General Semantics Quotes

Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.

The objective level is not words, and cannot be reached by words alone. We must point our finger and be silent, or we will never reach this level.

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

Any proposition containing the word "is" creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.

The rich are poor without the poor's acknowledgment of money.

The abuse of symbolism is like the abuse of food or drink: it makes people ill, and so their reactions become deranged.

Ignorance is no excuse when once we know that ignorance is the only possible excuse.

Whatever we may say will not be the objective level, which remains fundamentally un-speakable. Thus, we can sit on the object called 'a chair', but we cannot sit on the noise we made or the name we applied to that object.

The fallacy that Morley in his life of Gladstone asserts to be the greatest affliction of politicians; it is indeed a common plague of humanity. It is: The fallacy of attributing to one cause what is due to many causes.

Moreover, every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolve the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Different ‘philosophies’ represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded.

It is a sign of intellectual maturity to always crawl to conclusions.

When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word "depression." Depression, most people know, used to be termed "melancholia," a word which appears in English as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. "Melancholia" would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a blank tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated -- the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer -- had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.

There is absolutely nothing feminine about the colour pink, or, anything bad-luck'ish about the colour black — in itself.

Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism on our instituitions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to maladjustment of the incoming generations which, being born into, are forced to develop under the un-natural (for man) semantic conditions imposed on them. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations. The vicious circle is completed; it results in a general state of human un-sanity, reflected again in our instituitions. And so it goes, on and on.

The reader must be reminded that it takes a good 'mind' to be 'insane'. Morons, imbeciles, and idiots are 'mentally' deficient, but could not be insane.

What luck! If the theories of Epictetus, Karen Horney (who first talked about the “tyranny of the shoulds”), Alfred Korzybski (the founder of general semantics), and REBT are correct, you almost always bring on your emotional problems by rigidly adopting one of the basic methods of crooked thinking—musturbation. Therefore, if you understand how you upset yourself by slipping into irrational shoulds, oughts, demands, and commands, unconsciously sneaking them into your thinking, you can just about always stop disturbing yourself about anything.

Marriage converts a player into a polygamist.

You cannot say something about something without revealing something about yourself.

Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reversed order and so non-survival evaluation. If we use the nervous ystem in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival. Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction.

Say wharever you choose about the object, and wharever you might say it is not. Or, in other words: wharever you might say the object is, well it is not.

Unlike meaning, the truth always survives translation.

You are. Before you are whatever you are labeled.

The definition of 'Employment' by an employer, and, that by an employee, are seldom the same.

Reading, seeing, and hearing happen way more often than understanding.

We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

Photojournalism has frequently been lambasted for being the product of circumstance. In fact rarely are any of these images considered in terms of their composition and semantic intent. They are merely news, a happy intersection of event and opportunity. It hardly helps that photographs in general also take only a fraction of a second to acquire. It is incredible how so many people can constantly misread speed to mean ease. This is certainly most common where photography is concerned. However simply because anyone can buy a camera, shutter away, and then with a slightly prejudiced eye justify the product does not validate the achievement. Shooting a target with a rifle is accomplished with similar speed and yet because the results are so objective no one suggests that marksmanship is easy.

Looking at what 'foreplay' is, 'sexual intercourse' is a game.

To millions of children, a condom is nothing but a balloon.

He who says that someone isn’t himself is a victim of statistics.

For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub-Creative Art in itself, and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image: a quality essential to fairy-story. I propose, therefore, to arrogate to myself the powers of Humpty-Dumpty, and to use Fantasy for this purpose: in a sense, that is, which combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of 'unreality' (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the dominion of 'observed fact,' in short of the fantastic. I am thus not only aware but glad of the etymological and semantic connexions of fantasy with fantastic: with images of things that are not only 'not actually present,' but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all, or are generally believed not to be found there. But while admitting that, I do not assent to the depreciative tone. That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that indeed is possible) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most Potent. Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being 'arrested.' They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control; with delusion and hallucination. But the error or malice, engendered by disquiet and consequent dislike, is not the only cause of this confusion. Fantasy has also an essential drawback: it is difficult to achieve. . . . Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough -- though it may already be a more potent thing than many a 'thumbnail sketch' or 'transcript of life' that receives literary praise. To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.

No reflecting reader can deny that the passing off, on an unsuspecting listener, of noises for words, or symbols, must be classified as a fraud, or that we pass to the other fellow contagious semantic disturbances.

