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November 17, 2020 - January 9, 2021
13. Languages, formulational systems, etc., as maps and only maps of what they purport to represent. This awareness led to the three premises (popularly expressed) of general semantics: the map is not the territory no map represents all of ‘its’ presumed territory
maps are self-reflexive, i.e., we can map our maps indefinitely. Also, every map is at least, whatever else it may claim to map, a map of the map-maker: her/his assumptions, skills, world-view, etc.
Korzybski recognized that conclusions constitute behaviors, consequences, doings, and that these are not merely logical derivatives but psycho-logical inevitabilities. If we want to change behaviors, we must first change the premises which gave birth to the behaviors.
Predictability as the primary measure of the value of an Epistemological formulation.
As always in human affairs, in contrast to those of animals, the issues are circular. Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism on our institutions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to nervous maladjustment of the incoming generations which, being born into, are forced to develop under the un-natural (for man) semantic conditions imposed on them. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations. The vicious circle is completed;
In the present investigation, we have discovered and formulated a definite psychophysiological mechanism which is to be found in all cases of ‘mental’ ills, infantilism, and the so-called ‘normal’ man. The differences between such neural disturbances in different individuals turn out to vary only in degree, and as they resemble closely the nervous responses of animals, which are necessarily regressive for man, we must conclude that, generally, we do not use our nervous system properly, and that we have not, as yet, entirely emerged from a very primitive semantic stage of development, in spite
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When we study comparatively the nervous responses of animals and man, the above issues become quite clear, and we discover a definite psychophysiological mechanism which marks this difference. That the above has not been already formulated in a workable way is obviously due to the fact that the structure of the old language successfully prevented the discovery of these differences, and, indeed, has been largely responsible for these human semantic disturbances.
Investigation shows that, in general, the issues raised are mostly linguistic, and that, in particular, they are based on the analysis of the structure of languages in connection with s.r.
All sciences have progressed exclusively because they have succeeded in establishing their own [non-A] languages. For instance, a science of thermodynamics could not have been built on the terms of ‘cold’ and ‘warm’. Another language, one of relations and structure, was needed; and, once this was produced, a science was born and progress secured. Could modern mathematics be built on the Roman notation for numbers—I, II, III, IV, V.? No, it could not.
This ‘emery’ in the nervous system I call identification.
Identification appears also as something ‘infectious’, for it is transmitted directly or indirectly from parents and teachers to the child by the mechanism and structure of language, by established and inherited ‘habits of thought’, by rules for life-orientation, etc.
Training in non-identity plays a therapeutic role with adults.
Any system involves an enormous number of assumptions, presuppositions, etc., which, in the main, are not obvious but operate unconsciously. As such, they are extremely dangerous, because should it happen that some of these unconscious presuppositions are false to facts, our whole life orientation would be vitiated by these unconscious delusional factors, with the necessary result of harmful behaviour and maladjustment.
Every system is expressed in some language of some structure, which is based in turn on silent presuppositions, and ultimately reflects and reinforces those presuppositions on and in the system.
‘Human nature’ can be changed, once we know how. Experience and experiments show that this ‘change of human nature’, which under verbal elementalism was supposed to be impossible, can be accomplished in most cases in a few months, if we attack this problem by the non-elementalistic, neuro-psycho-logical, special non-identity technique.
If the ignorance and identifications of our rulers could be eliminated a variety of delusional factors through home and school educational and other powerful agencies would cease to be imposed and enforced upon us, and the revision of our systems would be encouraged, rather than hampered.
If, by a higher order abstraction, we consider individual objects, not in some perfectly fictitious ‘isolation’, but as they appear empirically, as members of some aggregate or collection of objects, we find characteristics which belong to the collection and not to an ‘isolated’ object.
Let us take some actual territory in which cities appear in the following order: Paris, Dresden, Warsaw, when taken from the West to the East. If we were to build a map of this territory and place Paris between Dresden and Warsaw thus: We should say that the map was wrong, or that it was an incorrect map, or that the map has a different structure from the territory. If, speaking roughly, we should try, in our travels, to orient ourselves by such a map, we should find it misleading. It would lead us astray, and we might waste a great deal of unnecessary effort. In some cases, even, a map of
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A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must be considered only as maps. A word is not the object it represents; and languages exhibit also this peculiar self-reflexiveness,
The rest of this volume is devoted to showing that the common, [A]-system and language which we inherited from our primitive ancestors differ entirely in structure from the well-known and established 1933 structure of the world, ourselves and our nervous systems included. Such antiquated map-language, by necessity, must lead us to semantic disasters, as it imposes and reflects its unnatural structure on the structure of our doctrines and institutions. Obviously, under such linguistic conditions, a science of man was impossible; differing in structure from our nervous system, such language must
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As words are not the objects which they represent, structure, and structure alone, becomes the only link which connects our verbal processes with the empirical data.
To achieve adjustment and sanity and the conditions which follow from them, we must study structural characteristics of this world first, and, then only, build languages of similar structure, instead of habitually ascribing to the world the primitive structure of our language.
That languages, as such, all have some structure or other is a new and, perhaps, unexpected notion. Moreover, every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use. The guessing and ascribing of a fanciful, mostly primitive-assumed, structure to the world is precisely what ‘philosophy’ and ‘metaphysics’ do. The empirical search for world-structure and the building of new languages (theories), of
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Any one who will reflect upon these structural peculiarities of language cannot miss the semantic point that the scientific method uses the only correct language-method. It develops in the natural order, while metaphysics of every description uses the reversed, and ultimately a pathological, order.
This is a chicken and egg situation. a model needs to be developed before the territory can be experienced
Let us repeat once more the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.
system. If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.
I would sat it is in tge capacity to predict outcomes that are desired
The structure of the world is, in principle, unknown; and the only aim of knowledge and science is to discover this structure.
Insofar as it helps us close a Meaning Gap
