Territory or Map? The Radicalism of Inexperience

Alford Korzybski said: "the map is not the territory." 

There's a great article in the May 2005 issue of Discover Magazine on Temple Grandin, by the writer Verlyn Klinkenborg. 

One of the points Grandin is that many people now don't have the experience to distinguish between the map and the territory, and may prefer the map.

What happens then?

Grandin uses an awkward but powerful word to describe the perceptual fog that normal humans live in. She calls it “abstractification.” It means the ability to live in our thoughts, surrounded by “our ideas of things.” “Normal human beings,” she writes, “are abstractified in their sensory perceptions as well as their thoughts.” This is partly what makes us human. But one of the things Grandin worries about is the increasing tendency of humans to live utterly abstractified lives, cut off from tactile participation in the real, physical world. She laments the way schools have dropped classes like wood shop and metal shop and drafting—the kinds of classes that saved her when she was going to school and failing classes like algebra.

Those changes directly affect autistic children. But normal humans are experiencing a similar loss. We surround ourselves with television and computer games. We practically live in our offices. We inhabit a cocoon of associations and representations of the world around us—increasingly a world divorced from nature. Grandin’s battles in the slaughter industry have nearly all been waged with higher management, not with workers or floor managers, simply because they’re office bound, their thinking determined more by the paper that surrounds them than by living animals and working plants.

The result, according to Grandin, is a pattern that might be called the radicalism of inexperience. “People,” she says, “that live in offices—I don’t care if they’re to the right or the left of an issue—the more far removed they are from practical things, the more radical they get.” This is what happens when humans cut the anchor and drift away from practical experience and, especially, from the experience of nature and the world of animals. We lose the comparative frame that helps us balance our lives.

Worse than that, we insist on the world following the map, rather than adjusting the map to suit the real truth.   Scientists talk about "ground truthing" maps or other representations of reality.

Again and again, we abandon ground truthing as inconvenient, as

"Let's go to war with the equipment we have."

===================

The Map is Not the Territor

Alfred Korzybski coined the term "general semantics" in     his book Science and Sanity. Korzybski had an interest in  the way we as human beings interact with the world outside  our own skins and sometimes take semantic shortcuts that  lead us to false evaluations. He said "the map is not the  territory" to indicate that we should not confuse the "map"  of reality that we carry around in our heads with reality          itself. Korzybski's system of general semantics gives us a  set of tools that enable us to develop awareness of our own map-making process, and thereby to make more accurate and   useful evaluations. It can result in clearer, more effective  communication, more appropriate responses to events around          us, and dealing more effectively with stress in daily life.    Accessed 10/1/01: http://www.general-semantics.org.uk/frontpage.html

                   

T he phrase "the map is not the territory" comes from Science and Sanity, [1933]  by Alford Korzybski

(Ground truthing in the Arctic; in the Klamath Forest;  and ground truthing's  utility in agriculture (with cool photo images);  a reclusive species;
 

 

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

Ew. Why does "Jaws" spring to mind?

Quint: You've got city boy hands, Hooper. You been countin' money all your life.
Hooper: I don't need this working-class-hero crap.

While I agree with Grandin about the value of practical classes in schools, I think the subtext is a prejudice: that dirty-hands work and contact with nature is somehow more worthy, and gives you a more accurate knowledge of the world. I don't think it's remotely true; for instance, horse breeders, for all their hands-on experience, had (and perhaps still have) bizarre beliefs about horse genetics. See http://www.raygirvan.co.uk/apoth/2004_09_01_arc.html#109425928351017367

[liz]

Ray's point is a good one -- although it isn't what Grandin is saying.

I don't mean -- and Grandin doesn't mean -- to exault the physical over the analytical.

What she is saying in the full article (and more fully argued in her book) is that abstract definitions and rules for physical processes need to be evaluated against reality.

It is somewhat akin to our American problem with "zero tolerance" in schools. It sounds great to have "zero tolerance for drugs" on campus, or "zero tolerance for weapons" -- and then the rules are applied mechanistically, without common sense. A first grader makes a "play cake" out of lawn clippings and dirt, and gives it to a friend. The child is expelled, because the "play cake" merely has the appearance of drugs.

What Grandin is saying is the feedback loops have been lost. The interplay between intellect and nature is gone, because the value of nature is ignored.

[Ray Girvan]

I should be working, but... It still smacks of nature-mysticism to me. Temple Grandin's ideas look to be heavily influenced by those of Erich Fromm (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm) who coined the term "abstractification" and who viewed one of the central problems of the human condition as departure from the instinctive natural state. As to General Semantics, these days few people outside its fanbase take seriously Korzybski's views that language is the root of social, economic and political messups. A better case could be argued for factors that are nothing to with language: cognitive biases (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias) and collective phenomena such as the "tragedy of the commons" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons). However much (apparent) grounding in reality they have, people still can think they're perceiving a situation realistically and acting rationally, yet be utterly wrong. Interesting take on this and its relationship to nature by Jared Diamond: "Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?" (www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond03/diamond_print.html).