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Korzybski and General Semantics
By George Doris
* As printed in the General
Semantics Bulletin Number 50, 1983. Reprinted and revised with
permission from "Self and Society: European Journal of Humanistic Psychology",
Vol. XI, No. 3, 1983, pp. 159-166.
[We frequently receive
requests for a simple, short statement to use in response to the question,
"Yes,
but what is general semantics?" The following paper by our English
colleague George Doris strikes us as one of the most successful
recent attempts we have seen. We present it, not as an explanation for
readers of the Bulletin, but as an example of how a popular yet rigorous
presentation can be made. Mr. Doris wrote his piece for an English-reading
European audience whose knowledge of general semantics was assumed to be
nil. (Ed.)]
This year marks the 50th
anniversary of the publication of Alfred Korzybski's major book,
Science
and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.(1)
For me it is also the 20th anniversary of obtaining that book, and 10 years
since my first visit to the United States, during which I attended
the 30th Annual Seminar-Training Workshop in General Semantics. The coincidence
of these dates has precipitated much reflection on the important influence
for good that general semantics has had on my personal and professional
life. This short essay thus honors Korzybski and gives thanks for his work;
if it also stimulates others to explore what value general semantics might
have for them, so much the better.
Korzybski (1879-1950) was
a Pole who was trained as an engineer and a mathematician; he also studied
mental illness in association with the famous Dr. William Alanson White
in Washington, D.C. General semantics is the result of both his scientific
and psychiatric studies, from which he inferred that the orientations of
science and the orientations that result in sanity are very similar - hence
the title of his book.
General semantics
is the study of the relations between language, 'thought' and behavior:
between how we talk, therefore how we 'think', and therefore how we act.
The term 'semantics' is somewhat misleading in this context and I want
just briefly to relate general semantics to the other 'language' disciplines.
Grammar deals
with word-to-word relations. It embodies rules about how to put words together
into sentences, and it is not concerned with how sentences are related
to each other or how sentences are related to facts.
Logic goes
further. To a logician, sentences are assertions and he is interested in
relations between assertions ("if this is true, then that is true"). But
for the logician words need not have any meaning except as defined by other
words, and the assertion need not have any relations to the world of fact.
Semantics goes
further than logic - to the semanticist, words and assertions have meaning
only if they are related operationally to referents in the world of nature.
The semanticist defines not only validity (as the logician does) but also
'truth'.
General semantics goes
furthest -- it deals not only with words, assertions, and their referents
in nature but also with their effects on human behavior. For a 'general
semanticist', communication is not merely words in proper order properly
inflected (as for the grammarian) or assertions in proper relation to each
other (as for the logician) or assertions in proper relation to referents
(as for the semanticist), but all these, together with the reactions of
the nervous systems of the human beings involved in the communication.
[The previous four paragraphs appear in Anatol Rapoport's article, "What is Semantics?"
in the Autumn 1952 issue of ETC: A Review of General Semantics. — Ed.]
Thus Korzybski spoke of 'neuro-semantic'
and 'neuro-linguistic' reactions - holistic terms for the functioning
of the 'human-organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment', with hyphens deliberately
used to indicate interconnectedness. Readers of this magazine may now recognize
a link with Neurolinguistic Programming, a recent development described
in The Structure of Magic, I and II - books
about language, therapy, communication and change. The authors, John Grinder,
a linguist, and Richard Bandler, a gestalt therapist - indicate their familiarity
with Korzybski's formulations by quoting him and citing Science and
Sanity. The two 'wizards' they cite by name,
Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls, have acknowledged a debt to Korzybski.
Indeed it is in the field
of 'gestalt' that the influence of Korzybski's work will be most familiar
to participants in the human potential movement, although they will be
mostly unaware of it. Bernard Basescu of the New York Society for General
Semantics has written an excellent paper(2) on the use of general semantics
in his profession of gestalt therapy and he makes the point that "those
who associate general semantics with the study of language, and those for
whom gestalt work means non-verbal expression (body feelings, tone of voice,
posture, etc.) are missing much of the richness of each." Fritz Perls'
methods seem to be his fruitful integration of at least four separate streams
of development - the psychoanalysis of Freud, the gestalt psychology of
Kohler and Goldstein, the psychodrama of J.L. Moreno and the linguistic
insights of Korzybski - the whole being more than the sum of the parts!
It is impossible to give
here more than a few 'inklings' into the scope and power of general
semantics as a way of evaluating personal experience. A useful starting
point might be Korzybski's emphasis on the human process of abstracting,
i.e., we abstract from our experience only a fraction of the totality,
and that fraction is not 'random', but depends on our particular nervous
system, our physical state at the time, our needs and objectives, etc.
