Language in Thought and Action: Tips for Effective Communication (Part 2)

This is the second part of ‘Language in Thought and Action’: Tips for Effective Communication. For more tips, please read my other articles.

People like to create symbols that have designated meanings, i.e., one thing is used to symbolize another. Of the many symbols, language is one of the most sophisticated.

We often think that a symbol is the thing it represents, but in fact, there is not necessarily a link between the two. Let’s say that many viewers will project their emotions about a character onto the actor, loving and hating him or her. This happens because they don’t get it: the actor is just representing the character, the symbol, not the character. Thus, of all the principles about symbols, one of the most crucial is this:** A symbol is not the thing it represents, and language is not reality. **

To better explain the relationship between language and reality, the authors of this book suggest that we live in two worlds: the world that surrounds us,** the world that consists of the things we recognize directly in ourselves, is the “outward world”. **This world is so small that it consists only of a sequence of things that we see, touch, and hear in person. Accordingly, the world that we learn through words is the “world of words”. **Most of our knowledge is gained through the medium of words, from friends and family, from school, from books, from conversations, from cell phones, and so on. For example, we know that there was the Battle of Waterloo because it was recorded in books, but the person who recorded it may not have witnessed it, and he or she may have gotten it from other people’s records, and then we can go back and forth until the last record is made by the person who witnessed the battle.

The relationship between the verbal world and the outward world is like the relationship between a map and the territory it is assumed to represent.

We expect the rhetorical world and the outward world to be always in agreement. For a man, if the verbal world in his head is not so different from the outward world to which he is exposed, he will not be shocked, disappointed, or distressed by the new things that appear. For the rhetorical world has already told him what he can expect more of and what he can only expect less of, and he is prepared for life. But if the verbal world does not correspond to the extroverted world, as if a wrong map had been stored in his head, he will constantly run into trouble, and even develop some puzzling behaviors. For example, he refuses to sleep on the 13th floor of the hotel when he goes out; when it rains and thunders, he throws a pair of clippings out the door to ward off evil spirits, etc. What we need to do to better adapt to the life of the moment is to keep on correcting the verbal world so that it can be consistent with the outward world.