What Do I Like Best About Korzybski: A Biography?

A Brazilian correspondent contacted me through the message board of my Academia.edu page and asked:
Q: About your book, Korzybski: A Biography, what do you like best about it??? 

Regards,
V. S. 

A: What I like best about my biography of Korzybski? Hard to pick just one aspect. For one thing, my wife and I and only a few other people are in Korzybski's direct lineage of student-practitioners. There has been much dilution and distortion of his teachings and I did my best to present those teachings in their fullness and with the widest context I could. GS is not actually focused on language as many people think, but is more concerned with human reaction/evaluation and primarily the study of self. I wanted to do honor to my teachers—and the great teacher Alfred —and I believe I did that without making him into a saint. He was a great man but a man for all that and he had foibles and flaws as we all do. I feel I represented his life in the best way possible.

As well, I'm proud of the book, not only as a documentation of Korzybski's work and how it developed but also as a lively and interesting narrative. With that book, I came of age as a writer.

Science and Sanity at 80

This month, October 2013, marks the 80th anniversary of the publication of Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 

When the book finally came out on October 10, 1933, the U.S. was in the first year of F.D.R.'s first administration. Despite whatever lift people's spirits may have had from the president's multiordinal, inaugural day reassurance in March that they had nothing to fear but fear itself, from his "New Deal" plans, and from the much anticipated ending of alcohol prohibition; the U.S. still seemed sunk in the depths of the Great Depression. Internationally, news didn't seem so good to Korzybski either: Hitler had become the Chancellor of Germany and the Nazi Party had begun to consolidate its tyrannical control there. Along with Stalin, ensconced in Soviet Russia, and the Japanese Empire spreading itself across East Asia, the world didn't seem like such a happy place. To Korzybski, with what he called his "theory of sanity", it seemed like as good a time as any to offer his own infusion of sanity, as much as the world could take.

It was no easy task. He had begun writing what would become Science and Sanity in 1921, just after the publication of his first book, Manhood of Humanity. It had taken 12  demanding years devoted to writing and research. By 1932 with the book mainly done, Korzybski and his wife Mira turned down a few publishers willing to publish the book if Korzybski could guarantee the production cost by means of advanced sales. Under such terms the book could sell for as much as $10 retail (over $100 in today's money), a price that surely would have put off most potential readers during a major economic depression. Instead, the Korzybskis started The International Non-Aristotelian Library and Publishing Company (INALPCO), financed primarily through Mira's work painting portraits on ivory for "the rotten rich" (as they sometimes referred to her  wealthy clients). As self-publishers they could offer the book for a more reasonable "educational discount" price of $5.50, when ordered directly from their printer/distributor, Science Press. 

With the Korzybskis' considerable expenses in getting the book published (they remained in debt for a few years afterwards), the book's price certainly wasn't intended to make them rich. But Korzybski offered his "educational discount" to make the book as accessible and as available as possible to his main audience: the 'average intelligent layman'. And he never wavered from his view that the work that his book introduced, perplexingly labeled "general semantics", was not intended mainly for academic and scientific/technical specialists, but for that average intelligent man, woman, and even child, on the street. For years, he had paid membership dues to a British group, The World Association for Adult Education whose motto seemed just in line with his own efforts: "The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world." 

Until his death 17 years later, Korzybski developed the implications of his work, promoting research, refining his insights, and reaching thousands of students individually and in group seminars, mainly through the auspices of the Institute of General Semantics which he founded in Chicago as a non-profit educational organization in 1938 with a few of his close students, his most serious "co-workers" as he liked to call them. 

By the time of his death on March 1, 1950, he had already  made a notable cultural impact in the U.S. and elsewhere, reaching perhaps the high point of critical appreciation of his work. Numerous popularizations of his work had already appeared. By 1949, one year before his death, he had begun receiving serious academic recognition at such places as Yale University, where he was invited by faculty there to conduct a seminar and lecture; the Cooper Union, where he addressed an audience of about 800 people on "Time-Binding: The Foundation for General Semantics"; the University of Denver where he taught a seminar before attending the "Third American Congress on General Semantics", sponsored by that university; and the University of Texas where he was the only independent, non-academic scholar invited to present a paper as part of a symposium on perception, along with a panel of some of the best and brightest figures in the behavioral/social sciences of that period. (Korzybski died while completing the editing and his  personal secretary and literary assistant, Charlotte Schuchardt, went to Texas alone to present his final paper, "The Role of Language in the Perceptual Processes".)

