Uit: Language in Thought and Action,
door S.I. Hayakawa.
Chapter 2 Symbols
Maps and Territories
There is a sense in which we all live in two worlds. First, we live in the world
of happenings which we know at first hand. This is an extremely small world,
consisting only of that continuum of the things that we have actually seen,
felt, or heard-the flow of events constantly passing before our senses. So far
as this world of personal experience is concerned, Africa, South America, Asia,
Washington, New York, or Los Angeles do not exist if we have never been to these
places. Jomo Kenyetta is only a name if we have never seen him. When we ask
ourselves how much we know at first hand, we discover that we know very little
indeed.
Most of our knowledge, acquired from parents, friends,
schools, newspapers, books, conversation, speeches, and television, is received
verbally. All our knowledge of history, for example, comes to us only in words.
The only proof we have that the Battle of Waterloo ever took place is that we
have had reports to that effect. These reports are not given us by people who
saw it happen, but are based on other reports: reports of reports of reports,
which go back ultimately to the first-hand reports given by people who did see
it happening.
It is through reports, then, and through reports of reports, that we receive
most knowledge: about government, about what is happening in Korea, about what
picture is showing at the downtown theater-in fact, about anything that we do
not know through direct experience.
Let us call this world that comes to us through words the
verbal world, as opposed to the world we know or are capable of knowing
through our own experience, which we shall call the extensional world.
(The reason for the choice of the word "extensional" will become clear later.)
The human being, like any other creature, begins to make his acquaintance with
the extensional world from infancy. Unlike other creatures, however, he begins
to receive, as soon as he can learn to understand, reports, reports of reports,
reports of reports of reports. In addition he receives inferences made from
reports, inferences made from other inferences, and so on. By the time a child
is a few years old, has gone to school and to Sunday school, and has made a few
friends, he has accumulated a considerable amount of second- and third-hand
information about morals, geography, history, nature, people, games-all of which
information together constitutes his verbal world.
Now, to use the famous metaphor introduced by Alfred
Korzybski in his Science and Sanity (1933), this verbal world ought to
stand in relation to the extensional world as a map does to the
territory it is supposed to represent. If a child grows to adulthood with a
verbal world in his head which corresponds fairly closely to the extensional
world that he finds around him in his widening experience, he is in relatively
small danger of being shocked or hurt by what he finds, because his verbal world
has told him what, more or less, to expect. He is prepared for life. If,
however, he grows up with a false map in his head-that is, with a head crammed
with error and superstition he will constantly be running into trouble, wasting
his efforts, and acting like a fool. He will not be adjusted to the world as it
is; he may, if the lack of adjustment is serious, end up in a mental hospital.
Some of the follies we commit because of false maps in our
heads are so commonplace that we do not even think of them as remarkable. There
are those who protect themselves from accidents by carrying a rabbit's foot.
Some refuse to sleep on the thirteenth floor of hotels-a situation so common
that most big hotels, even in the capitals of our scientific culture, -skip "13"
in numbering their floors. Some plan their lives on the basis of astrological
predictions. Some play fifty-to-one shots on the basis of dream books. Some hope
to make their teeth whiter by changing their brand of tooth paste. All such
people are living in verbal worlds that bear little, if any, resemblance to the
extensional world.
Now, no matter how beautiful a map may be, it is useless to a
traveler unless it accurately shows the relationship of places to each other,
the structure of the territory. If we draw, for example, a big dent in the
outline of a lake for, let us say, artistic reasons, the map is worthless. But
if we are just drawing maps for fun without paying any attention to the
structure of the region, there is nothing in the world to prevent us from
putting in all the extra curlicues and twists we want in the lakes, rivers, and
roads. No harm will be done unless someone tries to plan a trip by such a map.
Similarly, by means of imaginary or false reports, or by
false inferences from good reports, or by mere rhetorical exercises, we can
manufacture at will, with language, "maps" which have no reference to the
extensional world. Here again no harm will be done unless someone makes the
mistake of regarding such "maps" as representing real territories.
We all inherit a great deal of useless knowledge, and a great
deal of misinformation and error (maps that were formerly thought to be
accurate), so that there is always a portion of what we have been told that must
be discarded. But the cultural heritage of our civilization that is transmitted
to us-our socially pooled knowledge, both scientific and humane-has been valued
principally because we have believed that it gives us accurate maps of
experience. The analogy of verbal worlds to maps is an important one and will be
referred to frequently throughout this book. It should be noticed at this point,
however, that there are two ways of getting false maps of the world into our
heads: first, by having them given to us; second, by creating them ourselves
when we misread the true maps given to us.
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