Common dismissal: “Aren’t you just saying that ‘the map is not the territory’?” Attempting to clarify, I find myself baffled. Who ever thought the map WAS the territory? (No one.) What work was denying this supposed to do?
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Replying to @Meaningness
Yes. I am especially baffled by people noting TMINTT as though this is some deep insight. It amounts to a smug denial of the most naive realism. OK, so not that. Now what?
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Replying to @StephenPiment @Meaningness
I recently spent a few hours w/ the original source (Korzybski's Science & Sanity) and it gave me the impression that while current zeitgeist has partially just digested this insight, there are fundamental pieces missing. Most people are full of confusions that TMINTT negates.
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However, most people who try to point at these confusions have trouble, because they're ontological confusions and people tend to interpret incoming words as meaning something within their current ontology, rather than pointing at how it could be different.
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I sense a motte&bailey-esque thing here (except not so antagonistic as the central uses of that term). There's an obvious simple true thing that TMINTT means, & most people stop with that one when looking, then go back to making map-territory muddles when not paying attention.
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Replying to @Malcolm_Ocean @StephenPiment
Can you give an example of a map-territory error that may be commonly made? The range of responses to my query suggests that the statement is sufficiently pithy and metaphorical that different people interpret quite differently what M-T confusion consists of…
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Replying to @Meaningness @StephenPiment
I mean, Korzybski would claim that saying "this is a chair" is a M-T error, because "is" is busted. And people DO get in (usually useless) debates about whether some particular X "is" a Y. They wouldn't do this if they weren't making this M-T error.
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Rationalists get around this using the tool "operationalize". So the debate needs to become about a real question: "does it look like a chair to me?" "can I sit comfortably on it?" "do >70% of strangers call it a chair?" or simply "do I choose to call this a chair?"
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Replying to @Malcolm_Ocean @StephenPiment
That’s certainly a helpful move. My caveat would be that these questions can’t usefully be answered in the general case. A meaningful answer has to be relative to a particular situation, or limited set of situations.
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Replying to @Meaningness @StephenPiment
Right, also this! The importance of context. Perhaps one could even gesture at "contextualizing" as an even larger move than "operationalizing".
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That’s the central message of the middle, “mere reasonableness” part of the book.
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