So, long ago I was rather put off Korzybyski and General Semantics by the brief discussion of them in Martin Gardner’s “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science”. A few sample quotations:
Neither movement [sc. general semantics and psychodrama, which Gardner happens to put in the same chapter—gjm], it should be stated, approaches the absurdity of the two previously considered cults [sc. orgonomy and dianetics—gjm]. For this reason, general semantics and psychodrama must be regarded as controversial, borderline examples, which may or may not have considerable scientific merit.
[Science and Sanity] is a poorly organized, verbose, philosophically naive, repetitious mish-mash of sound ideas borrowed from abler scientists and philosophers, mixed with neologisms, confused ideas, unconscious metaphysics, and highly dubious speculations and neurology and psychiatric therapy.
Korzybyski’s explanation of why non-Aristotelian thinking has therapeutic body effects was bound up with a theory now discarded by his followers as neurologically unsound. It concerned the cortex and the thalamus. [...]
The simple reason is that Korzybyski made no contributions of significance to any of the fields about which he wrote with such seeming erudition. Most of the Count’s followers admit this, but insist that the value of his work lies in the fact that it was the first great synthesis of modern scientific philosophy and psychiatry.
The impression I get from Gardner is that “the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good”. So, e.g., Korzybyski is of course right to say that black-and-white dichotomous thinking is harmful, and that it’s useful to distinguish between a thing and a description of that thing, and that “is” can be a treacherous word. But we didn’t need Korzybyski to tell us that. And much of what’s distinctive in Korzybyski (again, I’m describing the impression I get from people like Gardner) is just plain wrong.
Is that all wrong? Is there substantially more to Korzybyski and “General Semantics”? Has present-day GS filtered out all the pseudoscience while preserving (or, better, newly finding) a lot of insight? Are there insights there that are unique to GS?
For what it’s worth, I got a lot of good from Chase’s The Tyranny of Words—basically the idea that general statements are typically based on much less information than they imply—and when I read Science and Sanity, there didn’t seem to be much that wasn’t covered by the Chase book.
On the charges of neologisms for old ideas and the repetitive claims, my recollection is that those were intentional moves on Korzybski’s part.
The repetition was to develop semantic habits—to actually change people. The neologisms were for creating new semantic habits, without carrying the semantic baggage of the old terms for the “same” ideas into the new.
Korzybyski wrote Science and Sanity in 1933 and as such specific things he says about the brain turned out to be false. I don’t think you will find a single person who wrote at the time who made no mistakes.
Technology such as fMRI did allow us to discard a lot of ideas about the brain as wrong.
Is that all wrong? Is there substantially more to Korzybyski and “General Semantics”?
A bit above you mention that “is” can be a treacherous word. Yet you started both of those question with it. From the General Semantics perspective your insight that “is” is can be a treacherous word didn’t help you.
It’s a bit like teaching someone Bayes theorem. It’s quite easy to teach it in a way that someone can use it in textbook problems but it’s quite another thing to teach it in a way that someone actually uses it in daily life.
Someone well trained in General Semantics and who uses that framework as his default way of reasoning about the world wouldn’t ask “Is that all wrong?”. Discussion whether the rejection of that question is pseudoscience bring you again near the space of what Korzybyski calls flawed Aristotelian reasoning.
Of course when I speak about that way and ask whether or not your statement is Aristotelian in nature, I’m also using binary categories. That makes it easier to make my point, but at the same time I’m not moving inside the rules of the General Semantics framework.
In Science and Sanity Korzybyski mostly tries to present the arguments for General Semanitcs in it’s own logic. That makes the book very hard to read.
As far as the charge of being poorly organized and verbose goes, it comes from the book being hard to understand. Korxybyski didn’t write in a way that’s easily accessible. If he would have the world would likely look different.
As far as the charge of not having influenced anybody goes, Albert Ellis who developed Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) with is one of of Cognitive Behavior Therapy does say that he was influenced by several of Korzybyski’s ideas when developen REBT.
He has also influenced a lot of other important people. There’s a list at Wikipedia.
I don’t think you will find a single person who wrote at the time who made no mistakes.
Nor am I looking for one. I’m extremely uninterested in questions like “was Korzybyski a very clever person?” and much more interested in ones like “does the stuff Korzybyski wrote contain enough insights I currently lack, and little enough distracting wrongness, to be worth my while reading?”.
