a Plist thematic trope....

[Mark Kohut]

And to me, shows another quality of Obama's I admire: (Often) sees
without Preconceptions, without Ideological biases.

korzybski was hot among intellectuals in the fifties I think I once
learned. See below where William Burroughs, new mapmaker
once attended a course.
_________________________________________________________________________

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1,
1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field
called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and
more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human
knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and
the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct
access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is
filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known
dictum is "The map is not the territory".

He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of
identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, e.g.,
a statement such as, "Elizabeth is a fool" (said of a person named
"Elizabeth" who has done something that we regard as foolish). In
Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Elizabeth belongs to a higher
order of abstraction than Elizabeth herself. Korzybski's remedy was to
deny identity; in this example, to be aware continually that
"Elizabeth" is not what we call her. We find Elizabeth not in the
verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain (the two,
he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This was
expressed by Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the
territory". Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of
"to be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to
abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he said explicitly[citation needed]
that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used
as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location. It
was even acceptable at times to use the faulty forms of the verb "to
be," as long as one was aware of their structural limitations.

Anecdotes[edit]

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he
interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of
biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that
he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats
in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students
took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while
he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he
tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the
original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the
words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were
shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of
their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You
see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't
just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is
often outdone by the taste of the latter."[4]

William Burroughs went to a Korzybski workshop in the Autumn of 1939.
He was 25 years old, and paid $40. His fellow students—there were 38
in all—included young Samuel I. Hayakawa (later to become a Republican
member of the U.S. Senate), Ralph Moriarty deBit (later to become the
spiritual teacher Vitvan) and Wendell Johnson (founder of the Monster
Study).[5]


On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 2:04 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Take out the word "always" and you have a very well-worn trope.
>
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 12:23 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> yesterday, in answer to a question after his speech---see Fred
>> Kaplan's column in SLATE for
>> more if interested---Barack Obama said this (and more):
>>
>> "The map isn’t always the territory, and you have to kind of walk
>> through it to get a feel for it."
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l