... everything based on arguments involving the ''is'' of identidy and the older el (elementalistic) 'logic' and 'psychology', such as the prevailing doctrines, laws, institutions, systems. , cannot possibly be in full accordance with the structure of our nervous system. This, in turn, affects the latter and results in the prevailing private and public un-sanity. Hence, the unrest, unhappines, nervous strain, irritability, lack of wisdom and absence of balance, the instability of our instituitions, the wars and revolutions, the increase of ''mental ills, prostitution, criminality, commercialism as a creed, the inadequate standards of education, the low professional standards of lawyers, priests, politicians, physicians, teachers, parents, and even of scientists - which in the last-named field often lead to dogmatic and antisocial attitudes and lack of creativeness.

Sometimes a fool says something wise without the intention to do that, and the awareness of having done that.

Poetry is the art of hiding the inadequacy of language.

Indescribable’ is the only accurate description of life.

In a way, trying to say exactly what something is, is like trying to take a picture of the entire universe—and that has nothing to do with the non-existence of a capable camera.

A thing named, misnamed, unnamed, or renamed is still itself.

An event need not have been witnessed to have happened.

Name the nine prime fallacies,” he snapped. “Simplification. Generalization. Circularity. Reduction. Analogy. False causality. Semantism. Irrelevancy….

A fist is not a thing but a particular state of a particular thing.

Our description of what we are seeing ought to be begun with the word 'apparently'.

Most social media users sometimes like statements they do not understand.

One demonstration is equivalent to one hundred explanations.

An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map.,endlessly. This characteristic was first discovered by Royce. We may call it self-reflexiveness.

Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from people who haven’t. Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin. Women who’ve suffered childhood sexual abuse have smaller somatosensory cortices—the part of the brain that registers sensation in our bodies. Victims who were screamed at might have an altered response to sound. Traumatized brains can result in reductions in the parts of the brain that process semantics, emotion and memory retrieval, perceiving emotions in others, and attention and speech. Not getting enough sleep at night potentially affects developing brains’ plasticity and attention and increases the risk of emotional problems later in life. And the scariest factoid, for me anyway: Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning. Brains do have workarounds. There are people without amygdalae who don’t feel fear. There are people who have reduced prefrontal cortices who are very logical. And other parts of the brain can compensate, make up the lost parts in other ways. But overall, when I looked at the breadth of evidence, the results felt crushing. The fact that the brain’s cortical thickness is directly related to IQ was particularly threatening to me. Even if I wasn’t cool, or kind, or personable, I enjoyed the narrative that I was at least effective. Intelligent. What these papers seemed to tell me is that however smart I am, I’m not as smart as I could have been had this not happened to me. The questions arose again: Is this why my pitches didn’t go through? Is this why my boss never respected me? Is this why I was pushed to do grunt work in the back room?

Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such as"expropriating the expropriators," "an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty," "they did it to me so I can do it to them," and, in general, the emotional mathematics of "one plus one equals zero" (1 + 1 = 0). The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc.

From time immemorial, some men supposed to deal in one-valued 'eternal verities'. We called such men 'philosophers' or 'meta-physicians'. But they seldom realized that all their 'eternal verities' consisted only of words, and words which, for the most part, belonged to a primitive language, refleting in its structure the assumed structure of the world of remote antiquity. Besides, they did not realize that these 'eternal verities' last only so long as the human nervous system is not altered. Under the influence of these 'philosophers', two-valued 'logic', and the confusion of orders of abstractions, nearly all of us contracted a firmly rooted predilection for 'general' statements - 'universals', as they were called - which in most cases inherently involved the semantic one-valued conviction of validity for all 'time' to come.

Until Einstein (roughly), THE universe of Newton was, for us, THE universe. With Einstein, it became A universe. Something similar happen to man. A new 'man' was produced, just as good, certainly contraditory to the old one. THE man became A man, otherwise a 'conceptual construction', one among the infinity of possible ones.

Rasa has two primary meanings: 'feeling' and 'meaning'. As 'feeling' it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses - seeing, hearing, talking, smelling and feeling, and it includes within itself three aspects of "feeling" that our view of the 5 senses separates: taste of tongue, touch on the body, and emotional 'feeling' within the 'heart' like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is the passion. As 'meaning', rasa is applied to words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse. And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative 'feeling' of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But int his second, semantic sense, it also means 'ultimate significance' - the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence(...) (The interpretation of cultures)

Semantic Memory is general knowledge about the world, everything from who Isaac Newton was, to what a bagel tastes like, and where your office is—all the kinds of basic facts and meanings that computers and robots don’t understand. Thankfully, in normal brain aging, this huge knowledge base not only remains generally stable in an older adult but can continue to grow as a person learns more.

