Obviously it doesn’t make them anything. But I have heard similar criticisms levelled at them.
My own impression of the Sequences is that most of what they say is fairly standard-issue analytic philosophy / cognitive science / physics / whatever; that where they’re novel they’re right more often than (according to what I’ve read, which I repeat is rather little and I have no reason to think it very reliable) Korzybyski is when he is novel; and that there’s very little in them that’s just straightforwardly wrong as (again, according to what I’ve read) some key bits of Korzybyski are.
But what seems to me most useful in the Sequences is that they bring together a wide-ranging body of ideas that, despite involving quite a lot of philosophy, are generally not wrong and are selected with good taste. Works of philosophy usually tend (as it seems to me) to be either narrow or frequently wrong. And by and large they’re clearly and engagingly written.
Perhaps fans of General Semantics would say the same about, say, Science and Sanity or later GS works. If they can correctly say so then that would be a reason to adjust my view of Korzybyski and/or his later followers. That’s why one of the questions I asked was: “Has present-day GS filtered out all the pseudoscience while preserving [...] a lot of insight?” to which the answer could be yes even if there’s very little original in GS.
So what does that make the LW sequences?
Obviously it doesn’t make them anything. But I have heard similar criticisms levelled at them.
My own impression of the Sequences is that most of what they say is fairly standard-issue analytic philosophy / cognitive science / physics / whatever; that where they’re novel they’re right more often than (according to what I’ve read, which I repeat is rather little and I have no reason to think it very reliable) Korzybyski is when he is novel; and that there’s very little in them that’s just straightforwardly wrong as (again, according to what I’ve read) some key bits of Korzybyski are.
But what seems to me most useful in the Sequences is that they bring together a wide-ranging body of ideas that, despite involving quite a lot of philosophy, are generally not wrong and are selected with good taste. Works of philosophy usually tend (as it seems to me) to be either narrow or frequently wrong. And by and large they’re clearly and engagingly written.
Perhaps fans of General Semantics would say the same about, say, Science and Sanity or later GS works. If they can correctly say so then that would be a reason to adjust my view of Korzybyski and/or his later followers. That’s why one of the questions I asked was: “Has present-day GS filtered out all the pseudoscience while preserving [...] a lot of insight?” to which the answer could be yes even if there’s very little original in GS.