The Only Way out Guide for Truth Seekers

THE ONLY WAY OUT 107
"And there is nothing like Him" (1) .
However, one critical issue deserves attention here. It has to
do with the need to differentiate between the meaning of an
Attribute and the reality/nature of that particular Attribute.
In linguistics i.e. the study of language, scholars discuss the
notion of reference. Reference is "the relationship between a
linguistic expression and the entity in the external world to
which it refers" (2) .
The entities we refer to in the external world are called
'referents'. Psychologically, the linguistic expressions we use
only help us form a mental representation of a given referent.
Because our mental representation is, in effect, only a
representation, it will inevitably fall short of encompassing the
real and fully elaborate nature of the referent.
So when referring to a set of entities, we're not talking
about their nature as they exactly exist in the real world (3) ;
rather we're only referring to our mental representation of
them, which is by nature restricted and imperfect. To put it
simply, let us remember that a copy of a paper is not the paper
itself or, as Alfred Korzybski famously remarked, "the map
is not the territory" (4) . Korzybski argued that because "we don't
deal with reality directly but only indirectly via our nervous
system and sense receptors" (5) , there will always exist a
fundamental difference between our understanding (map) and
(1) Quran: 112: 4.
(2)
Crystal, D. (1992) An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and
Languages, Penguin Books, p. 329. For example, the referent of the
word 'pencil' is the object 'pencil'.
(3) Actually no one can do that, not even the collective intelligence of
mankind.
(4)
Korzybski, Alfred (2000) Science and Sanity: An Introduction to
Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Brooklyn, New York,
p. 58.
(5) Bodenhamer, Bob G. & Hall, L. Michael (1999) The User's Manual For
The Brain, Crown House Publishing Limited, p.63.