William Safire Z'L

William Safire died on Sunday. (Z"L stands for zichrono l'vracha the Hebrew version of 'rest in peace' which literally means 'his memory for a blessing'. ) In his regular column for the New York Times, "On Language," Safire explored the latest fads and foibles in English usage. It was one of the main reasons I looked at the New York Times Magazine. He had an awareness of Korzybski's work and in his writing mentioned Korzybski and general semantics every so often. In one of his last columns entitled "bending the curve", he wrote:

Symbols are fine; we live by words, figures, pictures. But as Alfred Korzybski postulated seven decades ago, the symbol is not the thing itself: you cannot milk the word “cow,” and as he put it, “a map is not the territory.” Arthur Laffer’s famous curve drawn on a cocktail napkin offers some economists a nice shorthand guide to his supply-side idea, but it is not the theory itself. Today’s mind-bending surge toward the use of words about graphs and poll trends — even when presented in color on elaborate Power Point presentations — takes us steps away from reality. There must be a curve to illustrate that, and I say bend it way back.

William Safire. A wise voice now silenced. But we still have the writings he left behind.

From The Stray Thought Bin - 'Smith 1 and Fido'

Smith 1 can live in a world of phantasm and delusion that Fido can never know.

Institute of General Semantics International Conference - An Initial Report

I returned home on Monday from NYC. I congratulate Lance Strate on a fantastic conference program at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. Since I came back, a lot has been going on which unfortunately has kept me from writing about the conference until now. I'll start off here with a few relevant links.

The Fordham student newspaper had a nice write-up on the web on Mary Catherine Bateson who gave the 57th Annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture. Here's the link: Anthropologist Asks 'Age Old' Question: Does Older Mean Wiser? The short answer—No, but it can if you lead a life of learning and don't stop. A larger question she was dealing with—how do we promote and develop a time-binding culture? Short answer—Start here and now and with yourself. I found it an interesting talk at the end a long and fruitful day.

On Sunday, Mike Schilling on his blog Basket Case, had a post providing the beginning-of-chapter non-aristotelian quotes that A.E. Van Vogt used in his science fiction fantasy novel The World of Null A 'Null A' was Van Vogt's term for what Korzybski referred to as 'non-aristotelian' which was not anti-aristotelian for Korzybski, despite the implications of Van Vogt's usage. Interesting quotes Thanks, Mike.

Finally, I looked at the Sunday New York Times Magazine after I got home (yes, we get the NY Times in Los Angeles), where William Safire made a nice reference to Korzybski in his column bending the curve

Quite a korzybskian weekend for me!

The Hidden Side of Babel: A Review

Laura Bertone, as I noted last week, will receive the Institute of General Semantics' Hayakawa Literary Award for her book, The Hidden Side of Babel this weekend at the Institute's Across the Generations: Legacies of Hope and Meaning conference in New York City. Congratulations again, Laura! She wrote a wonderful book, worthy of receiving the prestigious award. My wife, Susan Presby Kodish, reviewed the book in the General Semantics Bulletin a while ago. Here is her review: Susan Kodish Review of HSB

I'll be attending the conference, which starts on Friday. Between preparing for the trip and researching the final part of my book, I confess that I haven't paid a great deal of attention to blogging. As you can see from looking at the program and presenter biographies available at from the IGS website, the conference has a large number of very interesting speakers—beside Laura Bertone—lined up (including your humble servant). I hope to discuss here some of the riches I've gleaned at the conference after I return to Pasadena.

Quote of the Day - 'Knowledge'

"Wonder, rather than doubt, is the root of knowledge."
--- Abraham Joshua Heschel (from Jewish World Review)

Quote of the Day - 'People'

"I believe people are well-intentioned. But I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortion of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences."
—Michael Crichton, "Author's Message," in State of Fear, p. 571

The Hidden Side of Babel

News Flash from the Institute of General Semantics:

The Institute of General Semantics is pleased to announce that its judges have selected The Hidden Side of Babel: Unveiling Cognition, Intelligence and Sense by Laura Bertone (Buenos Aries: Evolución, 2006) as the winner of its inaugural Samuel I. Hayakawa Book Prize. The Hayakawa Book Prize goes to the most outstanding work published in the past five years on topics of direct relevance to the discipline of general semantics, and includes a cash award of $1,000. The Hidden Side of Babel was chosen by judges Martin Levinson, Jacqueline Rudig, and Lance Strate, from a highly competitive field of ten finalists. Dr. Bertone is a Visiting Professor at the Masters’ Program of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Buenos Aires, and the Director of the consulting firm EVOLUCION, devoted to improving communication processes and to organizing educational seminars and events. A native of Argentina, she worked in Paris as an AIIC professional conference interpreter for twenty years, and holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Paris VIII University. The Hayakawa Prize will be presented to Laura Bertone at the Across the Generations: Legacies of Hope and Meaning conference on September 11-13, 2009, at Fordham University in New York City, where she will be one of the featured speakers.

Congratulations Laura! My wife helped Laura edit her book and having read it myself I heartily recommend it to one and all. In a very real sense we all actually speak different languages even if we speak the 'same' language. What are the challenges in trying to understand and not misunderstand, to be understood and not be misunderstood? How do we know when we are doing one and not the other? Laura's book will give you a new perspective on how you communicate and how you can do it better.

"Minds in Uniform"

Geoffrey Sampson has written an article "Minds in Uniform" seeking to demonstrate that Noam Chomsky's and now Steven Pinker's view of language ultimately promotes what could be considered, in my terms, a form of 'intellectual fascism'. Controversial stuff. Nicely written. The abstract, below provides a summary of the article:

Linguistic theory is seen by many of its practitioners as an enterprise as ethically neutral as mathematics. But it provides apparent scientific justification for a model of cognition which is currently fashionable for non-scientific reasons, and which threatens the future flourishing of the human spirit. According to Steven Pinker and, before him, Noam Chomsky, language is a rich source of evidence for the idea that the structure and contents of human thought are constrained by genetics as rigidly as the shape and functioning of the human body. This idea harmonizes with legal and political developments of the last twenty years, under which distinctive cultural norms evolved by independent societies are increasingly being swept aside in favour of universal enforcement of aprioristic systems imposed from above. Whereas 18th- and 19th-century imperialists recognized that the cultures of different societies were indeed different (though they set out to eliminate some of the differences), 21st-century internationalism is made to seem uncontroversial by trivializing the extent of existing cultural differences. The Pinker/Chomsky model of human cognition implies that the differences are indeed trivial. But that model is baseless. It rests chiefly not on empirical observation but on surmises about language behaviour; now that corpus linguistics is allowing us to check the accuracy of such surmises, they turn out to be wildly wrong even for English. Meanwhile, anthropological linguists such as Daniel Everett are showing us that differences between the intellectual worlds encoded by the languages of separate societies can be far larger than even pre-generative linguists suspected. If our genes do not constrain our ideas, we have no reason to assume that the belief-system of the leaders of North American and European societies anno 2006 is the last word in human intellectual development. We must be free to move forward intellectually in the future, and we should reject models of human cognition which deny that freedom.

Here's the link to the full article: Minds in Uniform

Quote (2) of the Day - 'Honesty & Deceit'

"It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
— Noel Coward

(Qtd. in Wordsmanship: Semantics as a Communist Weapon by Stefan Possony. A Study Prepared for the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate. U.S. Govt. Printing Office: Washington, D.C., 1961)