Language: The Map is not the Territory

Alfred Korzyb­ski in “Sci­ence and San­ity” (1933) reflects on the verb “to be” and the process of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. He used to train peo­ple to avoid say­ing “I am”, ask­ing them “Is this all you think you are?”.

Have you noticed when we are asked “who are you”, often, we say our name, and maybe men­tion our occupation/job title? Is this all we are? The verb TO BE can be lim­it­ing and reflects our beliefs about ourselves.

His work was based on the view that human beings are lim­ited in their knowl­edge by the struc­ture of their per­cep­tions and their lan­guage. Unable to expe­ri­ence the world directly, they resort to “abstrac­tions” (non-verbal per­ceived impres­sions and ver­bal indi­ca­tors expressed through lan­guage). The struc­ture of our per­cep­tions and our lan­guage (which deter­mine our under­stand­ing) some­times mis­leads us as to what is going on, what we must deal with. We cre­ate an abstrac­tion and this is the real­ity we deal with. He called for an increased aware­ness in each of us of that process of abstraction.

Inter­est­ingly enough, some 800 years before Korzyb­ski, in India, Shankaracharya, the cre­ator of the phi­los­o­phy of non-duality Advaita Vedanta, men­tioned the human process of “Adhyasa”, super­im­po­si­tion of mean­ing onto the unchang­ing real­ity through our senses, and its rem­edy, “Apavada” decon­struc­tion of the oper­a­tion of the senses.

So how to expand the struc­ture of our lan­guage and our per­cep­tions? Mind chang­ing courses.

Share on Facebook