General semantics is a system of personal growth based on non-Aristotelian logical structures. It aims to explain human experiences and interactions with reality, recognizing the limitations of language. The key idea is that descriptions of reality do not correspond accurately or adequately to reality itself. This leads to semantic reactions, which are at the heart of most human conflicts. Understanding the events themselves as faithfully as possible reduces miscommunications. Non-Aristotelian logic eliminates simple cause and effect relationships, recognizing that every event has many causes and many results.
General semantics is a system of personal growth and development based on non-essentialist and non-Aristotelian logical structures. The term general semantics comes from Polish-American writer and philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. This work integrates philosophy, mathematics and science in an attempt to explain human experiences and interactions with reality.
Some confusion can arise from the use of the word semantics. In linguistics, semantics is the relationship between words and their meaning. General semantics does not simply mean “the practice of semantics in general”, but instead refers to a particular set of philosophical concepts.
The key idea of general semantics is that descriptions of reality do not correspond accurately or adequately to reality itself. A common phrase used to express this idea is: “The map is not the territory”. In other words, human beings are constrained by abstractions in both how they perceive an event and how they describe it.
For example, suppose a person witnesses a robbery. He or she might attempt to describe the crime later by saying that a short man in a black balaclava held the clerk at gunpoint. This description, however, is full of abstract perceptions: to a particularly short person, the man might have appeared to be of average height. Furthermore, the description cannot contain every detail of the event, even as the person perceived it.
Also, a person hearing this description may not fully understand the event as it is described. This leads to what Korzybski calls “semantic reactions,” which are reactions to the perception of someone else’s verbalization of an event, rather than to the event itself. According to general semantics, these reactions are at the heart of most human conflicts. Understanding the events themselves as faithfully as possible by recognizing the limits of human communication reduces purely semantic reactions and therefore miscommunications.
On a more academic level, understanding the shortcomings of language is part of non-Aristotelian logic. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle classified claims into two distinct categories – true and false – with no middle ground or degree of correctness or incorrectness. According to Korzybski and other non-Aristotelian thinkers, however, statements can be true or false on a sliding scale: the statement “the man was tall” may only be partially true.
This type of thinking also eliminates simple cause and effect relationships. Every event has many causes and many results. People may try to verbalize those causes, but the reality is not the same as every single person’s verbalization. The notion of cause and effect in general semantics is further complicated by his use of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which upsets common ideas of time moving in straight lines.
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