REFLEXIVITY IN LANGUAGE

From the previous articles, you now know a lot more about Korzybski’s “Theory of Multi-Ordinality” and his Structural Differential which was his way of dealing with our self-reflexive consciousness. Let’s now consider the question: How does the theory of multi-ordinality relate to self-reflexivity? And, how does this theory of multi-ordinality resolves “serious complexities” in our lives? First I will restate the meaning of multi-ordinality.

Multi-ordinality, as a linguistic pattern, refers to the seemingly “magical” quality of some words so that at different levels (meta-levels) they have different meanings. At each level, the same word can have very different meanings. If we don’t recognize this, we could very easily attribute a word’s meaning at one level to every use of that term and thereby create tremendous confusion for ourselves and others.