The reality of communication difficulties - an observation

 

Plagiarism, Plagelism, Pugilism

Phantastic play pon pwords pafter pall

 

When a communication channel is created it takes both sender and receiver, original communication and feedback to try and bride the gap and make communication meaningful.

 

Tools like dictionaries try and bridge that gap in part by showing common usage as accumulated.

 

But language is living and flows and changes, as the user lives, flows and changes.

 

It’s easy to look at something and take it to the extreme one way, but as words really have no meaning but in context, and the receiver can interpret them alone as they wish, and the sender has no idea if they have communicated, there in lies some of the true openings for misunderstanding.

 

I’m reminded of a very old science fiction story. Earth discovered there was intelligent life on Venus and sent a ship to represent the earth. It broadcast the message “We come in Peace”, over and over. Before the ship landed on Venus a ray struck out and destroyed the planet Earth for all time. The Venusians acted correctly hearing a direct challenge that we were ready to destroy them, as all Venusian dictionaries define ‘Peace’ as the declaration of a war of total extinction.

 

Alfred Korzbyski realized how much misunderstanding how language functioned was an underlying cause for many of our problems. Long ago he explained how language functions with his levels of abstraction.

 

A Victor Smith simplification.

 

There is the event level of reality. The atoms, molecules, physical reality of matter, energy, heat and light.

 

Then there is the perceived level of reality. The sun shines through a window and the dinner table glows from it’s polished wood.

 

We abstract that perceived level of reality and end up with words, Table, Wood, Sunshine.

Those words are not the thing. Table as a term describes many, many, many tables. And if you want it to be understood as close to 100% of the time, in a room with 5 objects which can handle the label table, you need to add many descriptive modifiers. To make this simpler is when you wife tells you to get something out of the kitchen drawer, and you look in a few and can’t find it, because as a husband you’re supposed to know in which drawer she was referring.

 

But words can describe words too, at a higher level of abstraction.  An example of this would be the pride in the word table by a cabinet maker, where table is a much more abstract knowledge of each piece of wood, each shaved plane, each joint constructed.

 

This is but a simple view of Korzbyski’s General Semantics, but it is at the heart of the discussion these past days.

 

Someone reads something and jumps to an assumption about what was written, then layers of abstraction and miscommunication occur ad infinitium.

 

My response of course is a classical rhetorical device, "reductio ad absurdum".

 

Hence we go from Plagelism (original usage) to Plagiarism to Plagelism (my definition) to the implied Pugilism I suspect of Len.

 

It’s best to keep in mind what difficulty we face when we try to communicate.

In fact its the base of all of the problems that exist within Isshinryu if you delve deeply enough.

 

For myself rather than talk I’d rather grab a handful of Plagels and start heaving them at everyone!