24th
Map–territory relation- a brief résumé
René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe)
“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.
The only usefulness of map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map-languages.”
— Alfred Korzybski, Science & Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Institute of GS, 1994, p.61.
“The map–territory relation describes the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that “the map is not the territory,” encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. For example, the pain from a stone falling on one’s foot is not the actual stone, it’s one’s perception of the stone; one’s opinion of a politician, favorable or unfavorable, is not that person; and so on. A specific abstraction or reaction does not capture all facets of its source — e.g. the pain in one’s foot does not convey the internal structure of the stone, you don’t know everything that is going on in the life of a politician, etc. — and thus may limit an individual’s understanding and cognitive abilities unless the two are distinguished. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories—that is, confuse models of reality with reality itself—in this sense. (…)
Gregory Bateson, in “Form, Substance and Difference” from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), elucidates the essential impossibility of knowing what the territory is, as any understanding of it is based on some representation:
“We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.”
Neil Gaiman retells the parable in reference to storytelling in Fragile Things:
“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.”
Korzybski’s dictum “the map is not the territory” is also cited as an underlying principle used in neuro-linguistic programming, where it is used to signify that individual people in fact do not in general have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time, about reality. So it is considered important to be aware that people’s beliefs about reality and their awareness of things (the “map”) are not reality itself or everything they could be aware of (“the territory”). The originators of NLP have been explicit that they owe this insight to General Semantics.” — (Wiki)
Erik Evens in The Linguistic Metaphor:
“Korzybski’s General Semantics offered a view that human knowledge is limited by two main factors: the structure of the human nervous system, and the structure of human languages. He maintained that people cannot experience the world directly, but only through their “abstractions” - nonverbal impressions derived from data detected and transmitted by the senses and the nervous system, and verbal indicators derived from language. (…)
Here’s a story about Alfred Korzybski that’s amusing, and worth repeating because it’s illustrative of some of these ideas: One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. “Nice biscuit, don’t you think”, said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. After a while he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog’s head and the words “Dog Cookies”. The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the bathroom.
“You see, ladies and gentlemen”, Korzybski remarked, “I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but they also eat words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.” It seems his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality, and reality itself.”
The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of “perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves” in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”).” — (Wiki)
The painting is not a pipe, but rather an image of a pipe, which was Magritte’s point: “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe,” I’d have been lying!” — (Harry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images. p. 71.)
“I use the map-territory relationship because the characteristic are general for all existing forms of representation which include the structure of language.
We observe
1) That a map-language is not the territory-fact, etc.,
2) Map-language covers not all the characteristic of territory-fact,
3) Forms of representation are self-reflexive in the sense that an ideal map would include the map of the map, etc., and in language we can speak about language.
These three premises are child-like in their simplicity, and yet involve a flat denial of the fundamental present, yet very ancient, unrevised, harmful premises. The third premise has been historically entirely neglected except partially in mathematics.
This self-reflexiveness of language, however, is on the botton of most human difficulties in daily life as well as in science. (…)
As we have seen, for maximum predictability, we must have a map-language similar in structure to the territory-facts. The next crucial problem is to investigate empirically whether our present map-language is similar in structure to the territory-facts. We know empirically that “space” and “time” do not exist separately, otherwise they can not be divided, and so the facts are non-elementalistic. We know, on the other hand, that verbally we can separate or split thein into ficticious elements which do not exist as such. In other words, that the structure of the existing language is elementalistic where the facts are non-elementalistic. This goes much farther. Thus, in actual life we can not split “body” and “mind” “emotions” and “intellect”, etc., while verbalistically we can do that quite happily, and speculate uselessly on these split fictions. We conclude that this elementalistic language is not similar in structure to a non-elementalistic world and ourselves.
Let us analyze further. We find that every “chair”, “match”, “house”, “horse”, “man”, etc., is different, while the old language of intensional structures has only verbal definitions for verbal fictions called, say, “man”, “chair”, etc., emphasizing similarities and disregarding differences. By extension we have only actual chair1, chair2, etc., Smith1, Smith2, etc. which are actualities, not verbal fictions and verbal definitions. We conclude that the structure of the old accepted language being elementalistic an dintensional is not similar in structure to the facts of life and ourselves. This is a conclusion reached by inspections of facts of ordinary life and scientific work and also linguistic facts concerning structure of language which have been entirely neglected in the past.
The conclusions we must draw from these obvious observations are startling and extremely far-reaching, involving fundamentally the future of mankind and civilization.
Because the structure of the present language is definitely and empirically not similar in structure to facts of life and ourselves, proper evaluation and so predictability in our human affairs is thouroughly impossible except by accident.
Another more serious consequence of the neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic chaos is due to the lack of a science of man by which I mean the lack of application of standard scientific methods to the affairs of man. With our present intensional verbalistic attitutes which follow the structure of language, agreement between individuals and groups is in principle impossible. With a change to extensional orientation, strictly connected with the extensionalization of the structure of language, disagreement becomes impossible. (…) We must make a serious analysis of the neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic factors involved in our present situation and that realization may, perhaps, help us stop the suicide of our world.”
— Alfred Korzybski, Collected Writings, 1920-1950, Institute of General Semantics, 1990, p. 275-276.
“We have to be able to talk about the same things with words which are grounded. (…) We need to see terms and concepts in their context. (…) We can construct frames-of-reference as a schemata to visually reference and share diverse but inter-connected positions, focuses, ranges and horizons, in order to develop not only common grounds but a tolerance for alternate ways of seeing our different levels and scopes. By adequate and open conversation, we can create a common ground. In this way every player can discover his own place in the general panorama and understand better what he does and what he could and should do, or not do.” We can use the cybernetic tools to order our data-base. But he warns that we should not let us stray in a “virtual cyberspace” in a mainly and merely technical sense, with no relevance to real situations. Scales and proportions and their consequences should be duly taken in account in our representation, as we construct a 3 dimensional space/time model.” — International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics
[This note will be gradually expanded…]
See also:
☞ The Relativity of Truth - a brief résumé, Lapidarium
☞ Cognition / relativity tag on Lapidarium
☞ John Shotter on encounters with ‘Other’ - from inner mental representation to dialogical social practices, Lapidarium
☞ Philosophy of perception, Structural differential, Representative realism, List of cognitive biases, Emic and etic, Simulacra and Simulation, Social constructionism
