Reading: Abstraction
ABSTRACTION
Exploring Why the Map is not the Territory
The particular peepholes that define [our] outlook on the world become too small for [us] to see its large and exciting horizons. —Wendell Johnson (1946, p. 30)
When we “abstract,” we select small portions of reality to attend to and leave out the rest. In the abstraction process, our senses and locations, not to mention previous training and experiences, limit what we encounter of all that is going on in the world. Bois (1978) created the acronym “WIGO” from the phrase “what is going on,” using it to represent “all known levels of existence, from atomic elements to galactic spirals racing away from one another” (p. 78). I use WIGO whenever I refer to a world in process—the constant changing of microscopic and submicroscopic levels of existence.
Korzybski (2000) used a rotary fan to demonstrate the impact of our senses on perceptual accuracy in this ever-changing environment. He selected this simple demonstration because it showed that what we “see” may not be what is really there. As Korzybski (2000) argued:
Let us recall, in this connection, the familiar example of a rotary fan, which is made up of separate radial blades, but which, when rotating with a certain velocity, gives the impression of a solid disk. In this case the “disk” is not “reality,” but a nervous integration, or abstraction from the rotating blades. We not only see the “disk” where there is no disk, but, if the blades rotate fast enough, we could not throw sand through them, as the sand would be too slow to get through before being struck by one of the blades. (p. 382)
Similarly, our other senses may lead us astray. For instance, when I was a young child, my grandparents encouraged me to taste something “new” when I was visiting them in Florida. I ate what looked and smelled like fried chicken; basing that smell and looks on my previous dining experiences, I assumed that it was chicken. However, when my grandfather explained that I was eating “frog legs,” I gagged. I was fairly certain at the time that the “frog” that my cousin and ichased around the backyard did not belong on my dinner plate!
Even though it was not logical, my emotional reaction demonstrates why Korzybski (2000) coined the term “semantic reaction” (p. 24). He proposed that we use intellect and emotion during abstraction, and, thereby, create meaning as a whole being—as an “organismas- a-whole-in-the-environment” (Korzybski, p. liii). Similarly, Pula (2000) explained a semantic reaction as “the total (‘emotional’-‘intellectual,’ psycho-logical) response of a human organism to a given” (p. 16–17). Another option for remembering to account for both an intellectual and emotional response during abstraction is to use the verb “think-feel- evaluate” (Institute of General Semantics Seminar, 2002). This hyphenated verb clearly alerts people of their abstracting. How might a debate about assault weapons ban be enhanced by each person remembering “I think-feel-evaluate” during a heated argument? If this hyphenated verb reminds individuals to account for the intellectual, emotional, and evaluative nature of their responses, perhaps it could also encourage them to remember others abstract as well.
Even when we are aware that we think-feel-evaluate, Chisholm (1945) cautioned that our nervous systems often report “facts,” even though we are making inferences, because of past conditioning:
The point is, we don’t really come to a new experience, whatever that new experience is, with an absolutely untrained nervous system, and ‘open mind.’ We just don’t come to a situation without ourselves having a history, a trained set of habitual reactions. (p. 9).
Our senses and previous training, thus, limit what we experience of WIGO. Recently, Christof Koch, a neurobiologist, underscored the impact of our nervous systems: “We’re now beginning to understand that what I see in my head is actually constructed by my head, by my neurons” (as cited in Stockdale, 2009b, p. 14).
To clearly delineate how people abstract and the ubiquitous nature of abstraction, Korzybski (2000) created the “structural differential” (see Figure 1, from Stockdale, 2009a). He advocated keeping the structural differential nearby because we need a visual reminder of this automatic process: we omit characteristics when we sense objects (“O” level) from all the events going on around us (“E” level), and leave out even more characteristics when label the object (“D” level; p. 474).
Korzybski (2000) proposed that the object we perceive (and label) represents “a mad dance of ‘electrons,’ which is known to consist of extremely complex dynamic processes of very fi ne structures, acted upon by, and reacting upon, the rest of the universe, inextricably connected with everything else and dependent on everything else” (p. 387). He used a “broken-off line” on a parabola to depict this “infi nite number of characteristics” found in the microscopic and submicroscopic worlds, and he included small circles to represent the characteristics of the event at the “E” level. When our senses have perceived the object from the event level, we move to the “O,” or object, level, which Korzybski (2000) denoted with a “fi nite” size (the big circle) and “fi nite” characteristics (the small circles). Both the “O” and “E” levels occur in the nonverbal world.
