world into pairs, contrasting, for example, the genotype and the phenotype, the discrete and the continuous, the individual and the collective, the orderly and the random, the qualitative and the quantitative, the internal and the external, the persistent and the changing, the gradual and the abrupt, the reductionist and the holist – and yes, the certain and the uncertain. The list goes on and on. It is pretty obvious, one intuits, that both represent polarized extremes, and that reality must lie somewhere in between. One might even say that we categorize things and ideas in this polarized fashion in order to be sure that what we are really after will be captured in between.
One might even say that all science is about the in-between… Such thinking raises several questions. Is it something about our own brains that makes us categorize things in either/or terms? If so, how do we understand that? And what if we were to view things from the perspective of “both/and” rather than “either/or”… What if we were to embrace both the either/or and the both/and, and everything in between? What would such a science look like? At the very least, such a science… would have to include both the language of states, in which polarized extremes may be seen as stable states (stationary attractors) of a dynamical system, and the language of tendencies or dispositions, in which there are no states (stable or unstable) at all… the science of the in-between- like a James Joyce narrative – consists of multiple tendencies coexisting at the same time.
The science of the in-between – and importantly, the philosophy that motivates and accompanies it – thus represents a strange kind of complementarity (Bohr 1935). We call it The Complementary Nature (Kelso and Engstrøm 2005). On first blush, all this may seem rather obscure, philosophical and speculative, so let’s ground it in an example. In fact, let’s take a nontrivial example, one that lies close to the very issue of why we might split the world into pairs in the first place. The example concerns our understanding of the brain and – when the brain is embedded in its world – the behavior it gives rise to.
Historically, there are two (!) main theories of how the brain works… One is that the brain works as a coordinated, integrated entity. The other is that it is segregated into highly specialized parts that are localized for particular functions. Why, a reasonable person asks, could the brain not be both? We could all agree, “Of course! Let’s have both.” Instead of viewing integration and segregation as conflicting processes (and theories), let’s view them as complementary. That sounds grand, but what does it really look like? What would be the manifestation of having both segregation and integration in the brain, or for that matter in any naturally complex system like a society? In what way might integration and segregation be construed and understood as complementary?
To come to grips with these questions, we have to take a short sojourn into coordination dynamics, a theory of how coordinated patterns of behavior arise in a self-organized fashion, and how they adapt, persist and change according to internal and external circumstances (see Jirsa and Kelso 2004 for a sampling of recent work in this field). Coordination dynamics aims to characterize the nature of the coupling within a part of a system, between different parts of a system and between different kinds of systems. Moreover, it explicitly addresses the connection between different levels of description (see e.g., Kelso et al. 1999). Ultimately, coordination dynamics is concerned with how things come together in space and time, and how they break apart – bringing us back full circle to the integration~segregation issue.
From now on, by the way, we’ll use the squiggle or tilde (~) as part of a convenient syntax for complementary pairs (Kelso and Engstrøm 2005). The squiggle does not represent a glue or a bridge. Rather it is to acknowledge, in a world replete with either/or dichotomies, that complementary aspects are inextricably related, yet each may retain their singular character…”
One Response to “Toward a Science of the In-Between”
Today is President’s day in the USA. On the radio this morning I overheard
the words of Abraham Lincoln which resonate to the neither~nor logic of TCN
(one of TCN’s logics, since it embraces the either/or too):
So here’s Lincoln’s squiggle sense of democracy:
“As I would not be a slave so I would not be a master”.
Neither slave nor master, neither at peace nor at war,
neither integration nor segregation, neither manic nor depressed, etc.
In general (as in TCN the book) neither ca1 nor ca 2, valorizing neither.
In Lincoln’s words, there you have it..the neither~nor logic
of metastable Coordination Dynamics that underpins TCN and TSS.