Since his death, Korzybski's bright light has slowly faded. With the hindsight of 80 years since Science and Sanity's publication, what Korzybski actually taught has gotten somewhat obscured by the perpetuation of the errors made by a torrent of inept but influential critics, like Martin Gardner. Perhaps even more damagingly, it has gotten obscured by 'followers' like S. I. Hayakawa whose light and popular writing on 'semantics' showed an inadequate grasp of Korzybski's work, focusing mainly on Hayakawa's limited applications to language teaching, just one aspect of Korzybski's substantial, deep, and multi-faceted general theory of human evaluation. Depending on inadequate accounts as well as simply through the passage of time, Korzybski's work has thus become widely unread and, where acknowledged, often misread and superficially understood. 

But if you hear the siren call to plumb the depths of Korzybski's system of applied epistemology and his foundational framework for human knowledge and personal and social sanity, there is no substitute to reading Science and Sanity, now in its Fifth Edition. (Don't forget Manhood of Humanity and Collected Writings either!) Don't get put off by the size of the book or mathematical formulas within. Those of you who hear the call, may actually find Science and Sanity—and his other works—as I do: compellingly written with a rare combination of clarity, rigor, wit, and usefulness for living. 

And finally a shameless plug.  If you do feel that you need to ease into Korzybski's own writing with some introductory reading first, Drive Yourself Sane, written by myself and my wife Susan and now in its Third Edition, does present Korzybski's system in a brief, but accurate and comprehensive manner. Following that, there exists no better source than my own Korzybski: A Biography if you wish to follow Korzybski's own advice that "...when you read a book. Read not only what you read, but study the author." Korzybski: A Biography captures the adventure of his extraordinary life while tracing in detail the development of his work. Then, you'll definitely be ready to tackle Science and Sanity, and the rest of his work as well.  

"I Am The Very Model Of A General Semanticist"

I've been going through the remains of the IGS archives in my possession and found some files from of my friend and mentor, the late Kenneth G. Johnson, a long-time and important korzybskian GS scholar. One of the things I found was this  song parody of the Gilbert and Sullivan classic, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General". It looks like it may have been written by Ken. Or (because of the female voice, used) one of his students. His name wasn't on the typed page with the parody. However Ken definitely did write  humorous poetry, some of which I'll present here in a future blogpost. This parody very much has his signature humor. Enjoy!:

I Am The Very Model of A General Semanticist
"I am the very model of a general semanticist
My feet are firmly planted, I'm no longer a romanticist.
I'm very well informed about psychoses and neuroses, 
But I'm losing all my friends since I acquired halitosis. 
I'm very good at recognizing everyone's hostility
And I can point a finger at their lack of objectivity. 
At picking out projections I am certainly without a peer 
I think it's such a shame that all my friends won't stick around to hear. 

"I am the very model of a general semanticist.
I utilize its principles in bringing up my hordes of kids. 
I've thrown away my Doctor Spock and substituted Summerhill,
I gratify their every need instead of giving them a pill.
I haven't found a school around to use their creativity,
They won't admit a child who isn't toilet trained at puberty. 
They're well-adjusted, self-expressive, uninhibited and free,
I wish to hell that I could find a mother-substitute for me. 

"I am the very model of a general semanticist.
I'm well enough to do away with three of my psychiatrists. 
I know the very latest in extensional devices
And I've traded all my virtues for a gorgeous lot of vices.
My husband is much delighted with my growth in self-development
My intellectual progress is the cause of some resentment.
However, I have found a way to cope with his hostility, 
And find it has a very good effect on his virility.

"I am the very model of a general semanticist 
In every way at work and play I have become an optimist
In matters economical, political I'm vehement
I am the very model of a general semanticist."

From The Stray Thought Bin - "Skeptics and Skeptics"

The best skeptics not only doubt, but doubt their doubt and often doubt that too. 

Aristotle's Non-Aristotelianism

"Essentialism", an emphasis on 'essences' expressed in definitions and a rigid insistence on 'laws of thought' characterize what Korzybski called the aristotelian orientation. But despite the essentialism which Aristotle got from his teacher Plato, Aristotle himself went beyond it in several ways that show he was not himself a strict 'aristotelian'. 

For example, although Aristotle systematized the search for essences in his logical works, the focus of this search for him seems somewhat different from that of Plato. 

Plato had clearly emphasized the secondary importance of the visible world compared to the more important world of ideal forms or essences that he postulated. Aristotle, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of the world we live in, with the forms or essences existing within the objects around us that we see and touch.

Despite the essentialistic drift of his logic, this 'realistic' bent of Aristotle makes his philosophy in some ways more congenial with Korzybski's "non-aristotelian" perspective than some people might expect.  There are  places in his writings related to logic and methodology where Aristotle indicates some quite non-aristotelian sounding (in the korzybskian sense) leeway in what are still referred to as the aristotelian "laws of thought".

