Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

by Jordan B. Peterson

Before the emergence of empirical methodology, which allowed for methodical separation of subject and object in description, the world-model contained abstracted inferences about the nature of existence, derived primarily from observations ofhuman behavior. This means, in essence, that pre-experimental man observed "morality" in his behavior and inferred (through the process described previously) the existence of a source or rationale for that morality in the structure of the "universe" itself. Of course, this "universe" is the experiential jield-affect, imagination and all-and not the "objective" world constructed by the postempirical mind. This prescientific "model of reality" primarily consisted of narrative representations of behavioral patterns (and of the contexts that surround them), and was concerned primarily with the motivational significance of events and processes.