Willie Nelson

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General Semantics is an educational discipline created by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) during the years 1919 to 1933. General Semantics is distinct from semantics, a different subject.

The name technically refers to the study of what Korzybski called “semantic reactions”, or reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event — any event, not just perceiving a human-made symbol — in respect of that event’s meaning.

However, people most commonly use the name to mean the particular system of semantic reactions that Korzybski called the most useful for human survival, e.g., delayed reactions as opposed to “signal reactions” (immediate, unthinking ones).

Advocates of General Semantics view it as a form of mental hygiene that enables practitioners to avoid ideational traps built into natural language and “common sense” assumptions, thereby enabling practitioners to think more clearly and effectively.

General Semantics thus shares some concerns with psychology but is not precisely a therapeutic system, being in general more focused on enhancing the abilities of normal individuals than curing pathology.

According to Korzybski, the central goal of General Semantics is to develop in its practitioners what he called “consciousness of abstracting”, that is, an awareness of the map/territory distinction and of how much of reality is missed in the linguistic and other representations we use.

General Semantics teaches that it is not sufficient to understand this sporadically and intellectually, but rather that we achieve full sanity only when consciousness of abstracting becomes constant and a matter of reflex.

Many General Semantics practitioners view its techniques as a kind of self-defense kit against manipulative semantic distortions routinely promulgated by advertising, politics, and religion, as well as those found in self-deception.

Viewed philosophically, General Semantics is a form of applied conceptualism that emphasizes the degree to which human experience is filtered and mediated by contingent features of human sensory organs, the human nervous system, and human linguistic constructions.

The most important premise of General Semantics has been succinctly expressed as “The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined”.

While Aristotle wrote that a true definition gives the essence of the thing defined (in Greek to ti ên einai, literally “the what it was to be”), general semantics denies the possibility of finding such an essence.

In simplified form, the “essence” of Korzybski’s work was the claim that human beings are limited in what they know by

(1) the structure of their nervous systems
(2) the structure of their languages.

Human beings cannot experience the world directly, but only through their “abstractions” (nonverbal impressions or “gleanings” derived from the nervous system, and verbal indicators expressed and derived from language).

Sometimes our perceptions and our languages actually mislead us as to the “facts” with which we must deal.

Our understanding of what is going on sometimes lacks similarity of structure with what is actually going on.

He stressed training in awareness of abstracting, using techniques that he had derived from his study of mathematics and science.

He called this awareness, this goal of his system, “consciousness of abstracting.”

His system included modifying the way we approach the world, e.g., with an attitude of “I don’t know; let’s see,” to better discover or reflect its realities as shown by modern science.

One of these techniques involved becoming inwardly and outwardly quiet, an experience that he called, “silence on the objective levels.”

[From Wikipedia]

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