You Are Not Book.indb - Stephen H. Wolinsky Ph. D.

The structural differential diagram / 47
or understanding. To review; the symbol or description is a
condensation-abstraction of the microscopic level, hence it
leaves out much more information than it includes. Moreover,
the label level does the same. The problem soon lies with
the inferential level. To illustrate, if we were to start with I
AM—the object level—with sensations, then at the next level
appears a label of behavior, then a descriptive level statement:
“I like sugar,” “I like to talk,” etc., “I don’t like studying,” “I
don’t want a relationship.” Let us take the last example to illustrate
a point. The description “I don’t want a relationship,”
moves to Inference-1 (diagnosis) “this is bad (not normal) in
some way,” which then moves to an Inference-2 “we should
want to have a relationship.”
“This is an inference, a guess (Bois, The Art of Awareness,
p. 87), a statement that is not based [even] on sense
perception. Hayakawa warns that . . . the making of inferences
is a quick, almost automatic process. (Hayakawa,
Language in Thought and Action, p. 36) Many people
are so quick in jumping to conclusions (inferences) that
it seems they are unaware of the difference between a
descriptive and an inferential statement. Referring to the
quickness that Hayakawa mentioned, I would guess that
if you could time the abstracting process of people, you
would find that they shift from the object level through
the label level and the descriptive level to the inferential
level in less than a second. More tags could be added to
the diagram, which represent more general statements,
with the last tag representing . . . [the belief, everyone
should want a relationship]. In general, additional tags
at successively higher levels of abstraction can represent
more general or more interrelated descriptions or inferences
about something.
You might ask at this point, aren’t you just playing
with words to claim that different kinds of statements