NON-IDENTITY PRINCIPLE
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 2306 ▶ |
| Object type | Human sciences, Epistemology, ontology or semantics, Methodology or model |
This principle was quite graphically expressed by A. KORZYBSKI, when he stated that “The map is not the territory” (i.e.: the label is not the object, and label on level 2 of abstraction is not to be confused with label on level 1 nor with label on level 3). The Belgian surrealist painter R. MAGRITTE who painted a pipe with the caption: “This is not a pipe”, made the same point.
The non-identity principle is the only way out of the paradoxes provoked by self-reference, whose pernicious effects were described by A.N. WHITEHEAD and B. RUSSELL in their “Principia Mathematica” and further considered by H.von FOERSTER, who in turn inspired H. MATURANA in his work on autopoiesis and F. VARELA in his calculus for self-reference.
The non-identity principle leads also to a recursivity of expanding logical layers, as a result of GÖDEL 's incompleteness theorem and is related to D. BÖHM's concept of generating order (1987).
On psychological ground non-identity leads to non-identification, i.e. to avoid the identification fallacy, which, as shown by KORZYBSKI, opens the road toward mental illness.