I was reading an interesting book (“The Psychiatrist and the Nazi”). it is about a psychiatrist (Dr. Kelley) who interviewed and analyzed the Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, after WWII. Dr. Kelley was enamored of “General Semantics”-a pseudo-science founded in Chicago by a man named Alfred Korzybski. It was a rather strange cult, but as far as I know, it didn’t harm people who belonged to it.
In any event, was it a cult? How long did it last? Is it around today?
It certainly had cult like elements, although I do not know if it ever resulted in an organization that you would join and give allegiance to. I think it more presented itself as a whole new way of thinking that would solve people’s, and all humankind’s, problems, and there were people who bought into this in a big way. Perhaps a modern analogy would be something like the popularity of the book The Secret a few years ago, although I think General Semantics was going to save the world, rather than just make you rich and sexy.
On of the weirder products of the movement were the “Null-A” books of science fiction writer A.E. van Vogt, which are almost unreadably bad (though I seem to recall that I enjoyed some of van Vogt’s other stuff back in the day). The hero of the one I somehow forced my way to the end of, many years ago, gained superpowers through his use of non-Aristotelian logic (aka null-A) (which was part of the General Semantics system), and this, IIRC, eventually led him to grow an extra brain that allowed him to teleport at will (or something like that). It was seriously stupid, and did not seem to be satire.
As I understand it, Korzybski’s work began as a serious attempt to contribute to academic logical and semantic theory, but he soon began to make these wildly exaggerated claims for the theory, and gained a cult-like following (although I don’t think Korzybski himself ever claimed that it would do stuff like cause you to grow an extra brain or enable you to teleport).
Hubbard took a far amount of General Semantics for Dianetics. The difference was that he deliberately wanted to foster a cult while the GS people seriously believed in their work. Just because a study is wrong, even if it turns out to be pseudoscience, doesn’t mean that it is intended to be a cult. GS had some serious supporters during Korzybski’s life but that mostly reflected how little anyone knew about any aspects of the brain at that time. After his death, the woo factor increased and today any remnants are certainly pseudoscience and perhaps cultist. Of course it’s still around today: you could have just checked Wikipedia.
I just read van Vogt’s The World of Null-A after re-reading Damon Knight’s classic takedown. Yes, it is as preposterous as he says. What he doesn’t say is that the book is an inadvertant argument against Null-A thinking. The hero’s enemies are ahead of him at every moment - even though they have a mole in their midst who knows all of their plans and could have stopped them at any time before the novel started. There is not a single example of thinking cleverer or deeper than run-of-the-mill pulp fiction despite the use of Null-A techniques. With friends like that…
I think it was more of a fad than a cult - you’d run into people who tediously explain that they had become successful (or were about to become successful) because they had clarified their language and thus their thinking, just like running into people who are devoted to mediation, or a special diet. General Semantics notions were used in Golden Age SF by Heinlein and Van Vogt (and probably others too); even today, you’ll hear terms like “false-to-fact” and “time-binding” in SF fandom circles, both of which come from GS, I think.
Voyage of the Space Beagle had some good bits, most notably “Coeurl,” the mean scary black space cat-monster, probably the inspiration for D&D’s “Displacer Beasts” and arguably the inspiration for the Xenomorph in Alien. One of the best space monsters in the whole history of SF.
I had a friend who was a “weak” GS fan. He tried to avoid using “is” words, because he felt they were linguistically misleading. Two plus two “isn’t” four – they have the sum of four. That sort of thing. I can see how it might offer some very small advantage to clear thinking, in that it makes you revisit ordinary everyday things that we pretty much take for granted. As Sherlock Holmes might say, it helps you to observe, not merely to see.
He gave me a subscription to a GS newsletter, but after a year of it, I lost interest. As the fellow said, the parts that were good weren’t original, and the parts that were original weren’t good.
That’s not a Null-A book, though.
I actually learned a few tips from GS. One: the map is not territory, nor is the word the object. Two: humans construct a world in their minds that is not necessarily congruent with the actual world. Three: this construction is based upon the interaction between the thalamus and the neocortex. Four: it is possible, through training to learn to control that interaction so that the mental landscape is more congruent with the actual landscape.
These are useful things to know, and I learned them from reading the Null-A series as an 8 year old. Yeah, the whole ‘similarity to 20 decimals points’ nonsense is… well, nonsense. But, still these have been useful concepts that I have taught to others.
But, a cult? Hmmm… I don’t think so. There is the The Institute of General Semantics but they seem relatively harmless.
They have some good ideas that shouldn’t be ignored, but a cult? No.
You do realise that is two great steps.
- Admitting there are problems
- Admitting that they could be solved.
:dubious: Are you suggesting that no-one ever thought that there are problems, or that they might be solved, before Korzybski?
