DIY History | Transcribe | Hevelin Fanzines | Plenum, issue 2, July 1946

Transcribe
Translate

Plenum, issue 2, July 1946

Page 4

PLENUM     Page four

in his writings. There would, in the first place, have been no confusion between "semantics" and "general semantics."

Even as Heinlein says in "Coventry": "Because semantics dealt with spoken and written words as a determining aspect of human behavior, it was at first mistakenly thought by many to be concerned only with words and of interest only to professional word manipulators......"

The dictionary says: "Semantics (Greek semantikos, significant; sema, a sign) the science of the meaning and sense development of words."

And so these early fans of whom I speak thereupon got the idea that to pursue a discussion by the semantic technique the thing to do was to analyze the opponent's sentences to find out precisely what they meant, thereby showing that his sentences were just meaningless groups of noises. Or else that the opponent was using words of emotional significance and therefore wasn't being logical.

Jack Speer, in the Fancyclopedia, indicates that some fans had advanced as far as the idea that "...if a proposition makes no conceivable difference in the way things may be expected to act, it is meaningless to ask whether it's true or not."

Now that's beginning to approach the meat of what Korzybski has to say, but it omits practically all of K's new concepts --- the very concepts which  make "general semantic" a vastly broader subject than the classical dictionary "semantics." Semantics is what the fans were playing around with a few years ago. General semantics, meaning the study of nonaristotelian systems, is what Heinlein and van Vogt have been talking about, and it is a much bigger and interesting field, covering the relation of language structure to human behavior as a whole.

That's a pretty big field. Korzybski admits it. It involves "psychology", psychiatry, mathematics, sociology, anthropology, and most other subjects that you can name. The reason for this lies in the concept that human behavior is strictly a back-and-forth interplay between the individual and the environment. The very development of nervous structure takes place in accordance with stimuli received from the environment. Now one of the most important parts of that environment is the language which the child hears from the day it is born, and that language creates structures in the nervous system which ultimately affects the behavior of the individual as a whole. Since all of the academic subjects mentioned above are part of the human behavior picture, and since the non-elemental viewpoint of A insists that human behavior must be considered as a whole and not broken into arbitrary categories, then general semantics must include those subjects.

(To digress, I might say that the ideas I will be explaining, and which are included in "Science and Sanity" are not necessarily Korzybski's own." So when you here an idea which you know

Saving...

PLENUM Page four in his writings. There would, in the first place, have been no confusion between "semantics" and "general semantics." Even as Heinlein says in "Coventry": "Because semantics dealt with spoken and written words as a determining aspect of human behavior, it was at first mistakenly thought by many to be concerned only with words and of interest only to professional word manipulators......" The dictionary says: "Semantics (Greek semantikos, significant; sema, a sign) the science of the meaning and sense development of words." And so these early fans of whom I speak thereupon got the idea that to pursue a discussion by the semantic technique the thing to do was to analyze the opponent's sentences to find out precisely what they meant, thereby showing that his sentences were just meaningless groups of noises. Or else that the opponent was using words of emotional significance and therefore wasn't being logical. Jack Speer, in the Fancyclopedia, indicates that some fans had advanced as far as the idea that "...if a proposition makes no conceivable difference in the way things may be expected to act, it is meaningless to ask whether it's true or not." Now that's beginning to approach the meat of what Korzybski has to say, but it omits practically all of K's new concepts --- the very concepts which make "general semantic" a vastly broader subject than the classical dictionary "semantics." Semantics is what the fans were playing around with a few years ago. General semantics, meaning the study of nonaristotelian systems, is what Heinlein and van Vogt have been talking about, and it is a much bigger and interesting field, covering the relation of language structure to human behavior as a whole. That's a pretty big field. Korzybski admits it. It involves "psychology", psychiatry, mathematics, sociology, anthropology, and most other subjects that you can name. The reason for this lies in the concept that human behavior is strictly a back-and-forth interplay between the individual and the environment. The very development of nervous structure takes place in accordance with stimuli received from the environment. Now one of the most important parts of that environment is the language which the child hears from the day it is born, and that language creates structures in the nervous system which ultimately affects the behavior of the individual as a whole. Since all of the academic subjects mentioned above are part of the human behavior picture, and since the non-elemental viewpoint of A insists that human behavior must be considered as a whole and not broken into arbitrary categories, then general semantics must include those subjects. (To digress, I might say that the ideas I will be explaining, and which are included in "Science and Sanity" are not necessarily Korzybski's own." So when you here an idea which you know