For example, in Metaphysics, he wrote: "...however much all things may be 'so and so', still there is a more and a less in the nature of things." (Book IV: Ch. 4, p. 743) In De Interpretatione, he noted that certain statements may have an "undecided" or indeterminate value, neither "true" nor "false". For example, take the statements "A sea-fight will take place tomorrow." 

"One may indeed be more likely to be true than the other, but it cannot be either actually true or actually false. It is therefore plain that it is not necessary that of an affirmation and a denial one should be true and the other false." (Ch. 9, p. 48)

Aristotle also moved beyond the two-valued approach of his logic in his work on ethics and politics. In Nichomachean Ethics, he emphasized the doctrine of the "golden mean", which involves each individual finding the best intermediate third value between two extremes. So courage provides a mean between excessive fear and over-confidence, and temperance lies between the extremes of self-indulgence and 'insensibilty'. (Book II: Ch.7, pp. 959-960)

In his Politics, he emphasized that the individual and society did not have to exist in opposition to each other: "Man is a political animal" who develops his excellence in the company of others, while the State can function to aid the individual in his self-development. 

Despite these exceptions, Aristotle and followers put into place a system that, when carried into the orientation of everyday evaluating and science, became rigidified. This "aristotelian" orientation has outlived its usefulness as an overarching approach.

Korzybski emphasized his admiration for Aristotle even as he criticized and sought to go beyond aristotelianism:

"To avoid misunderstanding I wish to acknowledge explicitly my profound admiration for the extraordinary genius of Aristotle, particularly in consideration of the period in which he lived. Nevertheless, the twisting of his system and the imposed immobility of this twisted system, as enforced for nearly two thousand years by the controlling groups, often under threats of torture and death, have led and can only lead to more disasters. From what we know about Aristotle, there is little doubt that, if alive, he would not tolerate such twistings and artificial immobility of the system usually ascribed to him." (Science and Sanity, Fifth Edition, p. xciv)

To conclude, Korzybski was certainly NOT anti-Aristotle nor anti-aristotelian logic. Instead, he objected to aristotelianism as an orientation or system involving the basic structural assumptions about the world ('metaphysics') and human knowledge ('epistemology') that he saw underlying Aristotle's systematic views (epitomized in the view of aristotelian logic as 'the' logic). Korzybski felt the need to challenge and revise these structural assumptions in the light of later scientific investigations, since overemphasizing aristotelian logic as 'the' logic encouraged an essentialist, what he called an "intensional" orientation in science and life, involving "identification" or "confusion of orders of abstraction". For Korzybski, aristotelian logic still had a place in useful formulating but could no longer be given an exclusive or dominating position. The main emphasis of Korzybski's work in "general semantics" (GS) was not on 'logic' as such, but on what might be called "psycho-logic", i.e., understanding and enhancing the entire scope of human evaluating including thinking-feeling-perceiving-doing, etc.; our evaluational reactions. 

References

McKeon, Richard. 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House. 

The Institute of General Semantics - 75 Years and Still Standing

     For several days in March, 1938, Alfred Korzybski lectured the medical staff at Peoria State Hospital, Peoria, Illinois. His presentation there marked the end of his career as an independent, itinerant teacher (which had ramped up ever since the publication five years earlier of Science and Sanity). By the time of his Peoria lectures, Korzybski and a few of his closest students had already begun the process of setting up the Institute of General Semantics (IGS) in Chicago, which the state of Illinois incorporated in May 1938 as a non-profit institution for "Linguistic Epistemologic Scientific Research and Education". Remarkably today, seventy-five years later, the Institute still exists. It has never been easy. 

Until his death on March 1, 1950—Korzybski would carry on his work at the Institute (which moved to Lakeville, Connecticut in 1946). Korzybski: A Biography provides a detailed account of IGS history during those first 12 turbulent  years. Accounts of the Institute's subsequent years can be found in various now-somewhat-hard-to-find articles by Charlotte Schuchardt Read and others. I've provided some recent updates of the last somewhat tumultuous decade (See my 2011 presentation at the IGS Annual Conference in New York City and my January 2013 blogpost The State of Organized GS-2013: A Blunt Assessment, which both focus on recent organizational difficulties.) However, as Korzybski: A Biography clearly documents, from its beginnings the IGS  struggled with difficulties of various kinds, some of which threatened its survival—even with Korzybski at the helm. Difficulties, sometimes severe, continued after Korzybski's death. (In my years, starting in 1979, of serious involvement in IGS educational, management, and publication activities I was one of a number of people who had to deal with many of these problems). But somehow the Institute survived it all. And despite recent problems and organizational downsizing, it still does. 