Figure 2.1: Korzybski’s structural differential. Korzybski developed a visual reminder of the abstraction process.
When we finally use language to describe an object, we have reached the “D,” or descriptive, level of abstracting. As Korzybski (2000) demonstrated with the loose strings hanging from the parabola, the further we move away from nonverbal world, the fewer details we carry with us: “The number of characteristics which we ascribe by defi nition to the label is still smaller than the number of characteristics the object has” (p. 387). Animals, like Fido the dog (represented by the small circle), may abstract objects, but without language, animals do not have higher order abstractions on the “D” and “I” levels, nor are they capable of time-binding, as are humans.
The important thing to remember about abstraction is that we carry less and less of WIGO with us as we move from one level to the next: “The object is not the event but an abstraction from it, and the label is not the object nor the event, but a still further abstraction” (Korzybski, 2000, p. 387). The strings on the model presented in Figure 1 represent the nervous system’s limited capabilities because the strings connect very few small circles from the “E” to the “O” levels, and even fewer from the “O” to the “D” levels.
Once we realize how little language represents WIGO, we further understand why Korzybski developed these map–territory analogies and Anton (n.d.) provided updated corollaries: the map is not the territory (there is no not territory) and the map cannot cover all of the territory (a map is part of the territory). When I tasted the “chicken” offered by my grandparents, my map was not representative of what I was really eating, nor did it cover the entire dining experience.
Korzybski (2000) also proposed that maps are “self-reflexive” and warned about what happens when we use language to talk about language: The false-to-fact results of abstraction can be costly, especially when we use an already inaccurate map as the “fact” to make further inferences at other levels.
If we call the level [I] an abstraction of second order, we must call an abstraction from this abstraction an abstraction of third order, [I1]. Once an abstraction of third order has been produced, it becomes, in turn, a fact on record, potentially a stimulus, and can be abstracted further and a statement about it, which becomes an abstraction of the fourth order [I2]. This process has no defi nite limits, for, whenever statements of any order are made, we can always make a statement about them, and so produce an abstraction of still higher order [Ix]. (p. 392)
Hence, the inferences that we call “facts” are really produced by abstracting limited characteristics of an object, which is why Korzybski (2000) advocated for an elimination of the “false to fact ‘is’ of identity” (p. 474). If I am shopping for a laundry detergent that normally comes in a blue box, and I scan the shelves only for blue boxes, I might overlook my detergent in its new white box. When I act as if the box “is” blue, I take my “false” map and operate as if it were “fact.” The false-to-fact results of abstraction can be costly, especially when we use an already inaccurate map as the “fact” to make further inferences at other levels.
To further complicate this process, we can use the same word when we are referring to different levels of abstraction. Chisholm (1945) demonstrated this problem with the statement, “never say never” (p. 54), explaining that the phrase included a behavior and a command to complete the behavior: one inference level is the behavior, whereas another inference level is what to do about the behavior. In Chapter 1, I gave the example about “being angry that I am angry,” which could result in not sharing my experiences of age discrimination. I am sure you can think of personal experiences with both of these statements and other such phrases, “I am in love with love” and “I am thinking about thinking.”
Elson (2010) suggested that we need to teach “levels literacy”—an “alertness to the interplay or relationship between levels . . . [and an] alertness to the implications of such relationships for oneself and others” (pp. 173–174). She thought that our failure to note that one level is “about” another may keep us from being conscious of abstracting: “One message component, in other words, is an observation of, or inference, evaluation about the other, and/or represents information about the other’s context that qualifies its meaning” (p. 165). She proposed teaching about levels with koans, such as the one below, as a way to operationalize differing levels of abstraction:
You are a student of Zen and the Master asks, “Does a dog have a Buddha nature?” Then he warns, “If you answer falsely I will hit you with this stick. If you say nothing I will hit you with this stick.”
Question: What should you do?
Answer: Take away his stick.
The answer takes an emergent perspective not only in that it reconciles and transcends the yes–no frame of the question, it also transcends the frame of the question and answer itself, and the frame of master and student. Transcending such frames requires an awareness that such frames are in play, as opposed to an inhabiting of the frames as a fish inhabits water (i.e., without awareness of the levels environment). Reading the levels of such a question would be the goal of levels literacy. (p. 175)
The ability to develop an awareness of levels, an understanding of higher order abstracting, is what makes time-binding possible for humans and not for animals. Time-binding was Korzybski’s (2000) great hope for humankind to learn from “the experiences of all past generations” (p. 394). Consequently, if we use the scientific method to challenge higher levels of abstraction and to find lower level descriptions, then our language will more closely resembles the territories—the nonverbal world—in which we find ourselves. It is these nonverbal and verbal worlds that we explore in the next two sections.
