Off the Map

One of my most recent essays in this blog (an entry titled “General Semantics: The Study of How We Represent Our Experiences”) did a number on me.  It started to get me focused on how people (others as well as myself) represent their experiences in words.  And it got me paying attention especially to how frequently people (others, though not so much myself) misrepresent their experiences in words.

It was as if general semantics developed as a door wedge.

That probably doesn’t make sense to you, but it makes sense to me.  General semantics got people paying attention to the words they use to represent reality.  And as a result, it tuned people into times when, say, they don’t represent reality well with their words.  There’s the precise sense of representation–as when a scientist represents reality with dispassionate, structurally correct words–but there’s also the less precise, more social sense of representation–as when you or I chat.

In truth, people do a lot of misrepresenting.

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(Nice pun!)

Sometimes our plight is to show that someone is lying.  That plight can be a bit too challenging because it is hard to prove that someone’s intent was to misrepresent.  Sometimes, it would seem to me, that just showing misrepresentation is enough.  That is, if you can demonstrate that someone is misrepresenting reality, that may be enough to damn a person.

You might not need to show the intent to misrepresent, as implied by the term “lying.”  You might just need to show the misrepresenter the facts, then see if she corrects her speech to speech that better represents facts.  If she keeps misrepresenting, you may see the problem the person is.  Misrepresentation may be a liability, enough to can someone who does it whether actively or neglectfully.

And we can do it innocently, as when we do it accidentally or naïvely.  Who knows how I’ve misrepresented myself out of naïveté.  When I catch myself misrepresenting events accidentally, oftentimes I aim to correct the error.  I might even do that months later to the person who heard my erroneous words.

But it is as if general semantics developed as a door wedge.  It jammed in people’s brains so that they didn’t just let themselves close them on events just because of how the events were represented in words.   General semantics kept the doorbrain open to possibilities other than those represented, or potentially misrepresented, in words.

See also: lying, misrepresentation, representation