Will the Institute of General Semantics survive as a viable organization carrying on Korzybski's legacy for another 75 years? I don't know. I do feel confident that if it is to do so, those people who run the organization now, its Board of Trustees, will need to do a lot more than they already have done to renew their understanding of Korzybski's work and of the aims and history of the organization they are responsible for. And they will need to renew their commitment to carrying on the legacy that Korzybski and others left us. Not just words but actions are needed. Complacency and indifference have a way of sneaking up on even the best of us. And the creeping organizational amnesia (which I've alluded to elsewhere and which may have started long before any of its present members sat on the Board of Trustees) will have to be reversed. Without a deep and thorough knowledge of the discipline of GS, including the history and traditions of the Institute,—which I presently see lacking in the organization—it will be impossible to adequately build upon what's been done already. That's what conscious time-binding requires. In order to learn, it's necessary to realize that you don't already know something. Those who don't know can then get help if they seek it, because there are still a few people around who know quite a bit—hint, hint.

In the meantime, I send the Institute of General Semantics my best wishes—Happy 75th Anniversary and Many More!

Ayn Nation Under God - A Review

The full title of Hart William’s book of connected essays, Ayn Nation Under God: A Rational Examination As To Why Ayn Rand Is Full Of It, indicates Williams' intent and point of view quite well. The essays (most of which appeared in slightly different form on Williams' blog from 2005 to 2012)  do not pretend to any faux ‘objectivity’. But despite his generally negative opinion of Ayn Rand’s work, her fans and followers will make a mistake if they dismiss Williams’ ebook, available in Amazon Kindle format, as not worthy of their reading time and effort. For them, and for the non-fans of Rand—in and out of academia—many of whom have dismissed her work as unimportant, Williams provides a most valuable service by treating Rand with the respect she deserves as one of the most influential figures of mid-20^th Century to early 21^st Century American thought. 

A veteran print journalist, blogger, screenwriter, novelist and all-around scribe (see His Vorpal Sword) Williams adduces a great deal of evidence to show that Rand—founder of a philosophical school she called "Objectivism"—has become a revered figure and a major inspiration for the Republican Right (especially its more secular wing representing finance and banking) and the allied Libertarian movement, both of which cherish and feel bolstered by Rand’s uber-individualist, anti-government, but pro-corporate outlook. Williams has carefully studied Rand’s work and his “rational examination” focuses on her basic premises: her view of ‘reason’, which he finds inadequate, and her basic understanding of human nature, which he finds lacking, indeed monstrously so. His criticism seems to me—a student and advocate of Alfred Korzybski’s non-aristotelian viewpoint—devastatingly apt.

Although Williams has not studied Korzybski’s work, he has clearly been influenced by some of the ongoing non-aristotelian currents that Korzybski saw developing in the  scientific, intellectual culture of his time, which he sought to systematize and enhance by means of the teachable system that he called “general semantics”. Non-aristotelian I should emphasize was not for Korzybski anti-Aristotle, not even anti aristotelian logic. Aristotle’s logic, for example, may still remain useful—where it applies. But Korzybski did reject the essentialist structural assumptions or metaphysics which Aristotle’s logic in particular embodies when interpreted, as Ayn Rand did, as the overarching basis for human ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’ rather than as a limited set of guidelines for some forms of discourse.

 In his first and perhaps best chapter (written especially for the book), Williams, who as a college philosophy major studied mathematical logic, gives his take on Rand’s trumpeting of the aristotelian ‘laws of thought’ and ‘pure logic’ as the basis for ‘reason’ (in Atlas Shrugged, she titled the three sections of the book “Non-Contradiction”, “Either-Or”, and “A is A”). Williams writes that when he first saw her “A is A” years ago, he said “When?”: “A is A sometimes, but other times it’s not exactly A. In fact, when you say A, you are just specifying THIS A at THAT exact moment in time, which that A will never be again. But it’s close enough for government work, or, in this case, anti-government work.” Williams further discussion of aristotelian logic seems quite in keeping with Korzybski’s take: overdependence on it by using it as a general orientation, as Rand and her followers do, leads to evaluational rigidity and inflexibility.

