Acquaintance, abstracting, non-allness.

Getting Acquainted with the Territory

What an individual experiences depends upon which specialized structures in his nervous system are stimulated. Note the paper on which this is written. In what ways can an observer have relationships with it? He can see it, touch it, smell it, taste it, lift it, tear it, etc. Each sort of response provides one avenue of acquaintance, because the receptors (the eyes, nostrils, skin, etc.) are so differentiated that each is sensitive only to particular stimuli. The wave lengths of radiations which affect the rods and cones in the retina of the eye do not also affect the nerve endings, membranes, and canals in the ear. Each nervous receptor will thus be excited by some stimuli from the paper. And since none is "all-engaging," it follows that our acquaintance with the paper through any one nervous means will be specific and partial.

Second, variations in sensitivity in the specialized nervous receptors in different observers will make for differences in the reports of their experiences. Deafness, color blindness, near- and far-sightedness, fatigue, adaptation, reaction time, etc., influence both the kind and the quantity of impressions, thus making acquaintance with anything personal and individual.

Third, the character of an individual's habits and interests affects the working of the nervous mechanisms so that his responses to stimuli are individualized. Objects viewed by several persons may thus give rise to widely varying evaluations. How different the reactions of a hungry baby, a dairyman, a bacteriologist to a bottle of milk. "'Milk,' Barry-more looked horrified. 'I tried the stuff once,' he said shuddering, 'but the stuff turned to chamois in my stomach!'" "The fool sees not the same tree that a wise sees," said William Blake.

Fourth, what is experienced varies with the position of the observer. "Where you are determines what you see." It makes a difference whether your seat at the opera is in the orchestra or in the top gallery on the side; whether you study New York City from the tower of the Empire State Building or the lush surroundings of an exclusive night club; whether you are in a bomb shelter or near a radio getting the news summary of an air raid. In the foreground of a famous Holbein painting one can see an oblong yellow patch, but from one particular position the patch looks like the top of a skull. The notion of perspective thus further emphasizes the partial character of experience. William James in The Will To Believe said, "There is no possible point of view from which the world can appear as an absolutely single fact." And when different observers are located in different places, it should not be surprising if they get different impressions and so make different maps.

Fifth, the fact that human reactions occur in "time" makes impossible our acquaintance with any object from all sides at once. At best, human study can proceed only serially, i.e., viewing the various aspects in turn. Details must be missed as observation goes on. A blade of grass as well as a three-ring circus defies coverage at any instant. But even if there were time to use the full resources of the nervous system, our acquaintance would still be partial, for microscopes and atom-smashing chambers would reveal new details. And special investigators, chemists, physicists, technicians, etc., could extend the areas of observation indefinitely, so that the process of becoming acquainted with anything must ever remain incomplete. In the words of George Santayana,

The most exhaustive account which human science can ever give of anything does not cover all that is true about it. All the external relations and affinities of anything are truths relevant to it; but they radiate in space and time to infinity, or at least to the unknown limits of the world... before we could know all about [the flower in the crannied wall] we should have to explore for ourselves the whole universe in which it grows. Evidently complete knowledge of anything, if we include all its natural and ideal relations, is incompatible with mortality and with the biological basis of thought.

Language and Abstracting

Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass indicates this abstracting process.

Here the Red Queen began again. "Can you answer useful questions?" she said. "How is bread made?"

"I know that!" Alice cried eagerly. "You take some flour -."

"Where do you pick the flower?" the White Queen asked. "In a garden or in the hedges?"

"Well, it isn't picked at all," Alice explained, "it's ground -."

"How many acres of ground?" said the White Queen. "You mustn't leave out so many things."

Our analysis of the ways of acquaintance as a means of asserting the inexhaustible characteristics of nature, its many-ness, its legion of details, and the segmented, isolating, and limiting character of human awareness should make clear the difficulties involved in the White Queen's admonition, for Alice could not do otherwise. Whenever we respond we abstract some details from a total situation, so that some others must be left out. Every way of looking brings with it some areas of blindness. As Kenneth Burke indicates in Permanence and Change, "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing - a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B." As Korzybski says, "We see what we see because we miss all the finer details."

What applies to the workings of the nervous system applies also to the coverage "capacities" of language as a form of representation. A map of any piece of territory will of necessity be diagrammatic, that is, indicate only a few of the many relationships which exist in the territory. The map can never cover all the minute aspects of the land, growths, markings, buildings, streets, conditions due to weather, etc. The map-maker, according to his purposes, selects and indicates some of the aspects while ignoring others.

Bloomfield approaches the matter this way. Any object or situation includes a wide range of stimuli, and any observer possesses a wide range of predispositions and ways of becoming acquainted with the object or situation. The stimulation and response "are to all practical purposes continuous," whereas the forms of language are discrete and specific. This being so, it follows that when we use language we must abstract, must fail to include in any report "all the features of a situation." Thus, for example, Bloomfield in Linguistic Aspects of Science, says:

If we do not consider the extension of an object, we may call it a "line"; if of two only, we call it a "surface"; terms like "straight line," "plane," "triangle," etc., add further characteristics, but still leave unmentioned certain simple features which are present in every object.

