[MD] From each... to each

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Platt]
Or as S. I Hayakawa would say, "The word is not the thing. The  differences
between actual and symbolic experiences are great -- one is not scarred by
watching a moving-picture battle, nor is one nourished by watching people in a
play having dinner."

[Arlo]
The word is not the thing. No. Language does not "create" reality, it merely
"tells us" what part of "reality" to see, and how to value it.

Pirsig quoting Kluckholn, "Any language is more than an instrument of conveying
ideas, more even than an instrument for working upon the feelings of others and
for self-expression. Every language is also a means of categorizing experience.
The events of the "rear world are never felt or reported as a machine would do
it. There is a selection process and an interpretation in the very act of
response. Some features of the external situation are highlighted, others are
ignored or not fully discriminated.

Every people has its own characteristic class in which individuals pigeonhole
their experiences. The language says, as it were, "notice this," "always
consider this separate from that," "such and such things always belong
together." Since persons are trained from infancy to respond in these ways they
take such discriminations for granted as part of the inescapable stuff of
life."

>From ZMM, "To understand what he was trying to do it’s necessary to see that
part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a
figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape
without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all."

To see that how you sort the sand is not guided by language, which is merely a
collection of the cultural values passed historically through generations, is
to end up in the "objective observer" fallacy.

Arlo