William’s critique of Rand’s view of human nature also appears quite devastating. Rand cut her heroes from a cartoonish mold where, just as with the fabled politician, they built with their own two hands the log cabin they were born in. She elevates to sacred doctrine an extreme individualism that takes little to no account of the social matrix upon which any individual human accomplishment is based. Perhaps Williams doesn’t know much about Korzybski’s characterization of humanity as the time-binding class of life, but throughout the book he demonstrates his implicit understanding of the time-binding character of humanity and its incompatibility with Rand’s extreme version of individuality, embodied in the title of one of her books The Virtue of Selfishness. Rand erroneously embraces “[a]n almost universal human trait…the ability to discount the endless contributions of others to our thinking process, while magnifying our own ‘original’ thinking beyond all measure. This is the basis of the American mythos of the ‘Self-made man…”

Rand’s extreme elevation of the virtue of selfishness has no place for altruism at all, at all.  According to Rand, Williams notes, “[o]nly when this awful, ridiculous moral notion of self-sacrifice and altruism is rejected will the thinkers/creators/Atlases be free to create. Until then, Galt [one of Rand’s heros in Atlas Shrugged] says, they’re out.” 

On the contrary, “Man is a SOCIAL animal,” Williams writes, “but Ayn Rand and her adherents insanely reject this fundamental truth. As a result, while a few have enriched themselves, our society is falling apart, and our infrastructure is rotting.” Thus Rand’s work provides the perfect theoretical basis for the current extreme view of individualism supported by ‘tea-party’ advocates, ‘libertarian’ think tanks, and the right-wing Republicans, among others. An example of the latter is former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, a staunch right-wing Catholic, who during the campaign attempted to distance himself from the staunch atheist, Rand, he once admired and touted. But despite his new found love for St. Thomas Aquinas, Ryan still seems to be pushing the virtue of selfishness. Not very christian according to some christian’s measures, but then again, as Williams points out, “nobody ever went broke providing millionaires with a rationalization for the morality of greed.” At the moment, Congressman Ryan seems to be doing quite well. 

The book's title, Ayn Nation Under God, might have been better titled Ayn Nation Under Galt, but then again maybe Hart Williams’ title is appropriate if we accept Albert Ellis's affirmative answer to the question that was also the title of his book critiquing Rand, "Is Objectivism A Religion?" At any rate, Hart Williams' book provides a remarkably non-aristotelian look at what is unfortunately becoming (at least to me) Ayn Nation Under Rand. If you want to understand a great deal more about the present, polarized, aristotelian orientation that dominates the political climate in the U.S. you can't do better than read Hart William's book. My summary and quotes don’t do justice to his writing. He tenders his conclusions with a large portion of supporting detail served with verve and wit in an extremely inexpensive book. All the more reason to get: Ayn Nation Under God

Foreword to the Second Edition of Selections from Science and Sanity

In 2010, Lance Strate, then the Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics (IGS), and Corey Anton, Series Editor of the IGS's New Non-Aristotelian Library Series, asked me to write this "Foreword to the Second Edition" of Korzybski's Selections from Science and Sanity, originally edited by Guthrie Janssen with Korzybski's consultation and approval. Although I would have advertised that fact and posted this much sooner, a number of unforeseen events intervened that kept me from doing so. But given that this is the 80th Anniversary year of the original publication of Science and Sanity, it seems like a good time to remedy that situation. 

I opine that this new second edition of the authorized abridgment of Korzybski's famous work is not without some graphical design and editorial problems. For one thing, I'm not crazy about the book's large size (11 and 1/2" by 9") or its green cover which I find unattractive. This Second Edition of Selections from Science and Sanity is also missing the original first edition's marginal page references to the unabridged book, which I find regrettable. More seriously, at least one of Korzybski's important diagrams was botched on page 152 by the book designer and appears completely indecipherable. That  designer also originally deleted italics in the text, which Korzybski used for emphasis. This last mistake was later corrected after I pointed it out, but as an writer and editor myself, I know how little slips and creeping errors can corrupt a text, so a thorough editorial run-through with the First Edition seems advisable.

Still, if you haven't read Science and Sanity, I consider this Second Edition of Selections from Science and Sanity most welcome as a readily available, inexpensive, and more inviting (because much shorter) version of Korzybski's great work. So without further ado, here is a link to my "Foreword to the Second Edition of Selections from Science and Sanity". 

The book can  be purchased from the Institute of General Semantics or from Amazon.com. 

Stoicism – General-Semantics' Family Tree

Marshall McLuhan proposed one way (among others) to understand any particular human innovation: asking what earlier innovations, inventions, form(s) of media/technology, does this recall? An interesting exercise to do with Alfred Korzybski's General-Semantics (GS). 


Despite its potentially confusing name, GS is not primarily focused on language and 'meaning' as commonly understood.
Korzybski explicitly said that he was investigating human nature, i.e., time-binding, which he considered the defining activity of human existence. After his first, 1921 book Manhood of Humanity, where he explored time-binding and it's implications, he spent the rest of his life exploring the mechanism of time-binding, how it works and the practical application of this understanding by individuals. 


