Bateson argued that many aspects of the fundamental structure and processes relevant to the segment of the world involving communication, messages, and meaning had to be carefully distinguished from those that were relevant to other aspects of the world. When you kick a stone, he would say, the movement of the stone is determined by its mass, and by the energy and direction of your kick; when you kick a dog it moves with the energy of its own metabolism because it understands something.
His arguments about these distinctions were to clear the ground. In the physical world, "chains of cause and effect. . . can be referred to forces and impacts" (1972:xxi). But in the world of meaning (and here is one of his examples at the service of a search for fundamentals):
Nothing-that which is not-can be a cause. . . . Remember that zero is different from one, and because zero is different from one, zero can be a cause in the psychological world, the world of communication. The letter which you do not write can get an angry reply; and the income tax form which you do not fill in can trigger the Internal Revenue boys into energetic action, because they too have their breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner and can react with energy which they derive from their metabolism. [1972:452]
Bateson sometimes used the termspleromaandcreatura, which he borrowed from Jung (who claimed to be following Gnostic usage) for the two domains.
The pleroma is the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no "distinctions." Or, as I would say, no "differences." In the creatura, effects are brought about precisely by difference. [1972:456]
These differences are the subset of changes ("the differences which make a difference") within or environing a "system" which is ordered in such a way that it responds to them, so that they are for that system meaningful messages.
These differences and the systems for which they are significant, (their elements, structures, class, and species characteristics) were what concerned him. Bateson tried to work out some of the ways in which the "creatura" was structured, maintained, and learned, something of its evolutionary and adaptive features, and of its pathologies. For this he extended the idea of "mind."
I suggest that the delimitation of an individual mind must always depend upon what phenomena we wish to understand or explain. Obviously there are lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and the messages which they carry must be included as part of the mental system whenever they are relevant. [1972:458]
(We will note below a further extension of the idea of "mind" in his later thinking.)
His interrelated concepts of end-linkages, levels of communication, schismogenesis, the double-bind theory of schizophrenia, the evolutionary implications of play, the significance of context and context markers, the specific formal properties of analogical communication, ways of structuring and communicating relationships, were all (in addition to a large numbers of less formalized conceptions) attempts to develop analytic tools for dealing with the "creatura" in what he thought were the terms adequate to it. Central to all this was a powerful learning theory (developed in a series of papers inSteps to an Ecology of Mind) which includes the concept of a "second level learning" (deuterolearning), suggesting how features of world view and aspects of character (both culturally agreed on and individual) glossed by terms such as "fatalism." "instrumentalism," "passivity," "free will," and so on, are learned, and how they come to be the "common sense" of groups. He also suggests in considerations of "third level learning" how the certainties of second-level learning may, under quite precisely specifiable conditions, be broken down or "transcended," an idea which has interesting implications for superordinate systems of social control and integration.
Batesoncametoseethesociopsychologicalforms
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