NONVERBAL AWARENESS
Knowing that there are more details in WIGO than our senses will ever discern, how can we improve our nonverbal awareness? First, we must distinguish between the “nonverbal” world in the abstraction process and the “nonverbal” cues known as nonverbal communication, which we interpret on the verbal level. Nonverbal cues can stand alone and/or accompany language: “physical appearance, body movements, gestures, facial expressions, eye movements, touching behaviors, the voice and the way people use objects, time and space to communication” (Morreale, Spitzberg, & Barge, 2007, p. 110). Similar to language, nonverbal cues vary across cultures and contexts: “In Japan, a nod means that one is listening—but not that one necessarily understands” (Martin & Nakayama, 2011, p. 171).
The nonverbal world that is represented by “the mad dance of electrons” (event level) and our senses (object level) is what I mean by “nonverbal awareness” in this section. Stockdale (2009b) called an awareness of the nonverbal world “sensory awareness” (p. 31). Korzybski (2000) recommended that we use the structural differential to explain our experiences, thereby engaging “all available nervous channels” (p. 475): seeing, hearing, speaking and moving. He proposed how to use the structural differential to make this work:
Thus, through the ear we stress verbally the formula of the rejections of the “is” of identity by indicating with our finger the different orders of abstractions, in the meantime, affecting the eye while we repeat “this is not this.” We utilize our kinesthetic centres, not only by pointing the finger to different levels, but also by making broad motions with our hands, indicating the stratifications. We should train in both horizontal and vertical stratifications, always using the hands. The stratification indicates the differences, or ordering of different order abstractions; the vertical stratification indicates the difference between “man” and “animal” and the differences between the different absolute individuals. In both cases the semantic effect of the “is” of identity is counteracted. (p. 475)
Students, however, seem to appreciate Stockdale’s (2009b) abstracting model (Figure 2). They find the nonverbal world easier to comprehend because of the five senses pictured and the phrase “what I sense is not what happened” (p. 29). Additionally, students appreciate the explanation of the verbal levels: “what we describe is not what we sense” and “what it means is not what we describe” (p. 29).
Figure 2.2: Stockdale’s abstracting model. He revised Korzybski’s structural differential, including words and pictures to explain the abstraction process.
To complement using structural differential to explain recent miscommunication events with others, we use Kodish and Kodish’s (2011) “sensory awareness” exercises to become more aware of the nonverbal world. Have someone read the following exercise to you.
Close your eyes to help you experience a world without words: What are you doing right now? As you [hear] these words let yourself become aware of how you are sitting or lying down or standing . . .
How can you allow yourself to feel the support of what holds you up?
How much do you need to hold yourself up?
Where do you feel unnecessary tensions?
Do you feel tension in your jaw?
In your face? Where do you feel ease?
How clearly do you feel yourself breathing?
Many events are occurring inside and outside your skin right now. Can you allow yourself nonverbally to experience these activities? When you focus unnecessarily on labeling and explaining, you may miss something important going on in and around you. (Kodish & Kodish, p. 105–106)
Now focus on one sense at a time, completing each of the nonverbal awareness exercises on different days:
Day 1: Touch the cloth of your clothes. Notice the sensation in your finger, your hands. Allow the sensations to travel where they will. Move to a different part of your clothes. Notice any differences in sensations.
Day 2: Listen to whatever sounds come to you right now . . . Do you find yourself labeling what you hear? Listen again and this time if you begin to label sounds just notice that you are doing it and allow yourself to come back to the sound again.
Day 3: Choose something to look at. Without words, take in what comes to your eyes. Continue looking: what else come to you?
