在此討論格列利．貝森五個核心的觀念，挑戰了許多學術領域；包含西方哲學家以為理所當然的正統信條。亦即：語言的功能在傳接溝通歷程中作為中立的導體。這個設定維持了不考慮不同文化的理性程序的觀念，以及客觀的資訊與數據。這也藉著過去掩蓋了現前的語言殖民化，那對於了解為什麼我們持續依賴造成生態危機的相同心態而言，十分重要。貝森的五個主要觀念是：主導認識論的遞迴性質（recursive nature）、概念地圖和今日文化∕生態實相之間的不相連（在遙遠的過去構成的比喻詮釋架構）、在文化生態學和自然生態學中流行的最基本的資訊來源造成差異的差異性、雙重束縛思考的性質、趨向第三層級學習的需要——提供理解生態智慧和個人智慧的差異，以及說明何以環境學家和哲學家對生態危機的語言根源缺乏關注的理由。

The five core ideas of Gregory Bateson discussed here challenge a widely held orthodoxy taken for granted by many academics, including western philosophers. Namely, that language functions as a neutral conduit in a sender receiver process of communication. This assumption sustains the idea of a culture-free rational process, and objective information and data. It also hides the linguistic colonization of the present by the past, which is critical to understanding why we continue to rely upon the same mind-set that is contributing to the ecological crisis to fix it. Bateson’s five key ideas––the recursive nature of our guiding epistemologies, the disconnect between our conceptual maps (metaphorical interpretative frameworks constituted in the distant past) and today’s cultural/ecological realities, how the difference which make difference is the most basic source of information circulating through both cultural and natural ecologies, the nature of double bind thinking, and the need to move to Level III learning––provide a conceptual framework for understanding the difference between ecological and individual intelligence, and why so little attention is given by environmentalists and philosophers to the linguistic roots of the ecological crisis.