One of the great popularizers of general semantics was S. I. Hayakawa, famous as the President of San Francisco State University during the student strikes of the late 1960’s and famous for sleeping in the Senate as a U.S. Senator from California. He was also famous for saying we should keep the Panama Canal because we “stole it fair and square.”
Science writer and debunker Martin Gardner devoted most of a chapter in his book In the Name of Science (later retitled Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science) to General Semantics. From his description (and criticism), it certainly sounds like a cult. I urge you to read his comments on it. He describes Korzybski leading classes in question-and-response sessions about his “multi-valued” logic, answering “Yes”, “No”, or “Et Cetera” (meaning that there a large number of possible answers, not to be limited by "yes’ or “no”), comparing him to entertainer Kay Kyser and his “Kollege of Musical Knowledge” ( Kay Kyser - Wikipedia ) Every now and then Korzybski would drop a self-deprecating comment in heavily-accented English: “Bah! I talk baby stuff!”
Gardner’s description makes it sound kind of trivial, but that was his goal, of course. Even Gardner acknowledges that there were some interesting and useful bits in Korzybsky’s system (I’ve seen it pop up in lots of places – not just Hubbard or Van Vogt. Heinlein quotes Korzybski on more than one occasion. And more recent folks spout his “The Map is Not the Territory”) But Gardner takes him to task for not acknowledging that a lot of his material had been considered and written upon by other philosophers – with different results. Korzybski’s claims that many problems of modern thinking result from heavy reliance on “Aristotelian” thinking and two-valued logic were, to Gardner, simply tilting at semantic windmills. There have been many systems of multivalued logic created and studied, but even in them a relation is either true or false. Korzybski redefined “semantic” so broadly that , Gardner says, it was almost meaningless. Most people realize that The Map is Not the Territory – but Maps are still usefully, nonetheless.
Gardner continued to write about General Semantics in his later books and in his columns in Scientific America and the Skeptical Inquirer.
It’s interesting to note that Korzybski had been dead for two years when Gardner first wrote about him. Or I should say it would have been interesting to see what happened if he had lived and continued to develop any positive aspects.
Or perhaps not. I don’t think Gardner was wrong about any subject he took on in Fads and Fallacies and GS might have been nonredeemable. Gardner in fact says that GS became *less *of a cult when Korzybski died and that Hayakawa, a serious scientist, had already found that other formulations provided the foundations for whatever good GS offered.
Cal is spot on when he says that “Most people realize that The Map is Not the Territory – but Maps are still usefully, nonetheless.” So is the realization. (How many GPS accidents will it take to pound this into everybody’s brains?) There was more to McLuhan than “the medium is the message” and he got slagged for years regardless. McLuhan followers were also slightly cultist once, although today he is not much more than an academic interest with some fervent defenders.
I know someone who publishes in GS journals and he is six degrees of separation from reality. I don’t think there’s anything to it as a discipline, but I’m not fully prepared to say that there was never anything of any value, as is true of most woo. Most philosophical attempts to grapple with quantum mechanics seem to fail just as badly, but that just means they are wrong or inadequate not cults.
This is a long way of saying “I don’t know” but that’s the bottom line.
Thanks for the replies…anyway, was Korzybski a real scientist/academic? There have been many cases of scientists going loopy…like Dr. Wilhelm Reich (who had been a respected psychiatrist,before turning to "orgone"research).
I know that S.I. Hyakawa was a respected professor of English, and had published many books and papers.
Was Korzybski just a self educated crackpot?
According to his Wikipedia entry, his education was in engineering. Engineers are, I think, a bit notorious for being more liable to come up with, or glom on to, crackpot theories than people educated to a similar levels in other fields, whether scientific or humanistic. An engineering education seems to provide some people with a (no doubt justified) sense that they are smart and highly educated without always inculcating the same levels of intellectual skepticism and respect for other disciplines (apart from physics and mathematics) that one gets from a good scientific or humanistic education.
However, Korzybski may have genuinely had quite a sophisticated and cutting edge knowledge of logical theory. Logic was a very vibrant field in Poland (the best known figure of this movement was probably Alfred Tarski) at just about the time that Korzybski was growing up and getting his education there. So he might well have learned about it then, and, after he came to America, he might well have been ahead, in his understanding of the latest developments in logic, of many American academics of the time. (I do not know for a fact that this was the case, but it seems plausible.)
What is so odd about Korzybski and his “General Semantics” is that the underlying ideas are not in themselves particularly crackpot, and some aspects of them may even be true (though probably not nearly as original as Korzybski and his followers would have you believe). The crackpottery come in with the absurdly inflated claims made for the importance of these ideas, and for their general applicability in the wider world and the conduct of life. If it hadn’t been for that, Korzybski might be remembered as having made genuine, though minor, contributions to the development of the fields of logic and psychology. Instead, he is remembered as the leader of a crackpot, quasi-cult.