Abstract

Human beings make sense of their world by employing symbol systems which pick out, organize and arrange elements of their experiences. With these symbol systems, they sort and order the world, make predictions, give explanations and venture new insights. In this process, a number of identifiable ways of understanding have emerged, ranging from the scientific and mathematical through the artistic, musical and literary to the religious and mythical, each with its own body of knowledge, methodology and focus, and each expressed in its own ‘language’, that is, its own semantically and syntactically differentiated symbol system