It has baffled me for the last several years since I read Science and Sanity that most people are unaware of it, and indeed to my knowledge no school systems teach it.
The basic premise of the system, that a word is not what it describes, seems to be so basic as to require no further explenation. The only word you can find which is the same thing as its object is the word ‘word’ itself. And even then, it is only an abstraction, as every word is not ‘word’.
Why then do we not teach our children a better model for perception?
I have heard several criticisms of Gen’ Sem’ over the years, many of which have stemmed from misunderstandings or ignorance of the system
Is anybody aware of why, exactly it isn’t taught?
Or, if anybody feels that the system is invalid, could you please elucidate exactly why it is invalid?
Somewhere around, I have a lovely dissection of General Semantics. I can’t recall if it’s in Gardner or in Why People Believe Weird Things. Either way…
I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to be discussing his work, it does not seem to be useful in any way that traditional logic is not.
That is, to restate the sentence, what great advances would be created by teaching his General Semantics in school?
Would that every subject could be taught in full, from relativity and quantum mechanics through a detailed history of the Knights Templar & Hospitaller all the way to every pupil learning a beautiful etude by Villa-Lobos.
There isn’t time. The headteacher/exam board chooses between Semantics and eg. Chemistry. Semantics loses.
Interesting. I’ve never read anything by Korzybski, but I have heard of that principle. I bought it up a few months ago in a thread about gay marriage. I do wish more people had heard of it…
General Semantics, with all the wordiness stripped out, possesses a great many characteristics that map onto a sort of general structure I like to call “advanced common sense.” (Term cheerfully stolen from a friend’s reaction to my description of the actual useful bits of a corporate “large group awareness training” bit a previous employer was heavily into mandating and–of course–not following afterwards.) Map not territory, check; the perceived aggregate of an object is nowhere even near to the actual total of that object, check; language to describe perceptions are themselves still further abstracted from base reality, check again. All useful things to know; all ACS–but I don’t think General Semantics really has a patent on the expression of any of them.
Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. That is an almost 50 year old book!
As Drastic said, the parts of General Semantics that make the most sense are incorporated into most well developed common sense and critical thinking. It also has a respected pedigree in the Western canon, namely Magritte’s painting "The Betrayal(or Treachery) of Images – the famous “Ceci n’est ce pas une pipe”.
You do run into a problem, however, when some preachers of GS then decide that the logical thing is to move on to more radical expressions such as “e-” or whatever it is called. That is a fine and dandy thought experiment but languages are dynamic “living” constructs that don’t care about fitting professors’ theories.
(E-Sabbath:In “Why People Believe Weird Things”, the chapter about a “weird” philosophy is about Ayn Rand)
Because it seems a little silly to teach …whatever you want to call this general area of academia…to students who barely can READ words, much less comprehend that a ‘word’ is not what it describes.
Yes, it would require a perceptual shift, and yes, we seem to be quite enamored of the various ‘is’ and ‘to be’ family of terms. But the simple fact that it would be difficult does not make it wrong.
Quentum physicists cannot talk about what things ‘are’, only what effects they appear to have and how to may be modeled. But a physicists model is not what it represents, nor would my model of what Gen’ Sem’ could accomplish be what it would accomplish in the minds of children.
but it seems as if giving children a thorough training in logic, ontology, etc at an early age would make future learning both easier and more desireable.
It seems, from where I stand, that certain mental diseases, such as racism, would be impossible if one were trained in Gen’ Sem’.
You could not longe say “All X are Y”
Since you would be forced to be aware that X is simply an abstraction and that there are no ‘groups’, as well as the fact that Y was multi-ordinal and taken on a case by case basis.
Mmmm… of course the language is in a state of constant evolution, but from what little I have studied, E-Prime would put us in accord with current scientific trends away from talking about ‘suchness’ or ‘isness’ and instead only working with models. Perhaps I’m reaching .Why is it you feel that E-Prime would somehow threaten or retard the future growth of language?
