Greg

First off, thanks to all for your very thoughtful comments in the discussions.

I was excited to see how excited many of you were by the concept of linguistic relativity and of cultural relativity more generally.

I also was impressed by your willingness to engage in methodological relativism, fully willing to hold off on semantic reactions and assess situations before passing judgment.

At the same time, I sincerely appreciated the way that all of you found ways in which to draw a line - a point at which you do indeed feel it is necessary to act. This is an important lesson of General Semantics - General Semantics is not merely an intellectual endeavor in which we must only stand back and contemplate our evaluations. Rather, General Semantics is a philosophy of action.

To this point, in these closing comments I thought I would point back to the central idiom of General Semantics, namely the structural differential.

If you look at the structural differential, you will notice that there is a line going back up to the broken parabola. Although not often commented upon, I actually think that this arrow is the most critical piece of the structural differential and of General Semantics - for this little arrow represents our actions in the world. While it is important to attend to the downward movement of the structural differential - what we might call the process of interpretation or meaning making - it is the arrow going up that represents the actions that we take that act back on the world to then shape the world. It is true that our actions will be greatly affected by the ways in which we interpret the world, but let's be cautious not to stop at good interpretations.

It is my hope that this course might have given you not only the ability to make good interpretations but also to undertake good actions.

Thanks again for your engagement and involvement and I wish you all the best.