A bit above you mention that “is” can be a treacherous word. Yet you started both of those questions with it.
Yup. There is no valid inference from “X can be treacherous” to “one should completely avoid X”. If Korzybyski claimed that one should simply never use “is” (I am doubtful that he did, as it happens[1]) then I disagree with him, which is not the same thing as failing to understand him or failing to have assimilated whatever useful points he may have made.
In the present case, note that “Is that all wrong?” is equivalent to “Does all that have the property of wrongness?” which doesn’t (either implicitly or explicitly) contain an “is”. (It arguably has the weakness of assuming that everything can be classified as “wrong” or “not wrong”, but use of such language is a very useful shorthand; it would be intolerably cumbersome always to have to say things like “Does all that have the property of wrongness to such an extent that I should be regretting having written it?”. And “Is there substantially more …” is equivalent to something like “Does Korzybyski’s work contain substantially more useful insight than what I wrote above would suggest?”. Again, no “is” contained or implied.
Now, if you think I made an actual error as a result of writing in English rather than in E-Prime, that I’d have avoided if I had more of Korzybyski’s ideas in my brain, go ahead and show me; but so far all you’ve done is to observe that my writing doesn’t conform to some rules associated with him (I’m not sure whether they’re his or his followers’) which I currently see no sufficient reason to endorse.
As far as the charge of being poorly organized and verbose goes, it comes from the book being hard to understand.
It seems somewhat plausible that the causation might go the other way. Are you claiming, specifically, that in fact K’s book is neither poorly organized nor verbose, but that because K didn’t write it accessibly Gardner misunderstood it and this led him to mischaracterize it as poorly organized and verbose?
As far as the charge of not having influenced anybody goes [...]
I didn’t see that charge. I saw a charge of not having contributed anything novel to human knowledge and understanding. Not being very influential (if indeed K wasn’t) might be a consequence of that, though it’s not hard to find very influential people whose influence didn’t mostly come from such contributions.
I wonder what led you to see a “charge of not having influenced anybody” in what I wrote. It seems to me a rather curious error.
[1] My hazy recollection is that Korzybyski and his followers have no particular objection to “is” when used merely to apply an adjective to a noun: “the cat is blue”, but that they object to using it in contexts that assert, or seem to assert, the identity of two different things (“that man is a liar”, maybe).
but so far all you’ve done is to observe that my writing doesn’t conform to some rules associated with him (I’m not sure whether they’re his or his followers’) which I currently see no sufficient reason to endorse.
Yes, I’m not trying to demonstrate that something is true but I’m trying to illustrate what Korzybyski’s ideas are about.
In the present case, note that “Is that all wrong?” is equivalent to “Does all that have the property of wrongness?” which doesn’t (either implicitly or explicitly) contain an “is”.
The issue is more that the word is appears. Right/Wrong is black-and-white dichotomous thinking.
Maps are not right or wrong but have degrees of accuracy in mapping certain teritory and usefulness for navigating the territory.
You will find somewhere a claim that humans have rougly 12 billion neurons. That happens to be clearly wrong and humans have more neurons but it doesn’t matter much to the main thesis and it’s not what makes reading the book hard.
Most sentence of the book are not clearly right or wrong. Mostly what’s driven the kind of criticism that Martin Gardner gives is not that Korzybyski says thinks that are easily shown to be wrong but that Korzybyski says things, where it’s not clear what point Korzybyski tries to make.
It’s a bit like reading a Zen Koan. You don’t ask yourself: “Is this claim wrong?” but “What is the author trying to tell me?”
I wonder what led you to see a “charge of not having influenced anybody” in what I wrote. It seems to me a rather curious error.
I refer to the quote “The simple reason is that Korzybyski made no contributions of significance to any of the fields about which he wrote with such seeming erudition”.
says things where it’s not clear what point Korzybyski tries to make
This sort of writing is only worth the effort of engaging with if there’s enough useful or interesting content there to warrant it. So we come back to my question: is there more there than if think from e.g. what Gardner wrote? This still isn’t clear to me.
I refer to the quote [...]
… which doesn’t say anything about whether he influenced anybody. At least, not when interpreted the way I meant it. Do you define “making a contribution of significance” to mean”influencing people”?
Has present-day GS filtered out all the pseudoscience while preserving (or, better, newly finding) a lot of insight? Are there insights there that are unique to GS?
