BELIEFS ARE REAL

Here’s a question for you to consider. Because as a Meta-Coach and as someone who uses NLP and Neuro-Semantics models to enter into a person’s inner world, Are beliefs real? Obviously, they are real inside a person and to a person, but that’s not the question I want you to think about. Rather, Are beliefs externally real?

Nor am I asking if a belief refers to a real referent which is external and outside in the real world. If a person’s internal map about the territory is to be useful so that we can navigate the terrain that we’re concerned about, then there needs to be at least some correspondence between map and territory. That’s because, as Korzybski pointed out over and over in Science and Sanity, the factor that actually makes a mental map in your head useful is that its structure “fits” the world. It may be a metaphorical map, but if so, then it has a degree of correspondence in structure so that it helps us get around and succeed in what we’re doing.