What is said here has been said before. Cassius Keyser in Mole Philosophy and Other Essays says:

There is indeed nothing that admits of complete description, for things are so interrelated that however much we may say of a given thing, there ever remains more to say of it; and complete description of one object would involve - in fact it would be - complete description of every other.

P. W. Bridgman in The Nature of Physical Theory has said:

No language can give a complete account of any situation or experience in the sense that given only the language we can produce the situation .... An essential distinction between language and experience is that language separates out from the living matrix little bundles and freezes them.

William James in A Pluralistic Universe puts it this way:

No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events.

Sidney Ratner says that:

Symbols can only represent certain selected phases of nature and society, never the totality of "reality" in all its complexity... No single language, frame of reference, or system of symbols can capture all the aspects of nature.

And Oliver Reiser in The Promise of Scientific Humanism says that:

We need to realize ... that nature transcends our ... abstractions, in the sense that nature contains more than the scientific law or equation expresses.

We must conclude that just as no map can have in it "all" the features of the territory it represents, so, too, no verbal utterances can give "all" the characteristics or details of whatever it is used to represent.

What Happens when Abstracting is Forgotten?

How easy it is to stop when a principle has been explained. How obvious this business of abstracting, and how oblivious to it we can be when it comes to application. And what dire consequences when in what we do and say we are not conscious of the workings of the nervous system and the inherent difficulties in the functioning of language.

But men have forgotten and continue to forget. The list of those who have taken the adequacy of language coverage for granted is a long one. It includes the social scientists who wait for decisions "until the evidence is all in"; the demagogues and panacea-makers who assert the single principles which promise to solve the whole of life's complexities; the guardians of doctrines who require that "Ye shall not add unto the words, neither shall ye diminish aught from it"; those who would burn the papers of an Abelard because he would argue the usefulness of "doubt"; the Hitlers who exalt the finality of one-sidedness ("Once I have decided on my course I am filled with boundless fanaticism"); the historians who insist that their cullings and sortings somehow piece together into the "definitive history as it actually was"; the debaters who erect their approximate descriptions into compelling totalities; the Renans for whom "the world today has no more mysteries"; the Ciceros who know that "mental stains can neither be blotted out by the passage of time nor washed away by any waters"; the cosmologists who find axioms in postulates and who argue for the geometry and universe-picture of a Euclid and a Newton, forgetful that each is but a geometry and a universe-picture; the gullible taken in by the lures and soft words of the confidence men; the psalmic quoter, "I said in my haste all men are liars"; the practical men, "who believe only what they see"; the judges who, quoting but a few passages from the shelf of his books, pronounce the "immorality" of a Bertrand Russell; the researchers whose reduction of a situation gives the facts; the academicians who could see only "romantic dreams" in the diathermy treatments of Arsene d'Arsonval; the students who so readily assume they "understand" whatever they read for the first time; those who "keep up with affairs" by reading but one newspaper; the men who so confidently predict the outcome of games on the basis of small shreds of information; the pundits and columnists so ready with prophecies based so often on local gossip; people whose fears and worries are intensified because they focus full attention on the possibilities of failure, danger, and defeat; the paranoiacs who see only the persecution aspects of the behavior of other people; those who feel "inferior" because they see only their relationships with those who are "'superior"; those who feel "superior" because they see only their relationships with those who are "inferior"....

What to Do?

That the impossible assumption of "allness" has had destructive effects in generating conflicts, in preserving obscurantism and ignorance, while preventing our plumbing the vast areas of human existence, has not been unrealized. In the words of a columnist:

No addition to the total of human knowledge was ever made by one who was convinced that the end of knowledge had been reached. No one ever learned anything who thought he had nothing to learn.... The civilized man may have convictions, but he tries to keep them from crystallizing.

Attacks on the "closed mind," arguments for the necessity of tolerance, and pleadings for the fertilization of curiosity are also nothing new. Here is an editorial putting the matter in most practical terms.

Do your mental muscles feel stiff? Are your convictions, hates, resentments, tooling a deep crease between your eyebrows? Do you feel sometimes as if you could scream at this world and all the rot that's in it?

Here's a suggestion. It may do you good to pick out your pet hate or your deepest conviction, and force yourself to think just the other way for, say, four or five minutes.

Suppose you detest John L. Lewis, just for instance, above anybody else now treading this mortal earth. Well, for just five minutes, tell yourself with all the earnestness and resolution you can call up that you admire Mr. Lewis, think he's great, believe he's got something or other nobody else has....

You can always go back at the end of such a period to hating John L. Lewis ... or whatever you hate most.

But during that period you've been relaxing your mental and spiritual muscles, so to speak - same principle as flexing and relaxing muscles for exercise.

Give it a try. Our estimate is that six out of every eight persons who do so will feel mentally refreshed and rejuvenated after each session of this kind of mind-limbering, and that anybody who makes a practice of it will gradually deepen and broaden his or her whole outlook on life.

