Appendix
5
Selections from SCIENCE AND SANITY
Author's
Note
These
selections from Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-aristotelian
Systems and General Semantics were produced on the request of
a number of teachers of General Semantics and study group leaders.
They found that for some students the full text was too bulky or
too expensive; yet they needed some fundamental textbook preserving
the physico-mathematical approach.
Originally I wrote
Science and Sanity for scientists, teachers, and other leaders
in our civilization. In my judgment all the material presented was
necessary for them, but not as necessary for beginning students.
Personally I would
be biased in making any 'selections' from Science and Sanity
and so had to rely on some teacher experienced with college
and university students.
One such teacher,
Guthrie E. Janssen, undertook the difficult task of making these
selections. Following graduation from the University of Illinois
in 1938 Mr. Janssen spent six years as instructor of English and
history in American schools in Egypt, particularly the American
University at Cairo where he used Science and Sanity as a
textbook with university students on the third year level. The following
two years Mr. Janssen was war correspondent and broadcaster for
the National Broadcasting Company, attached for a period to the
United States Strategic Air Forces (B-29's). After travelling in
some twenty-seven countries and broadcasting into the NBC network
from Cairo, Athens, London, Manila, Tokyo, Shanghai, and from an
airplane over Nagasaki, etc., and seeing results of the atomic bomb
as one of the first ten Americans to enter Hiroshima, Mr. Janssen
returned to this country and was granted a fellowship (donated by
Robert K. Straus) for a year's study at the Institute of General
Semantics. He produced these Selections as part of his working
fellowship during 1946-1947.
I personally am most
grateful to Guthrie Janssen for his considerable painstaking work,
and to the Institute staff and others for their valuable suggestions
and help in production. I wish to express my particular appreciation
to M. Kendig, the Educational Director of the Institute; she urged
for many years that such selections should be published, and gave
valuable aid in bringing about its realization.
For teachers and students
who will use this book I wish to include a forewarning concerning
the fundamental confusion existing today about what the terms 'semantics'
and General Semantics represent.
The original French
sémantique was introduced into the literature by Breal in
1897 in his Essai de sémantique; science des significations,
which was translated into English in 1900 under the title, Semantics:
Studies in the Science of Meaning. Unfortunately the terms are
not exactly equivalent in the different languages, and thus caused
a confusion among the English-speaking people about the use of the
term 'semantic' and 'semantics' which persists up to today. Sémantique
deals with a branch of philology and the historical change of
significance ('meaning'). Lady Welby somehow felt that difference
in implication and formulated a more organismal theory under the
name of 'Significs'. The Significs International Movement in the
Netherlands is still carrying on this work, under the leadership
of mathematicians such as Brouwer (the founder of the Intuitional
School in Mathematics) and logicians, epistemologists, psycho-logicians,
etc.
Both disciplines labelled
by those terms were not non-elementalistic enough, and so different
researchers attempted further elaborations and amplifications under
various old or new terms such as 'semasiology', 'semiosis', 'semiotic',
etc.
As to the relationship
between those disciplines, Lady Welby wrote in the eleventh edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Semantics may . . . be
described as the application of Significs within strictly philological
limits.'
In his Introduction
to Semantics (p. 9) Rudolf Carnap says, 'If in an investigation
explicit reference is made to the . . . user of a language [from
a businesslike, practical point of view] then we assign it to the
field of pragmatics [from the Greek pragmatikos, deed, business,
act, etc.] . . . If we abstract from the user of the language [i.e.,
disregard the person] and analyze only the expressions and their
designate [referents?] we are in the field of semantics. And if,
finally, we abstract from the designate also and analyze only the
relations between the expressions, we are in (logical) syntax. The
whole science of language, consisting of the three parts mentioned,
is called semiotic.'
Obviously such a 'whole
science of language' consisting of 'pragmatics', 'semantics', and
'logic', which is called 'semiotic', disregards the inner reactions
of the individual person, and so eliminates the possibility of
evaluation as a living issue with a living individual, which
is the main aim of General Semantics.
