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DR. SHANDS' ESSAY, ON THE ONE HAND, and Dr. Meissner's and Dr. Richardson's comments, on the other, constitute a sort of elliptic polarity in which one focus sheds light on the other and vice versa. Both foci, precisely because of the tension produced by their difference, can occasion that type of radical questioning which Dr. Richardson evokes with "the Matrix of Meaning" and Dr. Meissner with the fascinating topic of the genealogy of belief systems.
I want to present the amplifying effect of paper and commentary, seen together, by pointing out two things: (1) the complementarity of what Bateson (1972) has aptly called "loose and strict thinking, " and (2) the ideological infrastructure which is rhetorically present in the texts under discussion.
1Dr. Shands' article is evidently an instant of loose thinking which Dr. Meissner and Dr. Richardson recognize as such and duly attack with great elegance and vigor. They seem to value little, if at all, the advantages of this type of thinking, praised, among many others, by Gregory Bateson (1972:73–87) as providing those vague hunches and wild ideas, often unsound, with which human knowledge advances, provided the "orgy of loose thinking" is corrected by strict thought. Both processes combined are complementary and have been variously named, for instance, "bisociation" by Koestler (1968), and "tertiary process" by Arieti (1964). What follows is the expression and enactment of a kind of tertiary process by first perceiving the advantages of Dr. Shands'