general semantics

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General semantics is a non-Aristotelian educational discipline created by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) during the years 1919 to 1933. General Semantics is distinct from semantics (a sub-field of linguistics), a different subject. The name technically refers to the study of what Korzybski called "semantic reactions", or reactions of the whole human organism within the environment to some event — any event, not just perceiving a human-made symbol — with respect to the meaning of that event. However, people most commonly use the name to mean the particular system of semantic reactions that Korzybski called the most useful for human survival, that is to say delayed reactions as opposed to "signal reactions" (immediate, unthinking ones).

Overview

Advocates of General Semantics view it as a form of mental hygiene that enables practitioners to avoid ideational traps built into natural language and "common sense" assumptions, thereby enabling practitioners to think more clearly and effectively. General Semantics thus shares some concerns with psychology but some do not consider it specifically as a therapeutic system, evaluating it as more focused on enhancing the abilities of normal individuals than curing pathology.

Korzybski described the central goal of General Semantics as developing in its practitioners what he called a "consciousness of abstracting," or an awareness of the map/territory distinction and of how information gets deleted/distorted in the linguistic and other representations we use. Korzybski considered sporadic and intellectual understanding of these concepts insufficient, rather that humans achieve full sanity only when the consciousness of abstracting becomes constant and a matter of reflex.

Many General Semantics practitioners view the associated techniques as a kind of self-defense kit against manipulative semantic distortions routinely promulgated by advertising, politics, and religion, as well as those found in self-deception.

Viewed philosophically, some consider General Semantics as a form of applied conceptualism that emphasizes the degree to which human experience gets filtered and mediated by contingent features of human sensory organs, the human nervous system, and human linguistic constructions.

The most important premise of General Semantics has been succinctly expressed as "The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined".^[1] While Aristotle wrote that a true definition gives the essence of the thing defined (in Greek to ti ên einai, literally “the what it was to be”), General Semantics denies the possibility of describing such an essence--although Aristotle nowhere says that the definition is the thing defined, or its essence. The supposedly non-Aristotelian nature of General Semantics purports to represent an evolution in human evaluative orientation much as non-Euclidean geometry represents an evolution in mathematical representation of spatial relationships.

Other aspects of the system

There are more elements, but these three in particular stand out:

• Time binding: The human ability to pass information and knowledge between generations at an accelerating rate. Korzybski claimed this to be a unique capacity, separating us from other animals. Animals pass knowledge, but not at an exponential rate, that is to say, each generation of animals does things pretty much in the same way as the previous generation. For example, at one time most human societies were hunter-gatherers, but now more advanced means of food production (growing, raising, or buying) predominate. Excepting some insects (for example, ants), other animals are still looking, that is, they do not grow or raise food.

• Silence on the objective levels: As 'the word is not the thing it represents,' Korzybski stressed the nonverbal experiencing of our inner and outer environments. During these periods of training, one would become "outwardly and inwardly silent."

• The system advocates a general orientation by extension rather than intension, by relational facts rather than assumed properties, an attitude, regardless of how expressed in words, that, for example, George 'does things that seem foolish to me,' rather than that he is 'a fool.'

Much of General Semantics consists of training techniques and reminders intended to break mental habits that impede dealing with reality. Three of the most important reminders are expressed here by the shorthand "Null-A, Null-I, and Null-E".

• Null-A is non-Aristotelianism; General Semantics stresses that two-valued (Aristotelian) logics cannot adequately map the totality of human experience. (See also: Abductive reasoning)
• Null-I is non-Identity; General Semantics teaches that no two phenomena can ever be shown identical (if only because they may differ beyond the limits of measurement) and that it is more sane to think in terms of "sufficient similarity for the purposes of the analysis we are currently performing".
• Null-E is non-Euclideanism; General Semantics reminds us that the space we live in is not adequately described by Euclidean geometry.

The underlying purpose of these reminders is both to adjust our conceptual maps better to the territory of reality and to keep us reminded of the limitations of all maps. Non-Aristotelian, in this particular case, refers to the use of non-Aristotelian logic rather than the aforementioned philosophical disagreement. However, Korzybski saw these as linked. The complex nature of the objects we interact with means that reasoning from "essence" or definitions will often lead us astray. This creates uncertainty, which general semantics links to the use of non-Aristotelian logic.

Korzybski's books

Korzybski's first book, Manhood of Humanity, published in 1921, introduced the notion of time-binding as the defining distinction between humans and other organisms. There, he used the imagery of dimension to spell out the unique niche humans occupy among organisms. The book became an immediate best-seller, and remained in that status for several years. He rejected explicitly the claim that we could consider a human as either a ‘monstrous hybrid’ of animal with some supernatural or immaterial ‘mind’, ‘soul’, or ‘spirit’, or simply as animal. In his defining of humans in terms of what they do rather than attempting to state what they are, he declared a fundamental revision of the 2,500-year old Western philosophic foundations of science, philosophy, and biology.

His major work was Science and Sanity, an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, published in 1933. A third book of his writings, Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings 1920-1950, was published in 1990.

History

General Semantics is an educational discipline created by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) during the years 1919 to 1933. His major work was Science and Sanity, an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, published in 1933. Korzybski's student S. I. Hayakawa further introduced the subject in Language in Thought and Action (1941). An earlier and less influential book in 1938 was The Tyranny of Words, by Stuart Chase. A current book is Drive Yourself Sane, by Susan and Bruce Kodish, published in 2000.

Two major groups were formed in the United States to promote the system: the Institute of General Semantics, in 1938, and the International Society for General Semantics, in 1943. In 2003, the two groups merged into one organization, now called the Institute of General Semantics, with headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. There are also a New York Society for General Semantics, a European Society for General Semantics, and an Australian Society for General Semantics.