It boils down to the old stoical adage: live according to nature. Which means in part, finding out about your own species and individual natures. The stoics, saw human capacity for 'reason' as what differentiated us from animals, and they taught their students practical ways to apply 'reason' in their lives. 


I have found no better way to understand Korzybski's work and its place in the long span of human intellectual achievement, than to see him as one of the great figures in the stoic tradition though he did not emphasize that. His work appears to me a great contribution to that still living stream of practical wisdom for living. 

Alfred Korzybski - 62nd Anniversary of His Death

Alfred Korzybski died in the early morning of March 1, 1950, several months short of his 71st birthday. 

By that time, his work had reached a high point of recognition and influence: Despite its seemingly esoteric subject matter and formidable appearance, an astonishing number of copies of Science and Sanity (approximately 20,000 books) had been sold. Many books and articles about his work or making use of it, had already been written by hundreds of his students and others. And his career had been followed for several decades in national and international media (mainly newspapers and magazines). (This Google ngram charting "Alfred Korzybski" and "General Semantics" provides some interesting, confirming graphic data of this.)

To commemorate him on the 60th Anniversary of his death, I'm posting this obituary, which appeared in the March 13, 1950 edition of Quick (Vol. 2, No. 11), a small, pocket-sized, popular news weekly published and distributed nationally (U.S.) by Cowles, the publisher of Look and other magazines. It gives an interesting and surprisingly accurate view of Korzybski and his work. (The actual, glossy-cover magazine is probably not much larger than the images you see here on your browser.) 

"How About 'Evaluatics" – A Letter from the ETC. Archives

I don't particularly care for 'general semantics'—that is, the term 'general semantics'. And I'm not alone. Many of the most dedicated students of and builders-upon Alfred Korzybski's work, popularly know as 'general semantics' have had to deal the problems associated with the term 'general semantics'. 

Because of how people tend to automatically interpret the term—as an elaboration of 'semantics', the linguistic/philosophical study of 'word meanings'—there has always existed the tendency to understand the work as 'all about' language and linguistic 'meaning'—an excessively limiting viewpoint for those of us who have studied Korzybski's "up-to-date epistemology" with any significant seriousness. 

At the time when I was most active at the Institute of General Semantics, Korzybski's co-workers such as my friend and mentor Charlotte Schuchardt Read, were still teaching and working there, and for them the term 'general semantics' remained as much of a problem as ever. For a time, those of us involved in the scholarly publishing and teaching then going on at the Institute, decided to insert a hyphen as in 'general-semantics' to at least mark it more clearly as a unified term. However we later decided against imposing this usage in any formal way, and stopped it as an Institute policy. (Although I prefer the hyphenated spelling and sometimes still use it, definitely correct and clarifying according to the Chicago Manual of Style when using a two-word term as a modifier as in "a general-semantics approach.") In my Radical General-Semantics classes today, I keep a special contribution box for any student to deposit a fine whenever they use the term 'semantics' when actually referring to 'general semantics'. (Writing or saying "GS" provides another way to avoid triggering  automatic reactions associated with seeing or hearing the word 'semantic(s)'.) 

As I fully document in Korzybski: A Biography, the confusion between 'general semantics' and 'semantics' had become problematic even for Korzybski. In the final years of his life he had come to realize the difficulties caused by people's signal reactions to the term 'general semantics' for his general theory of evaluation and to the term 'semantic' used as a modifier synonymous with evaluational. By the time of his sudden and unexpected death on March 1, 1950, various methods were being considered by him and his students to deal with the problem. If he had lived longer, it seems very likely to me that he would have changed the name of the discipline he had founded and modified the terminology even more than he already had done.

Here is a terminological solution proposed by one student, J. Russell Bruff, printed in the Correspondence section of the Spring 1949 issue (Volume 6, Number 3) of ETC.: A Review of General Semantics (published at that time, not by the  Institute of General Semantics, but by the Society for General Semantics.) The Editor of ETC. at that time, S. I. Hayakawa was one of the people whom Bruff was referring to as using 'semantics' when talking about 'general semantics' and thus helping to perpetuate the confusion. (To his credit, Hayakawa did publish Bruff's letter.) However you evaluate Bruff's proposal, he pinpoints quite well some significant aspects of what remains an ongoing problem for those of us in 2012 who want to promote and develop Korzybski's work. 