Charles Morris says
explicitly that 'Semiotic is not then a "theory of value"'. Of 'Semantics'
he writes, 'That branch of semiotic which studies the signification
of signs.' (Signs, Language and Behavior, pp. 80 and 353).
Of my work he says, 'The work of A. Korzybski and his followers
is psycho-biological in orientation . . . aiming to protect the
individual against exploitation by others and by himself' (p. 283),
in other words, dealing with the inner life of the individual, on
the silent (non-verbal) levels.
From what was said
here it is obvious that my work in General Semantics has
nothing to do with the above-mentioned disciplines, although I know
and respect the works of the corresponding investigators in those
fields, with their stated limitations.
Even in the index
of Science and Sanity the word 'semantics' does not appear
except as 'Semantics, General'. I use 'semantic' there only as an
adjective with other words, in the sense of 'evaluational', such
as 'semantic aphasia', 'semantic blockage', 'semantic reactions',
etc. I selected the term 'General Semantics' for an empirical natural
science of non-elementalistic evaluation, a theory of values.
If I had not known
of the work done in Sémantique, Significs, etc., I would
have labelled my work by another name, but my system would have
remained fundamentally unaltered. Thus, my papers before the International
Mathematical Congress in Toronto in 1924 before the Washington Society
for Nervous and Mental Diseases in 1925 and before the Washington
Psychopathic Society in 1926 outlined practically my whole system
before I became familiar with the works of Bréal, Lady Welby,
et al. The word 'semantic' does not appear in those papers at all,
and my work is called 'Time-binding, the General Theory', which
remains as important as ever today. I also coined, I believe originally,
the term 'human engineering', but since the publication of my Manhood
of Humanity: The Science and art of Human Engineering in 1921
that term has become so abused that I had to abandon it, and actually
had to hunt for another term. 'Semantics', 'significs', etc., were
unusable, as they did not even touch my field. From a time-binding
point of view, and in fairness to the efforts of others, I coined
the term 'General Semantics', on the assumption that intelligent
laymen will be able to discriminate between 'semantics' and 'General
Semantics', as mathematicians are able to discriminate between the
cartesian system and the vector, tensor, etc., calculuses as different
disciplines, in the process of mathematical evolution. I selected
it also for historical continuity, as the problems on the non-verbal
levels outside or inside our skins are present with us and real,
no matter whether their relations to the verbal levels were solved
by my predecessors and contemporaries or not. The term 'General
Semantics' seemed most appropriate to me because of the derivation
from the Greek semainein, 'to mean', 'to signify'. A theory
of evaluation seemed to follow naturally in an evolutionary sense
from 1) 'meaning' to 2) 'signification' to 3) evaluation, if
we take into account the individual, not divorcing him from
his reactions, nor from his neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic
environments. Thus we allocate him in a plenum of some values,
no matter what, and a plenum of language, which may be used
to inform, or misinform by commission and/or omission,
deceiving the individual himself and/or others. With such problems,
without exception, the individual has to cope to be human at all.
That's what I learned from the theory of time-binding and what I
tried to convey to others through General Semantics and psycho-biological
non-aristotelian considerations.
I showed several years
ago that theories of 'meaning' are humanly impossible, as they do
not take into consideration undefined terms, which label
only the silent levels of non-verbal experiences, etc. Confusion
between non-verbal silent levels, and verbal levels, due to lack
of consciousness of abstracting, leads inevitably to insidious identifications
(misevaluations) of these different levels. Primitivism, infantilism,
formalism, academic stupidites, un-sanity, and other types of pathological
reactions, must then follow.
The words 'semantic'
and 'semantics' are today commonly used even in newspapers and magazines
mostly in the sense of 'meaning'. Important scientists, mathematicians
and physicists included, also use these words, mostly in that sense.
Many of them know something about General Semantics, and if they
mention my work at all, they say explicitly that they use the term
'semantic' in an entirely different sense than I use the term 'General
Semantics', and they are exactly correct.
The more my researches
advanced, the more it became obvious that deeper studies in many
branches of science were necessary. I had to investigate further
hidden silent assumptions. Finally it became clear that nothing
short of a methodological synthesis of mathematics and modern
empirical sciences would suffice for a general theory of values.
