Alfred Korzybski Series #13
When you make a linguistic map, there are numerous cognitive distortions to be aware of and to take into consideration. When Bandler and Grinder launched the field of NLP, they mentioned three mapping or modeling distortions that came with the territory of map-making: deletion, generalization, and distortion. To see these, take any map. Pick up a map of your city or your state or country. Any atlas will do. There are lots and lots and lots of things left out— items deleted from the map. It’s inevitable. To put everything on the map you would have to have a piece of paper almost the size of the territory. So we delete the actual size and offer one “to scale.”
There’s also lots and lots and lots of generalizations. Buildings are marked with a mere dot. That generalizes the building. Rivers are just lines, so are freeways, and boundaries are straight lines on the map. Then there are the things distorted— which is everything. Nothing on the map is exactly like the reality. An old story goes that someone criticized Pablo Picasso for his abstract art. He changed the subject and asked about the person’s wife and children. He pulled out a picture from his wallet. “My she is very tiny” he said, “and flat, 2-dimensional!”
The value and usefulness of a map is not that it has to be exactly the same as the territory it seeks to represent, only that there is a similarity of structure. What does this have to do with cognitive distortions? Namely that the thinking patterns that we use to create our maps shows up in our maps. So the more we recognize the cognitive distortions and catch them, the cleaner we can make our mapping and maps.
In Cognitive Psychology, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck identified a list of a dozen or more cognitive distortions and used them as a checklist as they worked with people. The point was that above and beyond what a person said (the content) was how they were thinking and their thinking patterns. So when you clean up your cognitive distortions, your thinking content gets cleared as well. In Neuro-Semantics, Meta-Coaches especially use the Ellis–Beck list of cognitive distortions for this very purpose.
Then as they listen to a client present a goal or a challenge, they also listen for the cognitive distortions in the person’s linguistics. This helps them to know where the client may have a frame that creates limitations, even misery. When you improve your mapping clarity, you clear up lots of things.
What does all of this have to do with Korzybski? Well, believe it or not Science and Sanity begins with two pages of cognitive distortions! Okay, they are not called that. They are called, Corpus Errorum Biologicorum. That certainly sounds a whole lot more important, and serious! Quoting from the writings of H.S. Jennings in a book on heredity and environment, Korzybski quoted a list of fallacies that undermine clear thinking and sound linguistics.
1) The fallacy of Non-Experimental Judgments.
2) The fallacy of One Cause Attribution: Attributing to one cause what’s due to many causes. The fallacy that’s the greatest affliction of politicians and a common plague of humanity.
3) The fallacy of Exclusion: concluding that because one factor plays a role, another does not.
4) The fallacy of Dichotomy: characteristics are divisible into two distinct classes.
5) The fallacy of Assumptions: implied / ghostly premises.
6) The fallacy of Either-Or: If by hereditary than not alterable by the environment.
Actually, the rest of Science and Sanity continues this identifying of cognitive distortions especially in language as I mentioned about the additional Meta-Model distinctions which Korzybski identified.
“Let me again repeat, that the mixing of different languages of different structures is fatal for clear ‘thinking’.” (p. 147)
“In well-balanced persons, all psycho-logical aspects should be represented and should work harmoniously. In a theory of sanity, this semantic balance and co-ordination should be our first aim...” (p. 149)
It is then not only the content of thinking that can be wrong and can misdirect a person, it is how we think. And that’s where these cognitive distortions do their damage. Much of that occurs because in the process of thinking (the way we humans reason, draw conclusions, make meaning, explain things, etc.) we are not even aware of the kind or quality of our thinking. All of that lies outside-of-our-awareness. Yet that is where the leverage for sanity and transformation lies. And that also is why we focus on the semantic meaning-making process more than the content of the stories told.
The bottle line is that to map the territory, to create a plan for what and where and how to get to your desired outcome, it is not just a matter of the content of your map, but the thinking that goes into how you do your mapping. If the kind of thinking actually creates the problem, the solution will not be at the level of content. It will be in correcting the cognitive distortions.
To ever-higher quality thinking as you map your world!
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