Science Quote by Gregory Bateson

Bateson is picking a fight with a whole modern reflex: when faced with something intricate and alive-looking, we reach for physics-flavored nouns and call it an explanation. “Tension,” “energy,” “forces” - the vocabulary of engines and levers - becomes a kind of rhetorical solvent. It dissolves our discomfort with complexity by translating pattern into push-and-pull. Bateson’s provocation is that this translation is not just clumsy but category-mistaken.

His target isn’t measurement or material reality; it’s explanatory prose that smuggles in metaphors as if they were mechanisms. You can say “energy” and feel you’ve named a cause, while you’ve really just gestured at intensity. The subtext is anti-reductionist and deeply cybernetic: patterns don’t “come from” a substance-like quantity so much as from relationships, constraints, and feedback loops. Genesis of pattern is about organization - differences that make a difference - not a hidden reservoir of oomph.

Context matters. Bateson wrote in an intellectual moment intoxicated by thermodynamics, systems theory, and the prestige of the hard sciences. In that climate, to talk like a physicist was to sound serious; to talk about form, communication, and context risked sounding vague. Bateson flips the status hierarchy: the supposedly rigorous terms are, in the wrong mouths, the vague ones.

The bite of “inappropriate or wrong” is deliberate. He’s warning that bad causal language doesn’t merely fail to illuminate; it actively misleads by implying that patterns are produced by quantities rather than selected and stabilized by structure. It’s a call to stop treating metaphor as ontology.