During the period of the 1940s and 1950s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction, most notably through the works of A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A and its sequels, and Robert A. Heinlein, Gulf. The ideas of General Semantics became a sufficiently important part of the shared intellectual toolkit of genre science fiction to merit parody by Damon Knight and others; they have since shown a tendency to reappear (often without attribution) in the work of more recent writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson.

In 1952, General Semantics was pilloried in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science an influential book by Martin Gardner. L. Ron Hubbard claimed that his work was based partly on general semantics, but the compliment was not returned. Writing in Etc: A Review of General Semantics, in the fourth quarter of 1951, Hayakawa said, "The lure of the pseudo-scientific vocabulary and promises of Dianetics cannot but condemn thousands who are beginning to emerge from scientific illiteracy to a continuation of their susceptibility to word-magic and semantic hash."^[2]

Under the supervision of psychiatrist Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, U.S. medics in World War II used General Semantics to treat over 7,000 cases of battlefield neuroses in the European theater. Kelley is quoted in the preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity. The development of neuro-linguistic programming owes debts to general semantics.

General Semantics has continued to exert some influence in popular psychology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and education. Usually because of the efforts of individual teachers, such as Doctors Michael Wapner and Chris Aable at CSULA, it has been taught at various times and places in high schools and universities in the U.S.; but in general, the system has had no consistent home in academia.

Popular acceptance has likewise been very limited. As of the year 2005, the reputation of General Semantics has yet to recover from the damage Martin Gardner did to it.^{[citation needed]}

Connections to other disciplines

General Semantics has important links with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science; it could be characterized without too much distortion as applied analytic philosophy. The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and of early operationalists and pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, is particularly clear in the foundational ideas of General Semantics. Korzybski himself acknowledged many of these influences.

The concept of "silence on the objective level" attributed to Korzybski and his insistence on consciousness of abstracting are parallel to some central ideas in Zen Buddhism. Korzybski is not recorded to have acknowledged any influence from this quarter, but he formulated General Semantics during the same years that the first popularizations of Zen were becoming part of the intellectual currency of educated speakers of English. On the other hand, later Zen-popularizer Alan Watts has been influenced by ideas from General Semantics.

Although he appeared to have misunderstood or altered some of the basics of General Semantics,^[3] L. Ron Hubbard is widely believed to have used the theory in his creation of Dianetics and later to have incorporated it into Scientology; the first of these two movements in turn introduced General Semantics to a wider audience in the early 1950s, including popular science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt, personal growth theorist Harvey Jackins and his movement Re-evaluation Counseling and movements like Gestalt therapy. The founders of these movements did not themselves credit Korzybski for their ideas.

Albert Ellis, who developed Rational emotive behavior therapy, acknowledges influence from general semantics. The conceptually related cognitive therapy, developed by psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck, formulates a program that could have been taken directly from the declared intentions of General Semantics - cognitive therapy is rapidly developing into the most successful treatment of the more common psychological problems, thereby also validating the corresponding concepts of General Semantics.^{[original research?]}

Criticism

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Martin Gardner seems to suggest that proponents of general semantics violate their own rules about withholding judgement, following the scientific method, and replacing dogmatic belief with various degrees of probability^{[citation needed]}. Gardner also wrote of Korzybski that he "never tired of knocking over 'Aristotelian' habits of thought, in spite of the fact that what he called Aristotelian was a straw structure which bore almost no resemblance to the thought process of the Greek philosopher."

In response to the charge of unscientific behavior, General Semanticists like Bruce Kodish and Kenneth G. Johnson point to various scientific studies that appear to support the claims of Korzybski.^{[citation needed]}

Martin Gardner and others cite an essay in Language and Philosophy by Max Black as the "definitive critique of General Semantics". However, Kodish and others argue that the criticisms stem from misunderstandings of Science and Sanity (see references with external link to Kodish).

Black repeats the charge that Korzybski misrepresents Aristotle. He also seems to argue that Korzybski cannot prove the existence of an external world. A symbol of this external "event" or "scientific object" appears in the Structural Differential. Black views this as a contradiction, since Korzybski would say that our statements about this object derive in part from human nervous systems. Finally, Black claims "Korzybski holds the view that abstraction consists in 'leaving out details'," (p. 243) and says he ignores the brain's active role. Kodish replies that we have good reason to focus on this "leaving out", and that Black mistakes a practical concern for a definition.

Korzybski felt that his critics were confused by the non-aristotelian system. His response to them was: "I said what I said. I did not say what I did not say."

See also

Notes

1. ^ Hayakawa, S.I., Language in Thought and Action, Harcourt, Brace and Company, (New York), 1949, p.31: "The symbol is NOT the thing symbolized; the word is NOT the thing; the map is NOT the territory it stands for."
2. ^ "Dianetics: From Science-Fiction to Fiction-Science," pp.280-293.
3. ^ L. Ron Hubbard The Anatomy of Thought, Data Series 1, Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter (HCO PL) of 26 April 1970: "As Alfred Korzybski studied under psychiatry and amongst the insane (his mentor was William Alanson White at Saint Elizabeth's Insane Asylum in Wash. D.C.) one can regard him mainly as the father of confusion."

References

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Further reading

External links

• Korzybski's General Semantics
• New York Society for General Semantics
• Institute of General Semantics
• European Society For General Semantics
• Australian Society for General Semantics
• Coro Foundation (Leadership training programs based on General Semantics. Notables among its alumni include Gene Siskel, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Congressman Jerry Lewis.)
• Theoretical foundations of general semantics Xenodochy
• General Semantics: A Tutorial
• Dave's web site with the ETC magazine index
• Europe