Consciousness of Abstracting-Evaluating
Consciousness of Abstracting
One of the expressed goals in General Semantics is what Korzybski referred to as "consciousness of abstracting." In other words, the objective of learning anything is to apply it in some way to one's own circumstances, and one way to apply GS is to maintain an ongoing awareness of the abstracting process.
That's all well and good, but then one can ask, "what is it exactly that I'm supposed to be conscious or aware of?" After all, abstracting, as you may have observed thus far in the course, can be a rather ... abstract ... notion to grasp.
Therefore the following table may help summarize some of the key differences between maintaining an awareness of your own abstracting processes, compared to remaining unaware of abstracting.
| Presumption of Allness, what is experienced or sensed is exactly what is there to be experienced. | Aware of the abstracting process and limitations of the nervous system, recognition that one can never know or experience all about anything. |
| Conditioned responses, jump to conclusions, make snap judgments. | Conditional responses, delayed reactions. |
| Bypassing - presuming that meanings are in words, that listeners presume speakers should use words the same way the listener uses them. | Meanings are found in individuals and how they use words; ask what does the speaker mean? Definitions in dictionaries, meanings in people. |
| Two-valued, either-or, right-wrong, good-evil thinking. | Multi-valued thinking, acknowledging shades of grey. |
| Talking is prone to absolutisms, certainty, closed-mindedness. | Talking recognizes limitations of abstracting process, open-minded, tentative, acknowledges degrees of uncertainty. |
| Confusion between facts and inferences/observations, low standard for what is treated as fact. Prone to treat inference statements as if they were factual statements. | Aware of differences between facts and inferences, sets a high bar for facts: 1) must have already occurred; 2) must be personally observed/experienced; 3) as close to certainty as humanly possible. |
| Assumptions are bad and should be avoided. | Assumptions are inevitable and useful for time-binding, but need to be acknowledged and brought to awareness as much as possible. |