This synthesis turned out to be (although it was not planned
as such) a non-aristotelian system, the first so far to be formulated.
Today it becomes impossible to separate General Semantics and this
Non-aristotelian System. One follows from the other, and vice
versa, General Semantics being the modus operandi and
foundation of the system.
As the center for
training in these non-aristotelian methods, the Institute of General
Semantics was incorporated in Chicago in 1938. In the summer of
1946 the Institute moved to Lakeville, Connecticut, where its original
program is being carried on. The rapid spread of interest in our
work, by now on all continents, has indicated the need for the new
methods set forth here. I must stress that General Semantics gives
no panaceas, but experience shows that when the methods of General
Semantics are applied, the results are usually beneficial,
whether in law, medicine, business, etc., education on all levels,
or personal interrelationships, be they family, community, national,
or international. If the methods are not applied, but merely talked
about, no results can be expected. Perhaps the most telling applications
were those on the battlefields of World War II, as reported by members
of the armed forces, including psychiatrists on all fronts, and
especially by Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, formerly Lieutenant Colonel
in the Medical Corps, who reports in part as follows:
'General semantics,
as a modern scientific method, offers techniques which are of extreme
value both in the prevention and cure of such [pathological] reactive
patterns. In my experience with over seven thousand cases in the
European Theater of Operations, these basic principles were daily
employed as methods of group psychotherapy and as methods of psychiatric
prevention. It is obvious that the earlier the case is treated the
better the prognosis, and consequently hundreds of battalion-aid
surgeons were trained in principles of general semantics. These
principles were applied (as individual therapies and as group therapies)
at every treatment level from the forward area to the rearmost echelon,
in front-line aid stations, in exhaustion centers and in general
hospitals. That they were employed with success is demonstrated
by the fact that psychiatric evacuations from the European Theater
were held to a minimum.'
It is not generally
realized that with human progress, the complexities and difficulties
in the world increase following an exponential function of 'time',
with indefinitely accelerating accelerations. I am deeply convinced
that these problems cannot be solved at all unless we boldly search
for and revise our antiquated notions about the 'nature of man'
and apply modern extensional methods toward their solution. Let
us also remember that the methods of exact sciences disregard national
boundaries, and so the extensional methods and devices of General
Semantics can be applied to all existing languages, with deep psycho-logical
effects on the users and through them on their countrymen. Thus
the world can gain an international common denominator for
inter-communication, mutual understanding, and eventual agreement.
A.K.
Lakeville, Connecticut
February, 1948
ADDITIONAL NOTE:
As this was going to press a new paper by Allen Walker Read of New
York, to be published soon, came to my attention. One paragraph
in particular represents such an excellent, terse, historical statement
of how I came to introduce the term 'General Semantics', that I
asked for, and received, Mr. Read's kind permission to reproduce
it here:
'The great popular
vogue of the word semantics can be traced to the ferment
caused by the works of Alfred Korzybski. In 1928, in the first draft
of his Science and Sanity, he did not make use of semantics,
general semantics, or semantic reaction at all. But .
. . he was keeping in touch with the developments among Polish mathematicians
and he was particularly impressed with their work upon attending
the "Congrès des mathématiciens des pays Slaves" in Warsaw in 1929.
In 1931, in a paper given before the American Mathematical Society
at New Orleans, Louisiana he presented material on "the restricted
semantic school represented by Chwistek and his pupils, which
is characterized mostly by the semantic approach." ("A Non-aristotelian
System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics,"
printed in Science and Sanity, pp. 747-761, quotation, p.
748.) He announced that he was using the term "general semantics"
for his own study (Ibid., p. 749 Before this he has called
his work "Time-binding, the general theory."), and that his researches
had resulted "in the discovery of a general semantic mechanism underlying
human behaviour, many new interrelations and formulations culminating
in a [Non-aristotelian]-system." (Ibid., p. 750.) Thus the
background of Korzybski's usage is found in the Polish logicians,
though some of his followers have erroneously associated it with
the antiquarianism of Bréal, Ernest Weekley, and popular writers
on "the glamour of word study." '
A.K.
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