General Semantics - Deferring to Reality Brings Us Sanity

I favor a school of thought called ‘General Semantics’ devised by an engineer named Alfred Korzybski. He went through the horrors of World War One and wondered how it could repeatedly happen that scientists and engineers can communicate so precisely to one another through scientific and engineering methods (procedures, drawings, standard definitions etc) so that people from different cultures can understand one another clearly and largely without confusion and yet politicians and diplomats communicate and carry out their objectives so poorly that calamitous and tragic wars occur.

His investigations led him to realize the great import of language and the recognition that language has a largely abstract nature. We encapsulate descriptions of real world events and objects through language. The words symbolize events and objects yet we lose awareness of this and we rely upon words so implicitly that we often place more value on the intent of a word than we do upon the evidence of our own senses and experiences. Korzybski came up with the maxim “The map is not the territory” i.e. we can follow a map to travel through a land but the map has inaccuracies (as all maps do on some level) and it can cause us to struggle in finding our way if we insist on making the map the thing to obey rather than deferring to the reality that we experience. We can correlate this to thinking by recognizing that the model of the world that we create with our beliefs, assumptions and verbal descriptions does not fully describe nor substitute reality. Many psychological ills come from insisting that the map takes precedence over events in reality.

At the most basic level, General Semantics seeks to describe our reactions and interpretations of reality at the highest levels possible given the constraints that language imposes upon our thinking. Recognizing those constraints and removing language structures and terminology that can corrupt our thinking an interpretations of reality plays the key part of this method.

I confess that I am not an expert on the full intricacies of the method of General Semantics thinking. I have read the book ‘People in Quandaries’ by Wendell Johnson and I found certain pieces of knowledge and a number of methodologies so immediately useful that I have applied them ever since. I have a great understanding and practical experience of those parts and I would like to share these things with you through a series of articles. Each is written as a stand alone piece.

Scientific Method - The Best Solution Generation Tool Known to Man
Faulty Logic - Faulty Conclusions Create Confusion
Levels of Abstraction - Detaching Yourself From Reality
Beliefs - Turn Beliefs into Theories
E-Prime - A Tool For Accurate Thinking (not actually devised by Korzybski)
Questions - Why ‘Why?’ Often Doesn’t Help

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