We propose that use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in memory for details directly contributes to removing the social context of abuse from research on memory for trauma. As the term “false memories” has increasingly been used to describe errors in details, the scientific weight of the term has increased. In turn, we see that the term “false memories” is treated as a construct supported by scientific fact, whereas other terms associated with questions about the veracity of abuse memories have been treated as suspect. For example, “recovered memories” often appears in quotations, whereas “false memories” does not (Campbell, 2003).The quotation marks suggest that one term is questioned, whereas the other is accepted as fact. Accepting “false memories” of abuse as fact reflects the subtle assimilation of the term into the cognitive literature, where the term is used increasingly to describe intrusions of semantically related words into lists of related words. The term, rooted in the controversy over the accuracy of abuse memories recalled during psychotherapy (Schacter, 1999), implies generalization of errors in details to memory for abuse—experienced largely by women and children (Campbell, 2003)." from: What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer.

Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from those of people who haven’t.[8] Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin. Women who’ve suffered childhood sexual abuse have smaller somatosensory cortices—the part of the brain that registers sensation in our bodies. Victims who were screamed at might have an altered response to sound. Trauma can result in reductions in the parts of the brain that process semantics, emotion and memory retrieval, perceiving emotions in others, and attention and speech. Not getting enough sleep at night potentially affects developing brains’ plasticity and attention and increases the risk of emotional problems later in life. And the scariest factoid, for me anyway: Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning.

It is now time to face the fact that English is a crazy language — the most loopy and wiggy of all tongues. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people play at a recital and recite at a play? Why does night fall but never break and day break but never fall? Why is it that when we transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when we transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? Why does a man get a hernia and a woman a hysterectomy? Why do we pack suits in a garment bag and garments in a suitcase? Why do privates eat in the general mess and generals eat in the private mess? Why do we call it newsprint when it contains no printing but when we put print on it, we call it a newspaper? Why are people who ride motorcycles called bikers and people who ride bikes called cyclists? Why — in our crazy language — can your nose run and your feet smell?Language is like the air we breathe. It’s invisible, inescapable, indispensable, and we take it for granted. But, when we take the time to step back and listen to the sounds that escape from the holes in people’s faces and to explore the paradoxes and vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, homework can be done in school, nightmares can take place in broad daylight while morning sickness and daydreaming can take place at night, tomboys are girls and midwives can be men, hours — especially happy hours and rush hours — often last longer than sixty minutes, quicksand works very slowly, boxing rings are square, silverware and glasses can be made of plastic and tablecloths of paper, most telephones are dialed by being punched (or pushed?), and most bathrooms don’t have any baths in them. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a tree —no bath, no room; it’s still going to the bathroom. And doesn’t it seem a little bizarre that we go to the bathroom in order to go to the bathroom? Why is it that a woman can man a station but a man can’t woman one, that a man can father a movement but a woman can’t mother one, and that a king rules a kingdom but a queen doesn’t rule a queendom? How did all those Renaissance men reproduce when there don’t seem to have been any Renaissance women? Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane: In what other language do they call the third hand on the clock the second hand? Why do they call them apartments when they’re all together? Why do we call them buildings, when they’re already built? Why it is called a TV set when you get only one? Why is phonetic not spelled phonetically? Why is it so hard to remember how to spell mnemonic? Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like what it is? Why is the word abbreviation so long? Why is diminutive so undiminutive? Why does the word monosyllabic consist of five syllables? Why is there no synonym for synonym or thesaurus? And why, pray tell, does lisp have an s in it? If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress? ...

If we do not objectify, and feel instinctively and permanently that words are not the things spoken about, then we could not speak abouth such meaningless subjects as the 'beginning' or the 'end' of time. But, if we are semantically disturbed and objectify, then, of course, since objects have a beginning and an end, so also would 'time' have a 'beggining' and an 'end'. In such pathological fancies the universe must have a 'beginning in time' and so must have been made., and all of our old anthropomorphic and objectified mythologies follow, including the older theories of entropy in physics. But, if 'time' is only a human form of representation and not an object, the universe has no 'beginning in time' and no 'end in time'; in other words, the universe is 'time'-less. The moment we realize, feel permanently, and utilize these realizations and feelings that words are not things, then only do we acquire the semantic freedom to use different forms of representation. We can fit better their structure to the facts at hand, become better adjusted to these facts which are not words, and so evaluate properly m.o (multi-ordinal) realities, which evaluation is important for sanity.

Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental than differences. Less fundamental, but no less important, as life and 'intelligence' would be totally impossible without abstracting. It becomes clear that the problem which has so excited the s.r. of the people of the United States of America and added so much to the merriment of mankind, 'Is the evolution a ''fact'' or a ''theory''?, is simply silly. Father and son are never identical - that surely is a structural 'fact' - so there is no need to worry about still higher abstractions, like 'man' and 'monkey'. That the fanatical and ignorant attack on the theory of evolution should have occured may be pathetic, but need concern us little, as such ignorant attacks are always liable to occur. But that biologists should offer 'defences' based on the confusions of orders of abstractiobs, and that 'philosophers' should have failed to see the simple dependence is rather sad. The problems of 'evolution' are verbal and have nothing to do with life as such, which is made up all through of different individuals, 'similarity' being structurally a manufactured article, produced by the nervous system of the observer.

