General Semantics is perhaps best classified as a personal growth system providing tools to help us integrate with our advanced symbolic and technological environment through updated understanding and use of the methods and findings of science.

General Semantics - names a discipline based on learning and using the scientific method in our daily lives in the context of a classification system that distinguishes among plants, animals, and humans using the dimensions of energy, distance, and time. As any discipline does, it has its beliefs, values, ethics, and behavioral prescriptions. 

2009-03-28

What "is" General Semantics?

General Semantics is perhaps best classified as a personal growth system providing tools to help us  integrate with our advanced symbolic and technological environment through updated understanding and use of the methods and findings of science. General Semantics - names a discipline based on learning and using the scientific method in our daily lives in the context of a classification system that distinguishes among plants, animals, and humans using the dimensions of energy, distance, and time. As any discipline does, it has its beliefs, values, ethics, and behavioral prescriptions. 
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2 comments:

  1. Phil Ardery Jr29 March, 2009 14:31

    The term "General Semantics" was coined by Alfred Korzybski and became public property with the 1933 publication of "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics." With respect to Diogenes's statement initiating the thread "What Is General Semantics," I'm containing my own tendency to "burst into speech" and embellish the statement with emphases important to me. But...[pause]...I have time later to do that. First, I wish to say that I don't chafe under my "followers" positioning in the structure of this new blog. I first met Ralph Kenyon at a 12-day Institute of General Semantics "Seminar-Laboratory" 35 years ago. In the decades since, Ralph has constantly exhibited to me the personal qualities -- generous spirit, scientific curiosity, capacity for work, critical perspective, sense of humor, etc. -- that uniquely qualify "Diogenes" to "lead" us here.

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  2. Phil Ardery Jr02 April, 2009 16:09

    In my first comment on this, Diogenes's first post to this blog, I cited the first public use of the term "General Semantics" – Korzybski's Science and Sanity (1933). A Ralph Kenyon / Diogenes essay that I especially appreciate is the 2003 "How Much Out of Date is Korzybski" (http://www.xenodochy.org/gs/hmod.html). In my opinion, Diogenes especially connects to Korzybski in their shared call to inform conscious behavior from available scientific knowledge. The essay referenced above asserts that "Vast areas of material presented in Science and Sanity have been superseded by more recently gained knowledge. Korzybski was aware that this would happen, and he predicted it. The amount of knowledge change is so great that even major premises of general semantics need to be revised. The formulations as written in Science and Sanity and Korzybski's other writings are way out of date." In that 2003 paper and in his other writings, Diogenes points out that too few of us who claim to endorse and/or apply General Semantics have updated our General Semantics with post-1933 science. (I personally prefer to say, "post-1950 science," 1950 being the year when Korzybski coagulated and stopped providing new abstractions from current science.)

    By posting this comment, I wish to highlight the above-referenced Diogenes essay, and I hope that highlighting the one essay will draw attention to the larger body of Diogenes's General Semantics writings (see http://www.xenodochy.org/gs/gs-bib.html).

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