Science Quote by Gregory Bateson

Bateson is taking a quiet swing at the intellectual shortcut our era still loves: find The One Variable and you get to stop thinking. His claim sounds like a technical rule, but it’s really a cultural critique of reductionism dressed in scientist’s clothing. “In principle” matters. He’s not arguing that single-factor explanations are merely incomplete in practice; he’s saying they are structurally incapable of accounting for pattern, because pattern is relational. A pattern exists in differences, in the way multiple signals constrain and correct each other across time.

The subtext is a warning about explanatory arrogance. If you “invoke a single quantity,” you’re not explaining a pattern; you’re renaming it with a metric. You can measure temperature, but the weather isn’t temperature. You can measure dopamine, but you haven’t explained desire. Bateson’s phrasing also refuses the heroic model of science where one master key unlocks a whole domain. He’s advocating for ecology in the broadest sense: systems, feedback loops, context, and the unintended consequences that appear when you treat living or social processes like linear machines.

Contextually, this lands squarely in Bateson’s mid-century work bridging anthropology, cybernetics, and systems theory. After watching behaviorism, economics, and even parts of biology chase single-cause stories, he’s insisting that explanation should look like the phenomena it claims to describe: multi-causal, recursive, and sensitive to relationship. The line is blunt because it’s a boundary marker: if your account doesn’t have at least two interacting terms, it can’t “see” pattern at all.