Sirs: In getting started in general semantics, I found myself seriously misevaluating the discipline at first depending solely on the printed word, I progressed but slowly. Gradually I came to understand that I was unconsciously permitting my older evaluation patterns of 'the meaning in the word,' etc ., to block my efforts to develop the new pattern in which the emphasis is placed upon the individual evaluating the symbol. And it became apparent to me that writers on general semantics were often encountering the same difficulty and fostering it by what they wrote. Thus 'language' was observed to be linked with 'action,' implying that language may function as an operationally effective agent influencing the passive object, the individual. 

To free myself from this frequent unconscious reversion to the former orientation toward human behavior in sign-symbol situations as the outcome resulting from the effective operation of sign and/or symbols upon the individual, and to maintain more constantly the orientation toward human behavior as primarily an evaluation process occurring in an individual, I have found it helpful to avoid the use of certain terms. The words avoided were those which, because of past and present usage, I seemed persistently to associate with the older evaluation patterns. 

Among these terms were the words meaning (as applied to symbols), signification, and, most important of all, semantics. The use of these words seemed too often to be associated with a misorientation and a misevaluation when judged in terms of the basic formulations of general semantics. Whenever I used these terms I seemed to be implying that in a situation involving a 'human individual in a sign-symbol field' the effective operator causing action was located outside the individual in the signs and/or symbols.

I finally considered the advisability of discarding the label 'general semantics.' Because much of my own difficulty in getting at the essential features of this discipline seemed traceable to my evaluations when the word semantics was encountered, I now feel that a new term should be selected to refer to this field. This conviction has been reinforced by my experience in trying to explain it to others. I have found myself faced with the difficult task of separating general semantics from semantics. Since general semanticists are frequently referred to as 'semanticists' and the term 'general semantics' is frequently shortened to' semantics,' it now seems to me that the verbal foundation has been laid for much unnecessary confusion.

In other areas of scientific work the scientist does not hesitate to discard a term when its use seems no longer suitable. If the use of the words 'meaning,' 'signification,' and 'semantics' is customarily associated with a misorientation in which the effective agent in behavior, occurring in a sign-symbol situation, is projected into the sign and/or symbol, then these terms should be avoided. And along with them the adjective 'semantic .' It may seem presumptuous of me to suggest discarding a well-established label such as 'general semantics.' But one should bear in mind that all I am attempting to do is to clarify my own thinking, to make the formulations of this new 'science of man' more effective in my own life, and also to facilitate my helping others to achieve a similar result. 

The label which I have adopted as a replacement for 'general semantics' is derived from the word 'evaluate.' The process of evaluation in this discipline seemed to occupy a key position in relation to which the various other operational phases of general semantics were tributary. Therefore, from the word evaluate I have coined the term evaluatics for my use, and now whenever I encounter the expression 'general semantics,' I translate it, for my own use, into evaluatics or symbol-evaluatics. Where 'semantic' occurs as an adjective, I substitute the term 'evaluatic.' I should be happy to accept any other label than evaluatics if it should seem more appropriate. But with the current growth of the field of 'semantics,' which differs fundamentally from 'general semantics,' it seems to me imperative to adopt a new label to replace 'general semantics' if workers in this area are to escape unnecessary confusion .

—J. RUSSELL BRUFF Santa Ana College, Santa Ana, California

"A Difference That Makes A Difference"

Over the years, I've heard people, especially those involved with NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), use the phrase 'a difference that makes a difference'. It has a catchy sound to it and the notion intrigues a lot of people who, at the very least, think of it as a neat kind of play on words. Where did the usage come from? 

Difference and Differences That Make A Difference
Difference qualifies as one of the most important fundamental undefined terms in the non-aristotelian worldview that Alfred Korzybski  delineated. In a world where the premise of non-identity rules (the world we actually seem to live in), where no two objects however similar are 'exactly the same in all respects', difference indeed seems fundamental. 

As a term, difference, also qualifies as one of the important multiordinal terms that Korzybski talked about. Although, I can give a dictionary definition of a multiordinal term, the specific 'meaning' of a multiordinal term only becomes clear in a specific context of discussion when one specifies the level of abstraction the word refers to. What does that 'mean'? For now, I'll roughly give Korzybski's simple rule for determining if a word qualifies as a multiordinal term: Can the term be applied to itself and still make  sense? Can you fear fear? Can you be in love with love? Can you hate hate? Can you feel anxious about your anxiety? Can you have knowledge about knowledge? Can you think about your thinking?  This is not just playing with words, but points to the multiordinal (multi-leveled) and concomitant self-reflexive character of the human nervous system and human evaluating. Thinking2 about thinking1 is not the same as thinking1. And how you think about what you think may be crucial. 

