Defining and Describing General Semantics

From Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren, 1963

What is General Semantics?

You might think such a simple question would have a simple answer. Unfortunately, in this case there isn't a simple answer. Just like there's really no simple answer to the question, "What is chaos theory?"

In the course description there's a phrase that could serve as a beginning definition of General Semantics:

General Semantics—the study of how we transform our life experiences into language and thought.

The definition I used in my eBook, Here's Something About General Semantics (download the pdf Download download the pdf

), provides a broader view:

General Semantics deals with the process of how we perceive, construct, evaluate, and respond to our life experiences. Our language-behaviors represent one aspect of these responses (Stockdale, 2009, p. 21).

Following are several different approaches to describe General Semantics. From these, you might begin to sketch a picture for yourself of what GS is about.

Books

You can get an idea of the scope and domain of General Semantics from the titles of some of the prominent books in the field. (These are all listed in the Module 1 References.)

Science and Sanity (Korzybski)
Language Habits in Humans Affairs (Lee)
Language in Thought and Action (Hayakawa)
People in Quandaries (W. Johnson)
Your Most Enchanted Listener (W. Johnson)
The Art of Awareness (Bois)
Levels of Knowing and Existence (Weinberg)
Symbols, Status, and Personality (Hayakawa)
Drive Yourself Sane (Kodish & Kodish)
Communication and Organizational Behavior: Text and Cases (Haney)
The Speech Personality (Murray)
The Language of Wisdom and Folly (Lee)
The Tyranny of Words (Chase)
Making Sense (Potter)
Culture, Language and Behavior (Russell)
Mathsemantics (MacNeal)
Nothing Never Happens (K. Johnson and others)
Explorations in Awareness (Bois)

from Wendell Johnson

Wendell Johnson was one of the most important and distinguished of the "early adopters" of General Semantics. A clinical professor at the University of Iowa (see the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center Links to an external site.), Johnson wrote two wonderful books centered around GS, People in Quandaries and Your Most Enchanted Listener. The following excerpt comes from his first lecture of the Fall 1956 semester, which was broadcast over the campus radio station and recorded.

[General Semantics is concerned with the role] ... our use of words, designs — symbols of all kinds — tends to play in the development of our individual personalities, our institutions, and our human societies. So we shall be concerned in the course with the disorders of our symbolic processes, which is to say the language of maladjustment — the language which reflects maladjustment and which tends to produce maladjustment. We shall be even more concerned with the kinds of language which we are able to develop or cultivate which tend to be very effective, which tend to be conducive, to what we call "normal adjustment."

... I do not mean by adjustment some kind of self-satisfaction, some sort of blind acceptance of things as they are, but something much, much more dynamic and helpful than that. I mean by adjustment, by healthful adjustment, something that we might call the "realization of our own individual potentials for development." I don't mean being like somebody else, like the average man, or like the mold, but being oneself as fully as possible.

Well, there is a way to use language which tends to encourage this sort of development. Then there is a way to use language — there are probably many, many ways to use language — which tend to make it difficult to develop one's full potential, and so we will be concerned with these kinds of language. This means we're going to be concerned with things like speaking, writing, listening, reading, designing, and figuring with the pictures we make in our heads. We'll be concerned with the talking we do to ourselves that we recognize as thinking, and feeling, and imagining, and wishing, and regretting, and so forth.

We're going to be concerned especially with the language we use for talking ourselves into trouble, and that which we use for talking ourselves out of trouble. We are going to be concerned with the language that is effective for the solving of problems and for the realization of potential selfdevelopment. We're going to be especially concerned with language in its most effective forms for the purpose of solving problems. This means we will be especially interested in the language used by scientific research workers, and also by others — outstanding novelists, poets, any of the users of language who are very effective in the solving of human problems (Johnson, 1957).

from Irving J. Lee

Along with Wendell Johnson and S.I. Hayakawa, Irving J. Lee, professor of speech at Northwestern University, earned a place among the handful of most influential early proponents of General Semantics. The following 4:46 clip comes from a 1952 series of lectures on General Semantics called "Talking Sense" broadcast in Chicago as part of the "Of Men and Ideas" program.

Several excerpts from this series will be used througout the course. Note that some of Professor Lee's terminology is a reflection of his time - e.g., "men" rather than "people" or "men and women" - but the content of his presentations remain relevant.

If you have trouble viewing YouTube videos, try this as an alternative:

lee-on-ak.mp4 Download lee-on-ak.mp4 Play media comment.

from Dr. Russell Meyers

Dr. Russell Meyers also taught at the University of Iowa, but in the medical school as a neurosurgeon. He held leadership positions in the two GS organizations in the 1940s and was a principle lecturer at Institute of General Semantics seminars throughout the 1950s.

There are two premises we must operate on whenever we try to communicate. First, we must expect to be misunderstood. Second, we must expect to misunderstand. This may seem "obvious" but too few human beings act as if it were true. We are striving to minimize misunderstanding, not to eliminate it. This is true not only of inter-personal but intra-personal communication.

Communication can be competent or incompetent; it can lead to improvement or to destruction.

General Semantics is less interested in answers to examination questions than in personal behavior in day-to-day situations. It grew out of a comparison of the kinds of behavior that have led to adaptation and the kinds that have led to mis-adaptation.

Most of GS is unspeakable. It must be experienced and practiced over a period of time. Concepts basic to General Semantics:

Scientific method (generalized)
Communication
Evaluation
Creativity

Alfred Korzybski compared the efficient communication behavior of scientists to the inefficient behavior of "mental" cases. He then took those kinds of adaptive behavior that could be identified and taught and generalized them for everyday use.

The aim of GS is robust psychological health, not merely correcting or preventing maladjustment (Meyers, 1957).

from J. Samuel Bois

In The Art of Awareness, J. Samuel Bois describes a hypothetical situation to illustrate the scope of what General Semantics is concerned with. I've paraphrased it.

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.”

From a strictly semantic standpoint, or in terms of how the word cancer is defined in a dictionary, there is probably little ambiguity or lack of understanding among the three participants in this imaginary scene. They each share a common understanding that cancer refers to a medical diagnosis of cellular growths that may, or may not, be treated in certain ways, that may result in certain health outcomes for the patient. However, the common understanding of the definition of what the word cancer refers to is not at all the same as the emotional and physiological response of each individual person in the room upon hearing the utterance, “you’ve got cancer.”

In other words, what hearing “you’ve got cancer” means to the doctor who articulates the words is something entirely different to what it means to the patient who hears the words. And what it means to the patient is something qualitatively different from his wife’s response.

According to Bois, the study and understanding of such individual in-the-moment reactions, or happenings-meanings, "is the field of General Semantics" (Bois, 1966, p. 32).

Alfred Korzybski

The analysis of ... living reactions is the sole object of general semantics ... (Korzybski, 1994, p. xli).

Throughout this module we will concentrate on the work of Alfred Korzybski and his development of General Semantics.

Used with permission of Institute of General Semantics Links to an external site.

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