KORZYBSKI’S REFLEXIVITY

Alfred Korzybski did not have the Meta-States Model and so in imagining something for a Theory of Multi-ordinality he invented another model— The Structural Differential. In a way it was an early version of logical levels. After all, starting with the outside world, he essentially offered a way to trace from the sensory stimuli “out there,” to how we bring it into our ‘mind’ and neurology. Using the word abstracting, he described how we take what is given and make an abstraction from it and we do so level upon level upon level.

That’s what the Structural Differential represents. We map from the external world to the internal world. As we engage in higher level abstracting, we move higher and higher —and away from the sensory world. This is our self-reflexive mapping which allows us to stay conscious of our abstracting. When we do this, we create our own internal neuro-linguistic and neuro- semantic environments (or contexts). We create these and we then live within these multi- layered complexities.