Creatura and Pleroma

Creatura and Pleroma are Bateson's terms for two fundamentally different modes of description appropriate to different classes of phenomena. Pleroma is the world as physics describes it — forces, particles, masses, quantities — where causation runs through mechanical transmission and descriptions are context-independent. Creatura is the world of living pattern — meaning, communication, context-dependent interpretation — where causation runs through information and descriptions depend on the position and organization of the observer. Bateson borrowed the terms from Carl Jung's Seven Sermons to the Dead, but stripped them of theological content and repurposed them as an epistemological tool. The distinction is not between two kinds of stuff; it is between two modes of inquiry, each valid for its own domain, each catastrophically misleading when applied outside that domain.