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Steps to an Ecology of Mind

From Slow Like Wiki

Part I: Metalogues

Why do Things Get in a Muddle

Why do Frenchmen?

About Games and Being Serious

How Much Do You Know?

Why Do Things Have Outlines?

Why a Swan?

What is an Instinct?

Part II: Form and Pattern in Anthropology

Culture Contact and Schismogenesis

Experiments in Thinking About Observed Ethnological Behavior

  • Bateson's father had always a hankering after the problems of pattern and symmetry
  • The types of mental operation which are useful in analyzing one field may be equally useful in another.
  • The advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.
  • A habit of constructing abstractions which refer to terms of comparison between entities.
  • I felt that I had discovered how to think.
  • Psychoanalysis has erred sadly in using words that are too short and therefore appear more concrete than they are.

Morale and National Character

  • A person's character is oriented to the motifs and patterns of relationship in the society in which they live.
  • To limit the scope of a concept is almost synonymous with defining it.

Bali: The Value System of a Steady State

Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art

Comment on Part II

Part III: Form and Pathology in Relationship

Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning

A Theory of Play and Fantasy

Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia

Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia

The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia

Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia

Double Bind, 1969

The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication

The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism

Comment on Part III

Part IV: Biology and Evolution

On Empty-Headedness among Biologists and State Boards of Education

The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution

Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication

A Re-examination of "Bateson's Rule"

Comments on Part IV

Part V: Epistemology and Ecology

Cybernetic Explanation

Redundancy and Coding

Conscious Purpose versus Nature

Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation

Form, Substance and Difference

Comment on Part V

Part VI: Crisis in the Ecology of Mind

From Versailles to Cybernetics

Pathologies of Epistemology

The Roots of Ecological Crisis

Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization