Language is a Map

I've twice given an Ignite talk entitled Language is a Map, but I've never written up the fundamental concepts underlying that talk.  Here I do that.

When I first moved to Sebastopol, before I raised horses, I'd look out at a meadow and I'd see grass. But over time, I learned to distinguish between oats, rye, orchard grass, and alfalfa. Having a language to make distinctions between different types of grass helped me to see what I was looking at.

I first learned this notion, that language is a map that reflects reality, and helps us to see it more deeply - or if wrong, blinds us to it - from George Simon, whom I first met in 1969. Later, George went on to teach workshops at the Esalen Institute, which was to the human potential movement of the 1970s as the Googleplex or Apple's Infinite Loop is to the Silicon Valley of today.  I taught at Esalen with George when I was barely out of high school, and his ideas have deeply influenced my thinking ever since.

George's ideas were themselves shaped by Alfred Korzybski, whose 1933 book Science and Sanity kicked off a movement that came to be known as General Semantics. Korzybski argued that many psychological and social aberrations can be seen as problems with language.  Consider racism: it relies on terms that deny the fundamental humanity of the people it describes. Korzybski urged everyone to become aware of the process of abstraction, the process by which reality is transformed into a series of statements about reality - maps that can guide us but can also lead us astray.

One of Korzybski's most famous statements was "The map is not the territory."  He developed a series of practical exercises to help people become aware of where they were in the process of abstraction.  One of  the tools he used was a device he called "the Structural Differential." (Illustration is Figure 4 from Science and Sanity, with my annotations.)

The Structural Differential represents reality as a parabola. Like the universe around us, a parabola is infinite. Dangling from the parabola are a series of circles, each representing the experience of a single individual. Strings from points on the parabola to points in the various circles remind us that while our respective experiences are derived from the same reality, they are not actually identical. One person may experience things that another misses, and even when we experience the same external event, our experiences are not the same.  That's why there is only one parabola but multiple circles.

Dangling from the circles are a series of tags - the labels - the words and descriptions that we each apply to our experiences. We are reminded that words are derived from our experience but are not the same as that experience, and that the experience is not the same as the underlying reality.

Korzybski would have people finger the structural differential when they were talking, asking them to become more aware when they were at the "label" level, when they were talking about their experience, and when they were pointing most authentically at the thing itself.

George Simon took this idea one step further. Influenced by the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, who argued that human consciousness was in the process of evolving, that it was possible to grow in spirit by taking in higher levels of consciousness (non-physical, non-verbal elements corresponding to things in Korzybski's parabola that do not necessarily "make sense.")

George generalized this into a model of perception and psychological growth that he represented by a quadratic structure. The A quadrant corresponds to Korzybski's parabola (or at least some subset of it), the beingness of the thing itself. The B quadrant corresponds to the circles in Korzybski's Structural Differential - the experience that we have when we encounter the reality or beingness of something outside ourself. The D quadrant represents the language  - the map - we use to describe and understand what we experienced.  The C quadrant represents the integration of this new beingness, experience, and map into who we are. In contrast to the alphabetic order of the quadratic labeling, George saw the "firing order" of the perceptual process as being A-B-D-C.

Like Korzybski, George focused on creating an awareness of where you were in the process of perception.  But unlike Korzybski, who simply saw it as a process of abstraction, George saw it as a process of learning and growing who we are.  After working with him for a few years, I got a near-instinctive sense of when I was wrapped in the toils of the words we use about reality and when I was paying attention to what I was actually experiencing, or even more, reaching beyond what I was experiencing now to the thing itself.  When faced with the unknown, a certain cultivated receptivity, an opening to that unknown, leads to better maps than simply trying to overlay prior maps on that which is new.

(There's a lot more to George Simon's work than that, and what I've written elides a lot, but that should suffice in the current context!)

Some years later, University of Chicago psychologist Eugene Gendlin described a similar process in his book Focusing. 

Lest this seem like mystical mumbo-jumbo, let me end with a wonderful quote from Richard Feynman's autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. Both as a student and as a professor, Feynman was fond of playing jokes on people by presenting mathematical or physical laws in unexpected contexts, and finding that his listeners didn't recognize them, and were completely puzzled. They'd learned the symbols (the maps), but just couldn't relate them back to the underlying reality sufficiently to see them in real life.

"I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way -- by rote, or something," he wrote. "Their knowledge is so fragile!" 

It's precisely this training in how to look at the world directly, not simply to reshuffle the maps, that is at the heart of original work in science.

And in a business context, it was this training that allowed me to play a major role in popularizing the notion of open source software by noticing that the narrative about free software put forward by Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond ignored the most successful free software of all, the free software that underlies the internet, or to define "Web 2.0" by extrapolating from the differences between the companies that failed in the dotcom bust from those that survived that there would be a shift in economic power from proprietary software to proprietary data, and to presage today's world of big data and collective intelligence.

The key, though, is to remember that this is an experiential practice. Recognizing when you're stuck in the words, looking at the map rather than the road, is something that is surprisingly hard to learn.