Day 4: Consider the sounds, sights, aromas around you as structures to explore. Pick an “object” such as a stone or a pencil. Examine it closely, silently, for several minutes. Use “all” of your senses: see, hear, touch, smell, taste, move it. How well can you do this without labeling or describing? (adapted from Kodish & Kodish, 2011, p. 106)
I like to use an apple for the object noted in the last exercise to ensure that I focus on the senses of taste and smell. Explore answers to the following two questions after each nonverbal awareness exercise:
1. What “structures” emerge as a function of this sense? (Awareness of abstraction)
2. What “meanings” do you discern? (Awareness of evaluation)
Keep your answers from each exercise, noting progress or lack thereof toward experiencing the nonverbal world. Many of us in the United States struggle with such exercises because we have not been taught to be silent, let alone to find value in silence. However, these exercises encourage “semantic relaxation,” making us more aware of ourselves as “map makers” (Kodish & Kodish, 2011, p. 104).
Korzybski (2000) believed that because both “affective, or ‘emotional,’ responses and blood pressure are neurologically closely connected, [then] it is fundamental for ‘emotional’ balance to have ‘normal’ blood pressure, and vice versa” (p. lix). Much like the relaxation techniques you might have learned in a yoga or exercise class, Korzybski worked with students to relax tensions, to be “more open to their experiences, better able to take in and evaluate information” (as cited in Kodish & Kodish, 2011, p. 104).
In addition to the nonverbal awareness exercises focused on our five senses, Kodish and Kodish (2011) recommended the “means whereby” to focus on the “how” (p. 108) we move through the world. I have students practice getting up and sitting down, and walking around a building, trying to focus on “how” they move. They find this nearly impossible to do, as their senses focus on the weather, others’ movements, and the terrains across which they traverse.
Ultimately, these experiential approaches help us practice what Korzybski meant by an extensional orientation: giving “priority to ‘facts’ or nonverbal happenings rather than verbal definitions and labels, and maintaining our consciousness of abstracting” (Kodish & Kodish, 2011, p. 98).To complement our newly acquired nonverbal awareness, we then move to building an awareness of the limitations of language itself—a verbal awareness.
VERBAL AWARENESS
Korzybski (2000) argued for a “complete denial of ‘identity,’” an elimination of identification, to help us match the structure of our language to the nonverbal world it represents (p. 10). In other words, we need to challenge our perceptions because, as we learned earlier, what we describe is not what we sense, and what we sense is not what happened. Korzybski was concerned with humans confusing these levels of abstraction: “When humans who are engaged in abstracting identify (confuse) orders of abstracting they are “identifying” . . . [and] identification [becomes] the primary mechanism of misevaluation” (as cited in Pula, 2000, p. 23). Similarly, Chisholm (1945) explained what happens when we confuse levels of abstraction:
What I say about it is what it is
My statement = truth about subject of the statement
WORDS=TRUTH
What I say about anything = what it is (p. 3)
Unfortunately, our nervous systems may prevent us from knowing what “it” is for sure but our language allows us to operate as if words, or labels, represent reality. The need for Ultimately, these experiential approaches help us practice what Korzybski meant by an extensional orientation: giving “priority to ‘facts’ or nonverbal happenings rather than verbal definitions and labels, and maintaining our consciousness of abstracting” (Kodish & Kodish, 2011, p. 98). structural changes in our language is apparent in the following example:
If it is what I say it is, it is perfectly safe for me to guide myself entirely in terms of my verbal formulation. I don’t have to look out at the world again at all because I have in me some words which are equivalent to it.
But what is in the cans in a grocery store is more important than the labels wound around them: if a can containing spinach is by mistake labeled pumpkin, no amount of looking at the label will make the pie of the contents palatable pie for anyone but Popeye. Yet identification behavior equates label and thing labeled, and assumes ican safely guide my reactions by the label. (Chisholm, 1945, p. 3)
Even if we laugh at this fuzzy logic, how many times do we react to labels on a daily basis? Labeling some people as “kind” and others as “rude,” we move through our interactions without an awareness of how people change. This is why some general semanticists advocate for elimination of the verb “to be,” proposing that we write in “E-prime,” avoiding the “is” of identity (Bourland, 1989). Murphy (1992) explained that the verb “is” joins “nouns at different levels of abstraction [Mary is a woman]” and joins “a noun to an adjective that neither completely nor permanently qualifies it [Mary is cold]” (p. 20).
Write a paragraph about your best friend and then check it for forms of the verb “to be.” See how many times you use the “is of identity” to link nouns as if they were identical, on the same level of abstraction (e.g., my friend is a physician). Similarly, how often did you find the “is of prediction,” linking nouns with adjectives as if personality characteristics remain constant (e.g., she is amazing)? Just because I am “outgoing” today does not mean that I will act that way in a few days, let alone in a few years.