Thus what I see, hear, feel on any occasion is particular to me and will
not be exactly the same for anyone else at the 'same' time and place.
When I come to communicate
about that experience the complexities increase, because I will use my
stock of words and phrases, which won't mean exactly the same to anyone
else and which will not exactly match the experience I want to refer to.
There are many references to this difficulty in the literature -- for example,
"Any communication is a problem of translation, which involves, in its
broadest sense, not so much finding words to match other words as finding
experiences to match other experiences" (Anatol Rapoport) and "Any model
of communication is at the same time a model of translation, of a vertical
or horizontal transfer of
significance. No two historical
epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to
signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals of valuation
and inference. Neither do two human beings." (George Steiner)
The problem of the matching
of words to things, events and experience is tackled by Korzybski's use
of an effective analogy, in which he considers language as a kind of 'map'
of the 'territory' of reality. In the same way that a good map has a structure
or shape similar to that of the actual territory, language will be accurate
to the extent that its structure parallels the things and ideas spoken
or written about.
Certain very important relationships
are illustrated by the analogy:
Just as the map
is not the territory, the word is not the thing.
Just as the map cannot
represent all of the territory, words cannot say all about
anything.
Just as we can make a
map of a map, we can make a statement about a statement, and
use
words about words.
We grow up and live in a world
comprised, in large measure, of the verbal maps inside our heads. For many
'territories' we have only 'maps', no first-hand experience. In other cases
we are conditioned, and often prejudiced, by 'maps' long before we ever
experience the 'territory' (the link with Transactional Analysis is easily
seen here.)
We very frequently mistake
our 'maps' (words and ideas) for the world 'out there'. We eat the menu,
as it were, rather than the meal. And the danger is that, for many reasons,
including some referred to below, the maps are often quite inaccurate.
How do we come to make inaccurate maps? Korzybski would say as follows:
1. We live in a world
of process, change and dynamic structure, yet we map it with static words.
The same word may stand for a person or thing or activity year after year,
while what it stands for may change, grow and transform. We do not name
the process, the development, the flux -- we speak in static terms and
learn to perceive and think that way. Bernard Shaw remarked that "the only
man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measure anew each time
he sees me, whilst all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect
them to fit me."
2. In life there is 'non-identity'
-- no two things are identical. Yet our verbal maps consist largely of
categorical labels, which stress similarities and allow us to neglect
differences. Terms like 'trade union' obscure the fact that trade union(1)
is not trade union(2). We live in a world of uniqueness that is mapped
by a language of categories -- and some of us suffer from hardening of
the categories!
3. The world is frequently
about 'gradations', about probabilities and about degrees of intensity.
But our Aristotelian, two-valued logic leads us into evaluating in terms
of polar opposites, of "either-or" structures. Thus we have for/against,
in/out, win/lose, etc. -- exclusive positions that lead to many problems.
4. In the world there are
'fields of influence' and inter-relationships. Language, however, encourages
us to make statements in isolation -- for example, to think and speak of
the reason or the cause, when there are often many interacting factors.
Our subject-predicate forms may also mislead by implying one-way action
only, e.g., "I hate him" does not suggest that the hating may also be doing
something to me.
5. The world is complex but
our language leads us to 'split' with words what exists 'as-a-whole'. As
Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote, "We dissect nature along lines laid down by our
native languages ... the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of
impressions which has to be organized by our minds -- and this means largely
by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into
concepts, and ascribe significances...." (3)
6. Sometimes we go in the
opposite direction and create 'verbal wholes' or 'maps' for which it is
difficult or impossible to find a satisfactory territory. The word 'nature'
provides an example, referred to here by the Portuguese poet, Fernando
Pessoa:
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature does not exist,
That there are mountains, valleys plains,
That there are trees, flowers, grasses,
But that here's not a whole to which this belongs,
That any real and true connection
Is a disease of our ideas
Nature is parts without a whole.
This perhaps is that mystery they speak of.
Perhaps the struggle to find
'exact' meaning in some of the synthetic expressions we use is akin to
looking at this 'triangle' diagram -- each part is O.K., but 'the
whole is a nonsense'.
We have been considering
some of the problems arising from distorted relationships between 'maps'
and 'territories'. Yet the potential for error does not stop there -- the
relationship between the map and the mapmaker is important, and the latter
may bring other distortions in creating his or her 'meanings', especially
in interpersonal communication.
