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Gregory Bateson Quotes
1904–1980 England
Gregory Bateson (May 9, 1904 – July 4, 1980) was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. He was married to Margaret Mead.
England Academics Anthropologists Linguists Philosophers Also known as: Bateson, Gregory
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31 quotes
Things have to be done fast in America, and therefore therapy has to be brief.
p. 148 as cited in: C.H. Patterson (1958)
Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named (see also, Alfred Korzybski).
The world partly becomes — comes to be — how it is imagined.
Epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
Human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction.
Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money.
The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth.
A relationship with no combat in it is dull, and a relationship with too much combat in it is toxic. What is desirable is a relationship with a certain optimum of conflict.
To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.
The necessary ingredients for a double bind situation, as we see it, are
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
Rather, for all objects and experiences there is a quantity that has an optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.
We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
Number is different from quantity.
In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
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