A good point, and a separate rant all in its own I suppose… perhaps we could go with a Clockwork style educational system… “Viddy well, viddy well!” But I grow whimsical.
I suppose that in a corner of my mind I had hoped that children exposed to the idea that the map was not the territory would be seized by a love of knowledge, that they would be fascinated by the fact that Universe was far vaster than our models of it, and they would want to drink it all in… But I grow insanely idealistic.
I am absolutely certain I had teachers who would not have understood or accepted this concept if you suffocated them to death with it, then reanimated them and poisoned them to death with a concentrated solution of it. “Wait, so you’re saying that things aren’t what they are? That makes no sense! How can something not be what it is?”
Way to go, fine, don’t let me have any hope ~grins~
Thank you for the laugh, I suppose at times I can be a tad too idealistic.
Still, there has to be some solution to the problem of stupid teachers turning out stupid children who do not know how to think or how to perceive in a before-the-words manner… perhaps I am grasping at smoke.
From what little I have read about General Semantics, I am not sure that it warrants much coverage. First, the ideas are not strictly unique or original, as others have indicated. Second, they seem to deny their own premise in the E-Prime line of thought. Words aren’t isomorphisms… but we should avoid words that suggest isomorphisms. Er, right. Because… we are fans of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis? Or because isomorphisms do exist…? But we can’t say that…
The whole thing seems very tortured to me. Perhaps, and I’m certainly willing to accept the following, I have not investigated it enough. If the OP would care to give some more detailed instruction or flesh out the ideas I’d be willing to provide some better arguments (if I am still against the idea, of course).
I think you’re looking at this in a wrong manner. Start the children with facts, then teach them basic term logic and then they have the basic tools to address your E-prime idea. The same way that no one teaches grade 7 kids that non Euclidian mathematics describes space-time curvature. They lack the mental tools to address the idea.
When formulated Gen’ Sem’ was essentially a continuation of the work of others, so yes, it is not unique, but it does seem to bear inclusion as the system of Gen’ Sem’ or as its influence in similar systems.
To my knoweldge E-Prime does not suggest that we do away with all ismorphisms, simply that we use language which makes us conscious of abstracting. Thus all quanta ‘are’ not waves, or particles, but all quanta may be modeled as x, y, z, etc…
I’m also somewhat new to these boareds (long time lurker first time poster)… does OP mean orriginal poster?
Essentially then, without writing more than Korzybski did in order to explain what he was saying, Gen’ Sem’ deals with structural relatioships and is much more akin to observer-models which are currently popular in physics than the Reality principle which was popular from, oh, shall we say 500 AD to about the 1800’s? (a very rough aproximation mind you)
It elminates the ability to say what anything ‘is’, only what effects it has, what qualities may be modeled for a certain instant in space-time, etc…
It puts us on a basis of discussing quanta (in the macroscopic sense) rather than monads.
Mmmm. A valid point. And no offense is meant at all, but I wonder if your idea is not an oversimplification?
Why couldn’t we include bits and pieces of ontological/epistemological methodology in the curriculum starting at kindergarten?? Perhaps I am giving children too much credit… I don’t think so though. If while teaching seven year olds about whatever, you simply told them “this is not reality, this is a grid through which we perceive reality…” Heck, include some pictures to illustrate the point.
But just as we don’t teach Joyce to seven year olds, we do teach basic knowledge of the English language, perhaps, as logic is just as vital, we could include the basic-baby-steps of logic and perception in early education?
But the building block of language are facts. Tonal inflections for each letter, or letters for each tonal inflection if you like that better. I don’t think you’re giving children too much credit, but I do think that their ability to abstract away from concrete images develops over time. I’m currently spending evenings with my son working on linking pictures to words. I can’t begin to image how to do that without making the direct reference that that picture of a cat is a cat. The added layers of abstraction would make it impossible to teach him. That, right there might be the biggest reason why people resist this methodology.
However, he is able to abstract “cat” away from a unique picture to multiple cats. My son, the platonist.
Now since I have you, how would general semantic write “X is True”?
