Mapmaking

I almost never watch the news, or TV for that matter. I don't read newspapers. But I do like to read through the blogs of family and friends to see what sparks their interest of late. Having a very ---uhm--- eclectic bunch, there are usually some surprises. Some laughs, news, research, things to ponder, nostalgia or just frivolous musings. It's all good. Often their thoughts trigger thoughts of my own about a topic, like Marbella's this morning (in my timezone) about reality and maps.

General semantics is a discipline that is all about this and, in the area of self-examination, it is a jewel because it talks about the water that we fishies swim in. Things that influence our perceptions even before we start introspection. And it's hard to build a basis of self knowledge on a shaky foundation, or one we don't examine, so I'm going to poke around a little here in case it may be of value to other intrepid explorers of the clan.

The core observation of general semantics is that the map is not the territory. As obvious as this seems to us, we are constantly mistaking our descriptions of reality for reality itself. In his book, People in Quandaries, Wendell Johnson makes a very strong case for the basis of neurosis lying in this simple substitution. Most of us wouldn't mistake the menu for the actual food, but we constantly mistake our descriptions for what is really going on.

Now this would not be so insidious (although still benumbing) if it weren't for the fact that our map mapping tools themselves have some deadly (literally) flaws. Our primary tool for in-forming us about the world and creating these maps is language. Much as we'd like to believe that language is just a mirror of the world, it actually has very powerful structures that mold things before it presents them. Remember the bed of Procrustes? It fit everyone. Sure, some people may need a few extremities lopped off, or their bones wretched out of their sockets, but one way or another they all fit. There are many fascinating ways that language does this, but I'll just discuss one and leave others for the curious.

Deep within our language lies a little mechanism from the time of Aristotle that invisibly shapes the way we build our maps and descriptions of the world. It's called the law of identity. First I'd like to flush it out in its raw form and then show how it distorts when clothed. Essentially the mechanism is this:

1. A is A
2. A cannot be 'not A'
3. Something is either A or it's not

Sounds like common sense, no? Right is Right, Wrong is Wrong. But our words, just like our sensory stimuli, are an abstraction of something else, we don't react to things, we react to symbols and abstractions of things. This makes us particularly susceptible to propaganda. To a mouse, cheese is cheese, that's why a mouse-trap works. But sometimes cheese is bait.

It gets even more insidious when this mechanism spins its logic in our psyches with constructs like:

We are either successful/loving/intelligent or we're not.
We can't be both successful/loving/intelligent and not successful/loving/intelligent and
We have to be one or the other.

How many of our self-inflicted quandaries are built on this shaky fabric? Which happens quite easily when language does our thinking for us.

So one of the semantic tools to keep in mind in countering this is that A is never just, or maybe even, A. The map is never the territory, it's always a representation of a part of the territory that may or may not even be there. And maps are not one time deals. They need constant tweaking. New roads pop up, old roads close, towns grow or shrink. The greatest tragedies in our modern world aren't because of conflicts between right and wrong, but between two rights.

And this entry is just a little map about making maps, it may be useful in navigating a piece of this territory, or it may not. Hopefully, it's both.

Related Reading (and useful just to check the comments of the readers :-)

• Drive Yourself Sane
  
• People In Quandaries
• Language in Thought and Action