A certain mother habitually rewards her small son with ice cream after he eats his spinach. What 2 additional information would you need to be able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate spinach, b. Love or hate ice cream, or c. Love or hate Mother? The Loyalty Test. Corporate Compliance

´´I used to teach an informal course for psychiatric residents in the Veterans Administration Hospital at Palo Alto, trying to get them to think some of the thoughts that are in these essays. They would attend dutifully and even with intense interest to what I was saying, but every year the question would arise after three or four sessions of the class: “What is this course all about?” I tried various answers to this question. Once I drew up a sort of catechism and offered it to the class as a sampling of the questions which I hoped they would be able to discuss after completing the course. The questions ranged from “What is a sacrament? ‘ to “What is entropy? ” and “What is play? ” As a didactic manoeuvre, my catechism was a failure: it silenced the class. But one question in it was useful: A certain mother habitually rewards her small son with ice cream after he eats his spinach. What 2 additional information would you need to be able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate spinach, b. Love or hate ice cream, or c. Love or hate Mother? We devoted one or two sessions of the class to exploring the many ramifications of this question, and it became clear to me that all the needed additional information concerned the context of the mother ‘ s and son’s behaviour. In fact, the phenomenon of context and the closely related phenomenon of “meaning ” defined a divisionbetween the “hard” sciences and the sort of science which I was trying to build. Gradually I discovered that what made it difficult to tell the class what the course was about was the fact that my way of thinking was different from theirs. A clue to this difference came from one of the students. It was the first session of the class and I had talked about the cultural differences between England and America—a matter which should always be touched on when an Englishman must teach Americans about cultural anthropology. At the end of the session, one resident came up. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure that the others were all leaving, and then said rather hesitantly, “I want to ask a question.” “Yes.” “It’s— do you want us to learn what you are telling us? ” I hesitated a moment, but he rushed on with, “Or is it all a sort of example, an illustration of something else?” “Yes, indeed! ” But an example of what´?´´.GregoryBateson.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind : Gregory Bateson