Murphy (1992) continued with more problems with the verb “to be”:
. . . the verb makes possible the widespread use of the passive voice, conditions us to accept detours around crucial issues of causality (“Mistakes were made”). It makes possible the raising of unanswerable, because hopelessly formulated, questions (“What is truth?”). It makes possible, too, the construction of a variety of phrases (“As is well known . . .”) that casually sweep reasoning under a rug. One also finds the verb to be pressed into service on behalf of stereotypical labeling (“Scotsmen are stingy”) and overbroad existential generalization (“I am just no good”). These issues aside, semanticists say, the verb to be, broadly “Yet identification behavior equates label and thing labeled, and assumes ican safely guide my reactions by the label.” speaking , imputes an Aristotelian neatness, rigidity, and permanence to the world around us and to the relationships among all things in it—conditions that rarely have a basis in dynamic reality. (p. 20)
Such examples demonstrate the need to scrutinize the verb “to be” in our daily thinking, writing, and speaking.
Consequently, we can fully appreciate the need for verbal and nonverbal awareness in light of the abstraction process. The following chapters of this What he seeks to escape is an absolute failure, what he anxiously pursues is an absolute success—and they do not exist outside his aching head. What he does in fact achieve is a series of relative successes; and these are all that he, these are all that anyone, can ever achieve. text help us to put this general semantics methodology into daily practice. Ultimately, we want to avoid being trapped at higher levels of abstraction and pursuing unattainable goals, the result of which is well described by Wendell Johnson (1946):
In spite of all the prizes he captures, “success” eludes him! It eludes him for the remarkably obvious, but persistently unnoticed, reason that it is merely a verbal mirage. What he seeks to escape is an absolute failure, what he anxiously pursues is an absolute success—and they do not exist outside his aching head. What he does in fact achieve is a series of relative successes; and these are all that he, these are all that anyone, can ever achieve. But in the midst of relative abundance, absolutistic idealists suffer the agonies of famine. (pp. 5–6)
SUMMARY
To demonstrate how our nervous systems limit perceptions of reality, Korzybski (2000) created a visual representation of the abstraction process—the structural differential. He proposed that this diagram could be used to explain semantic reactions, noting both intellectual and emotional responses of human beings during abstraction. Moreover, the structural differential explains how we think-feel-evaluate, leaving out characteristics as we move from the event (WIGO) to object level (our senses), and even more details as we use language in the descriptive and inference levels.
Because maps are self-refl exive, we can use language to talk about language, often confusing descriptive and inference levels. Korzybski (2000) warned about this “falseto- fact ‘is’ of identity”: using an inaccurate map to make further inferences. Elson (2010) proposed teaching about levels literacy, acknowledging the interplay between levels of abstraction.
Korzybski (2000) advocated using of the structural differential to explain our experiences because we could involve several senses and our kinesthetic centers when we state, “this is not this,” engaging the ear, with the eye focused on the motion of the hands, indicating the big distance between WIGO and inferences. Additionally, Kodish and Kodish (2011) proposed that nonverbal awareness exercises help people explore how structures and meaning emerge as a function of their senses.
Chisholm’s (1945) example about mislabeled cans of pumpkin underscored the fallacy of identification. These kind of mistakes might be what encouraged scholars to advocate using E-prime, completely eliminating any form of “to be.” Murphy used the “is of identity” and “is of prediction” to demonstrate how this verb can link nouns as if they were on the same level of abstraction, when, in reality, they are not.
In the next three chapters, we move this newfound awareness of abstraction to action— correcting faulty language behaviors in our interactions with others. We explore how patterns of miscommunication occur when we overlook the basic premises of general semantics. In Chapter 3, we see how allness occurs when we forget that “a map cannot cover all its territory, so any map is only part of the territory.” In Chapter 4, we discover that inference–observation confusion involves disregarding how “maps refer to parts of the territory becoming refl exive to other parts at different levels of abstraction.” In Chapter 5, we address how bypassing results from ignoring that “a map is not the ‘territory,’ so there is no not territory.”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How might an awareness of “small circles” and “strings” in the structural differential have helped you better understand causes of a recent problem you had with a friend?
2. How might “sensory awareness” have helped you to better understand a recent argument you had with a parent or grandparent?
3. Write a paragraph to a future employer/graduate school/internship supervisor explaining who you are without using the “is of identity” and the “is of prediction.”