I would be more suspicious of a work along these lines that was full of new insight. Science and Sanity is a work of synthesis, not of discovery, and sometimes we do need someone to put it all together and tell us what, once we hear it, we can easily dismiss as “but we knew all that anyway”. “What is new is not good, and what is good is not new” is a misdirected complaint when made against a work of this sort. What is new in “The God Delusion” or “The Selfish Gene”? Only the presentation of those syntheses to the masses. Ask rather, what is old, but seen anew?
OK, I’m asking. (I have no objection to pop science, pop psychology, pop philosophy, etc., when done well.) What is “old, but seen anew”? Specifically: suppose me to be a longstanding LW participant, reasonably well read in science and philosophy; if I read (say) Science and Sanity or some later GS work, am I likely to come out the far end knowing more or thinking better, and if so what do you expect me to learn?
Specifically: suppose me to be a longstanding LW participant, reasonably well read in science and philosophy
Then reading S&S may well be supererogatory. If you’ve read all of the Sequences, you will recognise much in S&S, just as I, having read S&S, recognised much in the 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.
So, long ago I was rather put off Korzybyski and General Semantics by the brief discussion of them in Martin Gardner’s “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science”. A few sample quotations:
The impression I get from Gardner is that “the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good”. So, e.g., Korzybyski is of course right to say that black-and-white dichotomous thinking is harmful, and that it’s useful to distinguish between a thing and a description of that thing, and that “is” can be a treacherous word. But we didn’t need Korzybyski to tell us that. And much of what’s distinctive in Korzybyski (again, I’m describing the impression I get from people like Gardner) is just plain wrong.
Is that all wrong? Is there substantially more to Korzybyski and “General Semantics”? Has present-day GS filtered out all the pseudoscience while preserving (or, better, newly finding) a lot of insight? Are there insights there that are unique to GS?
For what it’s worth, I got a lot of good from Chase’s The Tyranny of Words—basically the idea that general statements are typically based on much less information than they imply—and when I read Science and Sanity, there didn’t seem to be much that wasn’t covered by the Chase book.
On the charges of neologisms for old ideas and the repetitive claims, my recollection is that those were intentional moves on Korzybski’s part.
The repetition was to develop semantic habits—to actually change people. The neologisms were for creating new semantic habits, without carrying the semantic baggage of the old terms for the “same” ideas into the new.
Korzybyski wrote Science and Sanity in 1933 and as such specific things he says about the brain turned out to be false. I don’t think you will find a single person who wrote at the time who made no mistakes. Technology such as fMRI did allow us to discard a lot of ideas about the brain as wrong.
A bit above you mention that “is” can be a treacherous word. Yet you started both of those question with it. From the General Semantics perspective your insight that “is” is can be a treacherous word didn’t help you.
It’s a bit like teaching someone Bayes theorem. It’s quite easy to teach it in a way that someone can use it in textbook problems but it’s quite another thing to teach it in a way that someone actually uses it in daily life.
Someone well trained in General Semantics and who uses that framework as his default way of reasoning about the world wouldn’t ask “Is that all wrong?”. Discussion whether the rejection of that question is pseudoscience bring you again near the space of what Korzybyski calls flawed Aristotelian reasoning.
Of course when I speak about that way and ask whether or not your statement is Aristotelian in nature, I’m also using binary categories. That makes it easier to make my point, but at the same time I’m not moving inside the rules of the General Semantics framework. In Science and Sanity Korzybyski mostly tries to present the arguments for General Semanitcs in it’s own logic. That makes the book very hard to read.
As far as the charge of being poorly organized and verbose goes, it comes from the book being hard to understand. Korxybyski didn’t write in a way that’s easily accessible. If he would have the world would likely look different.
As far as the charge of not having influenced anybody goes, Albert Ellis who developed Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) with is one of of Cognitive Behavior Therapy does say that he was influenced by several of Korzybyski’s ideas when developen REBT.
He has also influenced a lot of other important people. There’s a list at Wikipedia.
Nor am I looking for one. I’m extremely uninterested in questions like “was Korzybyski a very clever person?” and much more interested in ones like “does the stuff Korzybyski wrote contain enough insights I currently lack, and little enough distracting wrongness, to be worth my while reading?”.
