Other 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):
- Mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
- The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference.
- Mental process requires collateral energy.
- Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
- In mental process the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (that is, coded versions) of the difference which preceded them.
- 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 "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:
- Schismogenesis – the emergence of divisions within social groups.
- Information – Bateson defined information as "a difference which makes a difference." For Bateson, information in fact mediated Alfred Korzybski's map–territory relation, and thereby resolved, according to Bateson, the mind-body problem.
Read more about this topic: Gregory Bateson, Work
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