The Lindisfarne Tapes

Gregory Bateson: How We Know What We Know

Episode Summary

Gregory Bateson, anthropologist, cyberneticist, and systems theorist, develops a theory of “how we know what we know” using a number of parables. Bateson is the author of Mind and Nature and Steps to an Ecology of Mind. (Episode photo courtesy of wildculture.com)

Episode Notes

The Lindisfarne Tapes are selected recordings of presentations and conversations at the Lindisfarne Fellows’ meetings. In March of 2013 William Thompson granted permission to the Schumacher Center for a New Economics to transfer the talks from the old reel-to-reel tapes to digital format so that they could be posted online and shared freely. In 2021, the Schumacher Center used the digital audio to create the Lindisfarne Tapes Podcast. Reposting should include acknowledgment of williamirwinthompson.org. Learn more about the Lindisfarne Tapes here.

Bateson delivered this lecture in 1976 at the Lindisfarne Summer Conference, "A Light Governance for America: The Cultures and Strategies of Decentralization."