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But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?

Gregory Bateson

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Gregory Bateson
Age: 76 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 9
Died: 1980
Died: July 4
Anthropologist
Biologist
Film Director
Linguist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Semiotician
Sociologist
Grantchester
Cambridgeshire
Heart
Inevitably
Always
Answer
Personal
Question
Answers
Probe
Knowing
Epistemology
Point
Explorer
Nature
Explorers

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To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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There are no monotone values in biology.
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A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.
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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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The only way out is spiritual, intellectual, and emotional revolution in which, finally, we learn to experience first hand the interloping connections between person and person, organism and organism, action and consequence.
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Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
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We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
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In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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