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General Semantics is an Education al Discipline created by Alfred Korzybski ( 1879 – 1950 ) during the years 1919 to 1933 . General Semantics is distinct from Semantics , a different subject. Advocates of General Semantics view it as a form of Mental hygiene that enables practitioners to avoid Ideation al 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 is not precisely a Therapeutic system, being in general more focused on enhancing the abilities of normal individuals than curing Pathology . According to Alfred Korzybski himself, the central goal of General Semantics is to develop in its practitioners what he called " Consciousness of Abstracting ", that is an awareness of the Map/territory Distinction and of how much of Reality is thrown away by the Linguistic and other representations we use. General Semantics teaches that it is not sufficient to understand this sporadically and Intellect ually, but rather that we achieve Sanity only when consciousness of abstracting becomes constant and a matter of Reflex . Many General Semantics practitioners view its techniques as a kind of self-defense kit against Manipulative semantic distortions routinely promulgated by Advertising , Politics , and Religion . Philosophically, General Semantics is a form of applied Conceptualism that emphasizes the degree to which human experience is filtered and mediated by contingent features of human Sensory Organ s, 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." 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 finding such an essence. OTHER ASPECTS OF THE SYSTEM There are more elements, but these three in particular stand out:
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 by the shorthand "Null-A, Null-I, and Null-E".
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 major work was ''Science and Sanity, an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics,'' published in 1933. His first book, in which he defined time-binding and explained its ramifications, was ''Manhood of Humanity,'' published in 1921. A third book of his writings, ''Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings 1920-1950,'' was published in 1990. HISTORY Korzybski's most well-known student was S. I. Hayakawa , who wrote '' Language In Thought And Action '' (1941), which became an alternative Book-of-the-Month Club selection. 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 is also a Europe an Society for General Semantics, and an Australia n 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 and Robert A. Heinlein . 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 Delany and Suzette Haden Elgin. In 1952, General Semantics was pilloried in cannot but condemn thousands who are beginning to emerge from scientific illiteracy to a continuation of their susceptibility to word-magic and semantic hash." ("Dianetics: From Science-Fiction to Fiction-Science," pp.280-293.) 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, it has been taught at various times and places (sometimes under other names) in High School s 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 2005, the reputation of General Semantics has yet to recover from the damage Martin Gardner and L. Ron Hubbard did to it. 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 general semantics' foundational ideas. Korzybski himself acknowledged many of these influences. Korzybski's concept of "silence on the objective level" 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 English-speakers. Albert Ellis , who developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy , acknowledges influence from general semantics. CRITICISM 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. 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 Greek philosopher's manner of thinking." In the preface to the first edition of his book Science and Sanity -- in 1933, more than twenty years before Gardner's criticism -- Korzybski wrote the following: "The system by which the white race lives, suffers, 'prospers', starves, and dies today is not in a strict sense an aristotelian system. Aristotle had far too much of the sense of Actualities for that. It represents, however, a system formulated by those who, for nearly two thousand years since Aristotle, have controlled our knowledge and methods of orientations, and who, for purposes of their own, selected what today appears as the worst from Aristotle and the worst from Plato and, with their own additions, imposed this composite system upon us. In this they were greatly aided by the structure of language and psycho-logical habits, which from the primitive down to this very day have affected all of us consciously or unconsciously, and have introduced serious difficulties even in science and in mathematics." The author said he called this previous system "aristotelian" because Aristotle seemed to have influenced it more than any other individual. In response to the charge of unscientific behavior, general-semanticists like Bruce Kodish and Kenneth G. Johnson point to various scientific studies that they say appear to support Korzybski's claims. Martin Gardner and others cite an essay in Max Black's ''Language and Philosophy'' as the "definitive critique of general semantics". However, Kodish and others argue that Black's criticisms stem from misunderstandings of ''Science and Sanity'' (see references). Noam Chomsky , widely regarded as the father of modern Linguistics has said that "little can be resurrected" from Korzybski's work because it was "based on serious confusion" ''"We don't need Korzybski to tell us that people say alters our perception . And it's not 'confusion of [linguistic] representation with reality,' rather, being swayed by someone's opinion, which is often quite reasonable."'' Chomsky has also commented on Korzybski's criticisms of the use of the verb "to be" ("any proposition containing the word "is" its cognates 'are,' be' etc creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies") and the fact that Korzybski seemed to have changed his mind when he said (regarding the phrase he coined "the map is not the territory") that it was justified because "the denial of identification (as in "is not") has opposite neuro-linguistic effects on the brain from the assertion of identity (as in "is")." Chomsky said: ''"Sometimes what we say can be misleading, sometimes not, depending on whether we are careful. If there's anything else Korzybski's work , I don't see it. That was the conclusion of my undergrad papers 60 years ago. Reading Korzybski extensively, I couldn't find anything that was not either trivial or false. As for Neurolinguistic effects on the Brain , nothing was known when he wrote and very little of that is relevant now."'' Korzybski's views on what he called "'s dictum "What is is. What is not is not." Chomsky, who discredited much of the Behaviorist Doctrine that prevailed in the first half of the 20th Century proved that the principles underlying linguisitic behavior are Abstract and Innate , and rejected the Behavioral approach to the study of Language , which, he says, just like the so-called " Neuro-linguistic Programming " that came out of Korzybski's theories among others, has nothing to do with neurolinguistics, but instead is a ''"grotesque caricature and distortion of science, trivial empty as an intellectual pursuit; [something that wouldn't be taken seriously by anyone if it weren't for the fact that it.... offers a theory of human malleability... fills a certain role for those who are accepting the system, provid[ing a kind of aura of acceptability for techniques of control and coercion."'' Chomsky, an Anarchist maintains that the greatest distorters of our Perception are concentrations of Power ,(e.g. State s, Corporation s) because they have the means to propagate their point of view and influence our perception of Reality , much more than simply not using the Verb "to be". SEE ALSO
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