If this advice does work with "six out of every eight persons," then it is here recommended with the hope that more will try to make it work. But it is necessary to demur because much experience has shown differently. How difficult to "see another side." The man or woman who approves vigorously of the continuance of the "private enterprise system" is not likely to have either the data or the arguments or the methods and techniques with which to "think" otherwise. To have the will without the wisdom is usually to end in frustration. Further, such advice is offered as a means of dealing with a particular case whereas the problems of "allness" crop up continuously. We need a method so deep-seated and general that it makes the recurrence of those rigidity habits less frequent.

In this quest a twofold program is offered involving the consciousness of a process and the use of a device.

First, one must be convinced of the fact of non-allness, which Korzybski has summarized in these words:

Let us take any actual object; for instance, what we call a pencil. Now, we may describe or "define" a "pencil" in as great detail as we please, yet it is impossible to include all the characteristics which we may discover in this actual objective pencil. If the reader will try to give a "complete" description or a "perfect" definition of any actual physical object, so as to include "all" particulars, he will be convinced that this task is humanly impossible. These would have to describe, not only the numerous rough, macroscopic characteristics, but also the microscopic details, the chemical composition and changes, submicroscopic characteristics and the endlessly changing relationship of this objective something which we have called pencil to the rest of the universe, etc., an inexhaustible array of characteristics which could never be terminated. In general, physical abstractions, including daily life abstractions, are such that particulars are left out - we proceed by a process of forgetting. In other words, no description or "definition" will ever include all particulars.

If, then, the achievement of "allness" is prevented by the characteristics of the nervous system, it should be clear that in speaking and acting one can only abstract some details while omitting others. Consciousness of abstracting as a habitual reaction will lead directly to attitudes of non-allness. This consciousness is the coveted first step in proper evaluation, for when men act as if what they say says "all," delusions and improper evaluation are inevitable.

Second, the new attitudes may be coached into practice by the memory of a simple device which summarizes the fact that details are invariably left out in speaking. A hint of it is found in a statement by William James in A Pluralistic Universe, that "the word 'and' trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. 'Ever not quite' has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness." We here adopt a variant in the contraction, ETC., used to indicate that "more could be said." Habitual use of the ETC. silently or orally should dissolve the "allness-growths" by producing consciousness of factors left out. Which suggests a "new" slogan: Remember the ETC.

Maximum Probability and the Business of Prophecy

For the astrologers, the investment counselors, the readers of tea leaves and palms, the political seers, the columnists, etc., the assertion of things to come is an important and profitable stock in trade. But how shall we take their insistent utterances? Under what conditions do we get useful predictions?

The work of a man like Pasteur may suggest an answer. In one of his many achievements he was able to devise methods by which disturbing microbes could be kept from getting into liquids. He was able, too, to bring about the growth of one variety of microbe without having it contaminated by other kinds. Having tested his procedures in a variety of circumstances, aware of what those circumstances were and of his role in the process, he could say something like this: If you will do this and that under these conditions with this kind of material, these things are very likely to occur. Because he controlled the important, but not all the circumstances, he was never able to say what would happen with absolute certainty.

Now back to prophecy. The "perfect" prophet would know "all" there was to know about the subject, "all" that had occurred before, "all" that was now occurring, and "all" the possible factors which might occur to affect the outcome. If but one solitary new factor were to be introduced, the first conclusion might be invalid in some respects. The "perfect" prophet must see all and not merely some of the possibilities.

The trouble with most prophecies, however, should now be evident. The nervous systems of human beings function by abstracting from the totality, not by exhausting it. And if some factors or aspects of the situation are neglected but nevertheless do influence the course of circumstances, then what happens in life is very often quite different. The pattern of prophecies which do not turn out appears something like this: The seer argues that with facts B, C, and D operating, then action A must inevitably occur. But other factors X, Y, and Z intervene, giving rise to action M. In short, the prophecy went askew because some factors were not (or perhaps could not be) taken into account.

At least two attitudes can be taken toward the business of prophecy. One is to disregard everyone, on the ground that no prophet can be "completely certain," that in discussions of our complex social, economic, and political life the control that gave Pasteur authority cannot be achieved. The shifting of a single factor far off might at any moment introduce a chain of influences far-reaching and upsetting. A second attitude implies discounting on our part and a recognition that the fallibility of prophets is not something unusual, given the enormous possibilities of new factors. A full consciousness on our part that prophets, like the rest of us, abstract from the totality will prevent despair and cynicism on the one hand and disappointment on the other. Prophecies must be looked upon not as infallible truths but as possible guides and hints of what probably will happen. If Pasteur could not claim omniscience in the little area in which he operated, humility in the big matters should not be too much to ask for.

In Short

We see what we see, but human nervous systems cannot get to "all" the details of anything. Our speech abstracts some details and neglects others. Partial descriptions must not be defined as "complete." The assumption of "allness" leads to tension and conflict, the preservation of ignorance, and the blockage of further learning.

During his tenure as Professor at Northwestern Univesity, Irving J. Lee (1909-1955) pioneered in the establishment of general semantics as an academic discipline.