Yup. There is no valid inference from “X can be treacherous” to “one should completely avoid X”. If Korzybyski claimed that one should simply never use “is” (I am doubtful that he did, as it happens[1]) then I disagree with him, which is not the same thing as failing to understand him or failing to have assimilated whatever useful points he may have made.
In the present case, note that “Is that all wrong?” is equivalent to “Does all that have the property of wrongness?” which doesn’t (either implicitly or explicitly) contain an “is”. (It arguably has the weakness of assuming that everything can be classified as “wrong” or “not wrong”, but use of such language is a very useful shorthand; it would be intolerably cumbersome always to have to say things like “Does all that have the property of wrongness to such an extent that I should be regretting having written it?”. And “Is there substantially more …” is equivalent to something like “Does Korzybyski’s work contain substantially more useful insight than what I wrote above would suggest?”. Again, no “is” contained or implied.
Now, if you think I made an actual error as a result of writing in English rather than in E-Prime, that I’d have avoided if I had more of Korzybyski’s ideas in my brain, go ahead and show me; but so far all you’ve done is to observe that my writing doesn’t conform to some rules associated with him (I’m not sure whether they’re his or his followers’) which I currently see no sufficient reason to endorse.
It seems somewhat plausible that the causation might go the other way. Are you claiming, specifically, that in fact K’s book is neither poorly organized nor verbose, but that because K didn’t write it accessibly Gardner misunderstood it and this led him to mischaracterize it as poorly organized and verbose?
I didn’t see that charge. I saw a charge of not having contributed anything novel to human knowledge and understanding. Not being very influential (if indeed K wasn’t) might be a consequence of that, though it’s not hard to find very influential people whose influence didn’t mostly come from such contributions.
I wonder what led you to see a “charge of not having influenced anybody” in what I wrote. It seems to me a rather curious error.
[1] My hazy recollection is that Korzybyski and his followers have no particular objection to “is” when used merely to apply an adjective to a noun: “the cat is blue”, but that they object to using it in contexts that assert, or seem to assert, the identity of two different things (“that man is a liar”, maybe).
Yes, I’m not trying to demonstrate that something is true but I’m trying to illustrate what Korzybyski’s ideas are about.
The issue is more that the word is appears. Right/Wrong is black-and-white dichotomous thinking. Maps are not right or wrong but have degrees of accuracy in mapping certain teritory and usefulness for navigating the territory.
You will find somewhere a claim that humans have rougly 12 billion neurons. That happens to be clearly wrong and humans have more neurons but it doesn’t matter much to the main thesis and it’s not what makes reading the book hard.
Most sentence of the book are not clearly right or wrong. Mostly what’s driven the kind of criticism that Martin Gardner gives is not that Korzybyski says thinks that are easily shown to be wrong but that Korzybyski says things, where it’s not clear what point Korzybyski tries to make.
It’s a bit like reading a Zen Koan. You don’t ask yourself: “Is this claim wrong?” but “What is the author trying to tell me?”
I refer to the quote “The simple reason is that Korzybyski made no contributions of significance to any of the fields about which he wrote with such seeming erudition”.
Yes, I already addressed this.
This sort of writing is only worth the effort of engaging with if there’s enough useful or interesting content there to warrant it. So we come back to my question: is there more there than if think from e.g. what Gardner wrote? This still isn’t clear to me.
… which doesn’t say anything about whether he influenced anybody. At least, not when interpreted the way I meant it. Do you define “making a contribution of significance” to mean”influencing people”?
I would be more suspicious of a work along these lines that was full of new insight. Science and Sanity is a work of synthesis, not of discovery, and sometimes we do need someone to put it all together and tell us what, once we hear it, we can easily dismiss as “but we knew all that anyway”. “What is new is not good, and what is good is not new” is a misdirected complaint when made against a work of this sort. What is new in “The God Delusion” or “The Selfish Gene”? Only the presentation of those syntheses to the masses. Ask rather, what is old, but seen anew?
OK, I’m asking. (I have no objection to pop science, pop psychology, pop philosophy, etc., when done well.) What is “old, but seen anew”? Specifically: suppose me to be a longstanding LW participant, reasonably well read in science and philosophy; if I read (say) Science and Sanity or some later GS work, am I likely to come out the far end knowing more or thinking better, and if so what do you expect me to learn?
Then reading S&S may well be supererogatory. If you’ve read all of the Sequences, you will recognise much in S&S, just as I, having read S&S, recognised much in the Sequences.
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.