Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), Mind and Nature (1980), and Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (1988), the last published posthumously and co-authored with his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson.

Biography
Bateson was born in Grantchester, England on 9 May 1904. His father was the distinguished geneticist William Bateson. He went to the Charterhouse School high school from 1917 to 1921. He got a BA in biology at the St. John's College of the Cambridge University in 1925 and continued at Cambridge from 1927 to 1929. Bateson lectured in linguistics at the University of Sydney 1928. Form 1931 to 1937 he was a fellow at Cambridge and then went to the United States.

In Palo Alto, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland developed the Double Bind theory.

Bateson was married to the American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead between 1936 and 1950. Margaret Mead had been married twice before Bateson — first to Luther Cressman, who was theological student during the marriage (and later became an anthropologist himself), and second to Reo Fortune. Bateson and Mead had a daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, who also became an anthropologist. Their granddaughter, Sevanne Margaret Kassarjian, is a stage and television actress who works professionally under the name Sevanne Martin.

One of the threads that connects Bateson's work is an interest in systems theory and cybernetics, a science he helped to create as one of the original members of the core group of the Macy Conferences. Bateson's take on these fields centers upon their relationship to epistemology, and this central interest provides the undercurrents of his thought. His association with the editor and author Stewart Brand was part of a process by which Bateson’s influence widened &mdash; for from the 1970s until Bateson’s last years, a broader audience of university students and educated people working in many fields came not only to know his name but also into contact to varying degrees with his thought.

In 1956, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Bateson was a member of William Irwin Thompson's Lindisfarne Association.

Epigrams coined by or referred to by Bateson

 * Number is different from quantity.
 * The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named. Coined by Alfred Korzybski.
 * There are no monotone "values" in biology.
 * Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
 * Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction. Double description is better than one.
 * Bateson defines information as "a difference that makes a difference"

Terms used by Bateson

 * Abduction. Used by Bateson to refer to a third scientific methodology (along with induction and deduction) which was central to his own holistic and qualitative approach. Refers to a method of comparing patterns of relationship, and their symmetry or asymmetry (as in, for example, comparative anatomy), especially in complex organic (or mental) systems.  The term was originally coined by American Philosopher/Logician Charles Sanders Peirce, who used it to refer to the process by which scientific hypotheses are generated.
 * Criteria of Mind (from Mind and Nature A Necessary Unity):
 * 1) Mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
 * 2) The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference.
 * 3) Mental process requires collateral energy.
 * 4) Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
 * 5) In mental process the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (that is, coded versions) of the difference which preceded them.
 * 6) The description and classification of these processes of transformation discloses a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.


 * Creatura and Pleroma. Borrowed from Carl Jung who applied these Gnostic terms in his "The Seven Sermons To the Dead". Like the Hindu term maya, the basic idea captured in this distinction is that meaning and organization are projected onto the world. Pleroma refers to the non-living world that is undifferentiated by subjectivity; Creatura for the living world, subject to perceptual difference, distinction, and information.


 * Deuterolearning. A term he coined in the 1940s referring to the organization of learning, or learning to learn:


 * Double bind. Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing argued that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of people undergoing a psychotic episode were ultimately understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not possible or not permitted. Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of madness. He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations, where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations of their peers, leading to a 'lose-lose situation' and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned. In 1956, Palo Alto, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland articulated a related theory of schizophrenia as stemming from double bind situations. Madness was therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and trans-formative experience. The double bind refers to a communication paradox described first in families with a schizophrenic member. Full double bind requires several conditions to be met: a) The victim of double bind receives contradictory injunctions or emotional messages on different levels of communication (for example, love is expressed by words and hate or detachment by nonverbal behavior; or a child is encouraged to speak freely, but criticised or silenced whenever he or she actually does so). b) No metacommunication is possible; for example, asking which of the two messages is valid or describing the communication as making no sense c) The victim cannot leave the communication field d) Failing to fulfill the contradictory injunctions is punished, e.g. by withdrawal of love. The double bind was originally presented (probably mainly under the influence of Bateson's psychiatric co-workers) as an explanation of part of the etiology of schizophrenia; today it is more important as an example of Bateson's approach to the complexities of communication.


 * Schismogenesis - the emergence of divisions within social groups.

Publications
Articles Books
 * 1956, Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Jay Haley & Weakland, J., "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia",  Behavioral Science, vol.1, 1956, 251-264.
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Documentary film
 * Trance and Dance in Bali, a short documentary film shot by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the 1930s, but it was not released until 1952. In 1999 the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.