Science Quote by Mary Catherine Bateson

A bad metaphor doesn’t just miss the mark; it redraws the target. Bateson’s warning lands with a scientist’s impatience for sloppy instruments: metaphors aren’t decorative language, they’re cognitive equipment. If the equipment is warped, the thinking that relies on it warps too. Calling something a “war,” a “machine,” a “virus,” a “marketplace,” a “pipeline” isn’t neutral description; it smuggles in a whole rulebook about what counts as victory, efficiency, contagion, value, flow. That’s the toxicity: a metaphor can quietly set the terms of debate so thoroughly that alternatives start to feel unintelligible.

The second line twists the knife. “You can’t think without metaphors” refuses the fantasy of pure, objective language. Bateson, coming out of a lineage steeped in systems thinking and anthropology, is pointing to how minds model complexity: we borrow structure from one domain to navigate another. Metaphor is how we scale from the tangible to the abstract. So the task isn’t to purge metaphor, but to curate it with the same rigor we apply to data and methods.

The subtext is ethical as much as intellectual. Bad metaphors don’t merely confuse; they license bad policies and brittle identities. They make some actions seem natural (attack, optimize, purge) and others naive (care, adapt, live with ambiguity). Bateson’s intent is a call for metaphor literacy: interrogate the frames you inherit, because the language you reach for in a crisis is often the crisis’s hidden architect.