For example, we 'project'
-- that is we tend to see our own perceptions, feelings and evaluations
as being 'in the world out there' rather than in us. This is partly linguistic
in origin, as when we say "the office is noisy" or "the job is monotonous."
And whereas a person reacts 'as-a-whole' in a situation, our language structure
leads us to think and speak 'elementalistically' (as Korzybski would say)
in terms of thoughts and feelings and actions. Of course, the thought,
the feeling of embarrassment and the blush occur together, not as separate
elements.
We create symbols, including
words, then we tend to deal in 'word magic', to confuse the words with
the things or relationships they represent. We pin on labels -- like 'failure'
or 'militant' -- and react to these maps as though they were the territories.
In this way we may generate self-fulfilling prophecies.
So -- where does all this
lead us? Did Korzybski suggest that we cease writing and talking; that
perhaps we need a new language, or that we must rigidly define all our
terms? Most certainly not -- language has a life of its own, as it were,
and it will not be pinned down by some central authority. And it is not
so much the traps in language that are the problem, as it is our ignorance
of them. But there are some things we can do; we can work much more effectively
with language if we:
-
become more aware of what we
and others are doing when we use words and other symbols to communicate;
-
regard 'communicating' as a
process in which the speaker and listener, or writer and reader, constantly
fight against the forces of confusion;
-
expect to be misunderstood-
expect to misunderstand others.
How can we achieve this rather
different approach to communicating, this somewhat different 'view of the
world'? What does it involve in terms of behavior including thinking, speaking
and writing?
One of the difficulties we
face is the fact that our language is, in a very real sense, an integral
part of ourselves. It is 'built into' our nervous systems from infancy
and we may be as little aware of it , as such, as we are of breathing.
The process of making sense of our surroundings is complex and creative,
involving seeing, hearing, etc., and actively relating these stimuli to
memories held in some way in our 'brains' and 'bodies'. Our 'word associations'
and our tendency to 'identify words with things' are integral with these processes of perceiving, thinking, judging, etc. Bringing about new orientations to 'languaging' and evaluating must therefore be an active pursuit, in which a person becomes aware of how he is performing now and has an opportunity to change. There is an important phase of unlearning to be gone through before new behavior can develop.
For most people, this 're-orientation'
is very difficult or impossible to achieve by reading articles and books
(including Science and Sanity) or being 'talked at' in lectures.
Perhaps some difficulty in making sense of this essay illustrates the point!
It requires participation in activities -- for example, working with visual
perception exercises; discovering and examining our processes of making
assumptions and inferences, again by exercises; learning about map/territory
relationships using actual maps; and most of all by associative free discussion
in a group of fellow explorers, facilitated by a leader who is sensitive
to the sometimes radically different viewpoints that emerge and that provide
learning opportunities for all. General semantics provides various simple
but effective devices and processes to help in this learning. The effects
of the various experiences are cumulative, and 'meaning' often cannot be
assigned to events until subsequent happenings enable that individual to
complete a pattern or gestalt.
The Institute of General
Semantics, of Lakeville, Connecticut, U.S.A.**, has mounted a seminar-workshop
each year since 1943 to bring general semantics to many people from a very
wide range of professional backgrounds. These events are usually held residentially
in a school or university campus in the country, and besides scientific
and linguistic inputs the learning goes into non-verbal areas such as music,
painting, bio-feedback and sensory awareness. Many of the 'experiential
learning' techniques of today were applied -- in-deed, developed
-- in these workshops of up to 40 years ago.
To conclude, and picking
up a point touched upon earlier, the specific 'language' dimension is now
too often relatively neglected in personal growth activities, in favor
of a largely non-verbal focus. And yet the 'problems' of so many of us
are rooted in our inadequate or false verbal 'maps', which need to be 'identified' and worked on. As someone put it so nicely, we have too many experiential immersions without enough formulational rub-downs. Fifty years on, Korzybski's formulations have still an immense contribution to make in our progress towards sanity.
**The Institute's current
address is: Institute of General Semantics, 2260 College Avenue, Fort Worth, TX 76110
(1) Korzybski,
Alfred. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems
and General
Semantics,
4th Edition, International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co., Lakeville,
Conn., 1958
(2) Basescu, Bernard.
"On the Use of General Semantics Formulations in the Practice of Gestalt
Therapy."
General Semantics
Bulletin, No. 46, Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, Conn.,
1979, pp. 57-66.
(3) Whorf,
B.L. Language, Thought and Reality. Edited by John E. Carroll, M.I.T.
Press, 1971.
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