General semantics

It has been described by nonproponents as a self-help system, and it has been criticized as having pseudoscientific aspects, but it has also been favorably viewed by various scientists as a useful set of analytical tools albeit not its own science.

General semantics is concerned with how phenomena (observable events) translate to perceptions, how they are further modified by the names and labels we apply to them, and how we might gain a measure of control over our own cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses.

Proponents characterize general semantics as an antidote to certain kinds of delusional thought patterns in which incomplete and possibly warped mental constructs are projected onto the world and treated as reality itself.

"[3] While Korzybski considered his program to be empirically based and to strictly follow the scientific method, general semantics has been described as veering into the domain of pseudoscience.

[9] In the 1946 "Silent and Verbal Levels" diagram,[10] the arrows and boxes denote ordered stages in human neuro-evaluative processing that happens in an instant.

Although newer knowledge in biology has more sharply defined what the text in these 1946 boxes labels "electro-colloidal",[11] the diagram remains, as Korzybski wrote in his last published paper in 1950, "satisfactory for our purpose of explaining briefly the most general and important points".

[28] One paper presented at the congress reported dramatic score improvements for college sophomores on standardized intelligence tests after six weeks of training by methods prescribed in Chapter 29 of Science and Sanity.

[31] Hayakawa read The Tyranny of Words, then Science and Sanity, and in 1939 he attended a Korzybski-led workshop conducted at the newly organized Institute of General Semantics in Chicago.

[33] In 1985, Hayakawa gave this defense to an interviewer: "I wanted to treat general semantics as a subject, in the same sense that there's a scientific concept known as gravitation, which is independent of Isaac Newton.

"[34] The regimen in the Institute's seminars, greatly expanded as team-taught seminar-workshops starting in 1944, continued to develop following the prescriptions laid down in Chapter XXIX of Science and Sanity.

The structural differential, patented by Korzybski in the 1920s, remained among the chief training aids to help students reach "the silent level," a prerequisite for achieving "neurological delay".

But although many people were introduced to general semantics—perhaps the majority through Hayakawa's more limited 'semantics'—superficial lip service seemed more common than the deep internalization that Korzybski and his co-workers at the Institute aimed for.

Marjorie Kendig (1892–1981), probably Korzybski's closest co-worker, director of the Institute after his death, and editor of his posthumously published Collected Writings: 1920–1950, wrote in 1968:I would guess that I have known about 30 individuals who have in some degree adequately, by my standards, mastered this highly general, very simple, very difficult system of orientation and method of evaluating—reversing as it must all our cultural conditioning, neurological canalization, etc.... To me the great error Korzybski made—and I carried on, financial necessity—and for which we pay the price today in many criticisms, consisted in not restricting ourselves to training very thoroughly a very few people who would be competent to utilize the discipline in various fields and to train others.

(unconscious or conscious), i.e. the un-learning basic to learning to learn.Yes, large numbers of people do enjoy making a philosophy of general semantics.

In 2007, Martin Levinson, president of the Institute's Board of Trustees, teamed with Paul D. Johnston, executive director of the Society at the date of the merger, to teach general semantics with a light-hearted Practical Fairy Tales for Everyday Living.

[41] 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.

Although Korzybski never acknowledged any influence from this quarter, 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.

Albert Ellis (1913–2007), who developed rational emotive behavior therapy, acknowledged influence from general semantics and delivered the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture in 1991.

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 in the work of more recent writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson.

Henry Beam Piper explicitly mentioned general semantics in Murder in the Gunroom, and its principles, such as awareness of the limitations of knowledge, are apparent in his later work.

[55] Neil Postman, founder of New York University's media ecology program in 1971, edited ETC: A Review of General Semantics from 1976 to 1986.

Postman's student Lance Strate, a co-founder of the Media Ecology Association,[56] served as executive director of the Institute of General Semantics from 2007 to 2010.

With Charles Weingartner, Neil Postman included General Semantics within the introductory background analysis in Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Delacorte, 1969).