Okay, back to the subject of this little (still) article: difference, another multi-ordinal term. In a non-identity world, a world of differences, we can have differences that make a difference (for given individuals with given purposes) and differences that don't (when we recognize similarities). For sane evaluating we need to recognize both similarities (where the differences among the different individuals viewed as 'same' don't make a difference for our purpose) and differences that do make a difference. 

For Korzybski, difference was not the absence of 'sameness' (that would make 'sameness' fundamental, which seems a basic structural assumption of the aristotelian metaphysical worldview). Korzybski reversed this: 'sameness' or more clearly similarity constituted a species of difference; Difference, not 'sameness', seems more basic. As he also pointed out, a world of absolute difference between two things seems as impossible as one where absolute sameness exists. With every thing entirely different from everything else, recognition and knowledge would be impossible. In a non-identity world, difference appears fundamental; there exist only different kinds and degrees of differences. (See Science and Sanity, page 165.) What I've written here may—or may not)— seem obvious; Korzybski wanted to get people to understand it and, more importantly, apply it in their everyday evaluating (not necessarily so easy, even if understood). 

Although Korzybski may have used the phrase 'a difference which makes a difference' somewhere, I have thoroughly searched through his published writings and have not found it used. Korzybski's student and co-worker Wendell Johnson seems to deserve credit as the first to specifically talk about differences that make a difference and those that don't. Here's a bit from the discussion in his 1946 introduction to GS, People in Quandaries:

The law of identity sometimes holds sufficiently for practical purposes, in spite of its structural defectiveness. Therefore we can use it many times, but we should always be aware of our use of it. When eating peanuts, for example, we may proceed on the practical assumption that peanuts are peanuts, that peanut 1 is peanut 2, that they are the same. Even so, we should remember that they are not, that ultimately peanuts are not peanuts, that is, peanut 1 is not peanut 2. The differences, generally speaking, make no important difference, of course, and we can for the most part disregard them. But if we are basically oriented to non-identity, we will bite into the bad peanut that may be found in almost any bag, without bursting into invective against "these damned peanuts." We will merely discard peanut1 and go on to enjoy peanut2, since basically we had not assumed that they would be the same anyway. Therefore, an occasional bad peanut is not cause of shock, no generator of tensions.

It is "in principle" that different things are the same. This is to say, it is on relatively high levels of abstraction, "in general," "on the average," "for practical purposes," "in main essentials," with regard to certain more or less important respects (not in all respects) that two different things may be evaluated, spoken of, or dealt with as though they were identical. For certain purposes specific differences may not make a difference; what is important is that we realize that differences exist and that we recognize the conditions under which they do make a difference. This is to say that what is important is that we be fundamentally oriented to non-identity so that we shall be prepared for differences at any time. It is precisely the differences we least expect that tend to make the biggest difference, that have the gravest consequences and demand the most difficult readjustments.  [People in Quandaries, pages 178-179]. 

Gregory Bateson and Difference
The usage 'a difference that makes a difference' is usually ascribed to the non-aristotelian (in the korzybskian sense) anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who used it in the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture that he gave for the Institute of General Semantics (IGS) in 1970. Bateson had had a long peripheral interest and association with Korzybski's work, having briefly corresponded with Korzybski in the late 1940s (the two men exchanged papers), and then having written a number of the dialogues with his daughter, he called them "metalogues",  which were published in ETC.: A Review of General Semantics starting in the early 1950s (ETC. was then edited by S. I. Hayakawa and published not by the IGS but by the International Society for General Semantics). 

Bateson certainly qualified as a non-aristotelian before he ever heard about Korzybski (see Naven, a self-reflexive study of the anthropological fieldwork he did in New Guinea among the Iatmul, first published in the 1930s). But at some point, sometime in the 1940s, he appears to have read some of Korzybski's work, and probably other GS literature, including it seems nigh certainly Wendell Johnson's 1946 book, People in Quandaries.

So, as far as I know, as a matter of historical record, Wendell Johnson was the first to use 'a difference that makes a difference' as a significant formulation while explaining Korzybski's premise of non-identity. This takes nothing away from Bateson's brilliance. As a theorist Bateson built upon the notion of difference, and a difference that makes a difference in original and significant ways for the human sciences, starting it seems with his AKML paper: "Form, Substance, and Difference", which I read soon after it was published and which I still recommend most highly. I would find it most instructive for some serious student or students—perhaps they are reading this now—to trace the development of the notion of difference and differences of differences from Korzybski to Wendell Johnson to Bateson in much greater detail than I've done here (without getting lost in verbalism). That would constitute a genuine contribution to korzybskian GS scholarship. Any takers?