Evaluations-Meanings-Values

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Picking up from the previous page, let's look more closely at the influence of our Experiences.

"Theories" in General Semantics

Throughout Korzybski's writings, he refers to five "theories" related to General Semantics.

Time-binding, or as he titled two early papers, TIME-BINDING: The General Theory.
General Semantics as a general theory of evaluation.
General Semantics as a general theory of values.
General Semantics as establishing a theory of meanings.
General Semantics as establishing a theory of sanity.

We addressed time-binding in Module 1. We also mentioned that the title of the "source book" for General Semantics is Science and Sanity; that the methods and applications of science are the foundation for human sanity.

We've covered evaluation in the context of the abstracting-evaluating process.

And we talked about meaning, especially in Module 3 on bypassing. As attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce, "you don't get meaning, you respond with meaning."

But to this point, we haven't really talked about values. So here I want to place evaluation, meanings, and values in a broader environmental context. That is, evaluations, meanings, and values as inseparable and integral aspects of our life experiences.

Korzybski coined a technical term for such inseparable-ness — non-elementalistic. He observed that one of the potential errors in our language behaviors was the ability to divide or separate in our verbal worlds of language what cannot be separated in our non-verbal worlds of experience. This error of separating in words what cannot be separated in 'reality' he called elementistic evaluating, or to nounify the process, an elementalism.

In this case, we have three different words, which can be defined in different ways. But on a neurological level ... the level of actual living reactions ... what we refer to as evaluations, meanings, and values are all bound together both as past and present experiences.

To illustrate, let's return to the "you've got cancer" example of J.S. Bois from Module 1 Defining and Describing General Semantics.

Imagine a scene in a hospital examining room. There’s a doctor, a patient, and the patient’s wife. A lab technician knocks on the door and enters, carrying a medical folder with the patient’s charts. He hands the folder to the doctor, nods to the patient and the wife, and leaves the room. The doctor silently looks through the pages of the chart. She takes a deep breath, gathers herself, and turns to the husband to say, “The tests confirm that you’ve got cancer.”

Can you envision in that scenario how different evaluations, meanings, and values are manifested by each of the participants?

To repeat another excerpt from Module 1 that I hope you might now find a little more meaningful:

In Week 5, we'll address the "big picture" implications of [Korzybski's] theories about the complex inter-relationships among evaluations, meanings, and values. Here are some examples that may give you a feel for what Korzybski was getting at:

The European Union is divided over the ongoing financial crises in Greece and other countries. Generalizing and simplifying ... the citizens in Greece evaluate the crisis differently than German citizens because the austerity that is being forced on Greece means something very different to the Greek than it means to the German. The Greek and the German evaluate the situation differently because the situation means something different because they hold different values.

The Tea Party in the United States evaluates the significance of U.S. debt and government spending levels differently from other political groups because of the meaning that Tea Partiers give to government debt based on their values.

People around the world hold different evaluations about global warming/climate change based what the phenomenon means to them and what values they hold. To the citizen of the Maldives, the threat of rising oceans bears meaningful consequences because they value their way of life (not to mention their actual lives), so they evaluate the evidence and forecasts about global warming one way. The owner/operator/customers of a coal-burning electricity plant in the remote southwest U.S. evalute the issue differently because their economic and political values are affected in different meaningful ways.

The ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan can be considered in terms of different evaluations based on conflicting values and meanings.

Can you think of any close-to-home controversies that exhibit the inseparable (or non-elementalistic) nature of evalutions, meanings, and values?