I picked up a pile of old books at a yard sale a whiule back-among them was a dusty tome form the early 1950’s-called “Genral Semantics”-by some guy called Alfred Korzynski. This book is WEIRD beyond belief-it reminds me of some of L.Ron Hubbard’s Scientology ravings…
anyway, supposedly there was a “Genral Semantics” society/foundation in Chicago-does this group still exist? Apparently, this guy belived that insanity/metal illness was caused by misunderstood words! (I have read that scientology believes this as well-did L. Ron ever learn his crap from this Korzybski guy?
Anyway-to all Chicago-area SD’ers-is this group still around?
I don’t know if the group still exists, but for some good backround on the “Count” and his ideas check out Martin Gardner’s book Fads and Fallicities in the Name of Science.
Martin Gardner updated his info on the General Semantics movement a few years ago in the pages of The Skeptical Inquirer.
GS and Scientology DID attract a lot of the same folks back in the 1950s. The late SF writer A.E. VanVogt was associated with both. You can find arguments that L. Ron lifted some of his ideas for Scientology from the Count at the Clambake site at http://www.xenu.com
Other randomness about GS:
Considering that (according to “Fads and Fallacies”) Korzybski had the street number of his Institute legally changed to “1234” so that with his street name the address became “1234 56th Street” (in Chicago), it’s pretty weird hat he was called “The Count”. Maybe he anticipated Sesame Street.
Van Vogt based his books “The World of Null-A” and “The Players of Null-A” on General Semantics, as the titles alone make plain. When sf critic Damon Knight pointed out the inconsistencies in the first book Van Vogt actually went back and changed it – one of the few cases I know of where a critic had such an effect. Knight didn’t much care for GS, I think. I know I don’t. I find the Null-A books tedious, and The Voyage of the Space Beagle by Van Vogt is similarly annoying.
Korzybski “started” the modern study of semantics, and some of his followers have split off to study different aspects of linguistics–Neil Postman and Benjamin Lee Whorf, I guess.
They still publish Etc., the journal of general semantics.
http://www.generalsemantics.org/Services/etc-desc.htm
Wow, what a find (purely as a curio)! I heard about this guy in a couple of William Burroughs books - I can’t remember which ones, and my books are in storage at the moment, but I’ve never seen this guy referred to anywhere else. If you’ve ever read Burroughs, his writing’s quite insane too, and he did later get into Scientology (although he left it after not too long and put around word that he thought it was nonsense.)
As I understand it, he’s talking about something like words not having any meaning except what they are meant to mean, or something strangely convoluted. If you could give a rundown of it (if you ever get to/bother reading it), that would be cool. I haven’t checked the web to see if there’s anything on him, but there’s sure to be.
Iguana.
That link will get you to their new pages:
http://www.generalsemantics.com/
I once took a General Semantics class from the editor of ETC. I thought it was a linguistics class–it was and it wasn’t.
I was told that Korzybski had a problem with one leg, and he would make a dramatic approach to the middle of a stage, intone gravely “The word is not the thing,” and walk slowly offstage.
That sounds like a lot less fun than just going to see a certain Magritte painting.
Apparantly, like the “Dean Drive” and Dianetics, General Semantics was one of those weird ideas that SF editor John W. Campbell latched onto and spread to other members of the SF community. A result of this is the idea would “infect” his author’s stories. Heinlein mentions GS in “Revolt in 2100” (I believe…the one where the Cabal is rebelling against the Prophet) and maybe a few other stories. I’m pretty sure GS showed up in an Asimov short too.
For all his positive contributions, Campbell seemed like a pretty bad crackpot detector. Read his editiorial in the issue where Dianetics was introduced to see how…um…enthusiastic he could get (paraphrased quote “The GREATIST DISCOVERY since the INVENTION OF FIRE”, or read any of his “gosh-wow” columns praising the “Dean Drive”.
Fenris
I got hold of a copy of the Martin Gardner book, and read about the “Count”. According to Gardner, he was more of a con man than a legitimate scientist…but he published reams of material-just who bought all this stuff heaven knows. Another interesting fact-the late Prof. S.I.Hayakawa (a very respected english professor and linguist) was an associate of the count-they actually worked together, so perhaps the “count” had a few saner moments…
All in all, I would judge “General Semantics” to be a fairly respectable con job!