As black-box technologies become more widespread, there have been no shortage of demands for increased transparency. In 2016 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation included in its stipulations the "right to an explanation," declaring that citizens have a right to know the reason behind the automated decisions that involve them. While no similar measure exists in the United States, the tech industry has become more amenable to paying lip service to "transparency" and "explainability," if only to build consumer trust. Some companies claim they have developed methods that work in reverse to suss out data points that may have triggered the machine's decisions—though these explanations are at best intelligent guesses. (Sam Ritchie, a former software engineer at Stripe, prefers the term "narratives," since the explanations are not a step-by-step breakdown of the algorithm's decision-making process but a hypothesis about reasoning tactics it may have used.) In some cases the explanations come from an entirely different system trained to generate responses that are meant to account convincingly, in semantic terms, for decisions the original machine made, when in truth the two systems are entirely autonomous and unrelated. These misleading explanations end up merely contributing another layer of opacity. "The problem is now exacerbated," writes the critic Kathrin Passig, "because even the existence of a lack of explanation is concealed.

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support. Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition. I do not share their semantic concerns.[1] Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

Faeces by any other name would smell as gross

The Count, though, saw all problems in human relations as problems in semantics, that is, the fact that words mean different things to different people. Moreover, General Semantics, his own invention, would also take into account neurological events: the ways in which people reacted to new words, new information and new situations. Confronted with a stressful stimulus, one’s reflexes and/or conditioned behavior often preempted the appropriate measured response.

But neither can theological language consist in nothing but equivocal expostulations, piously but fruitlessly offered up into the abyss of the divine mystery; this would evacuate theological language not only of logical, but of semantic content; nothing could be affirmed—nothing could mean anything at all. And yet, down the centuries, Christians have again and again subscribed to formulations of their faith that clearly reduce a host of cardinal Christian theological usages— most especially moral predicates like“good,” “merciful,” “just,” “benevolent,” “loving”—to utter equivocity, and by association the entire grammar of Christian belief to meaninglessness. Indeed, so absolute is this equivocity that the only hope of rescuing any analogy from the general ruin would be to adopt “evil” as the sole plausible moral “proportion” between God and creatures. (from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015): 1-17)

Only in the mind is the mouth separate from the anus.

A statement can be truthful when it is said or written, but untruthful when it is heard or read.

The name of a thing gets in the way of us seeing more of it.

We can know, not what a thing is, but what its name is.

How the seen looks depends on how the seer sees.

Language is often mistakenly conceived as the opposite of mathematics. It is thought to be structurally loose and semantically nebulous, whereas mathematics is thought to be tight, clear, and unequivocal. In fact, not only is language a mathematical structure in its own right, but it is the most general mathematical structure of all, subsuming every other. If language were not mathematical in every sense, and if it were not capable of concise and unequivocal expression, then not only would mathematics (and therefore mathematical physics) be inadequate to characterize reality, but there would be no such things as mathematics and physics at all.

There are several important remarks which can be made about this 'absolute emptiness' and 'absolute nothingness'. First of all, we now know, theoretically and empirically, that such a thing does not exist. There may be more or less of something, but never an unlimited 'perfect vacuum'. In the second place, our nervous make-up, being in accord with experience, is such that 'absolute emptiness' requires 'outside walls'. The question at once arises, is the world 'finite' or 'infinite'? If we say 'finite', it has to have outside walls, and then the question arises: What is 'behind the walls'? If we say it is 'infinite', the problem of the psychological 'walls' is not eliminated. and we still have the semantic need for walls, and then ask what is beyond the walls. So we see the such a world suspended in some sort of an 'absolute void' represents a nature against human nature, and so we had to invent something supernatural to account for such assumed nature against human nature. In the third place, and this remark is the most fundamental of all, because a symbol must stand for something to be a symbol at all, 'absolute nothingness' cannot be objective and cannot be symbolized at all. This ends the argument, as all we may say about it is neither true nor false, but non-sense. We can make noises, but say nothing about the external world. It is easy to see that 'absolute nothingness' is a label for a semantic disturbance, for verbal objectification, for a pathological state inside our skin, for a fancy, but not a symbol, for a something which has objective existence outside our skin.

The Directorio Revolucionario (“DR”) existed during the mid-1950’s and it was a Cuban University students’ group in opposition to the dictator President Fulgencio Batista. It was one of the most active terrorist organizations in Havana. Although they were given orders not to attack the rank and file police officers, semantics became important, as their targets were no longer “assassinated,” but rather were “executed.” To them the term sounded more legally acceptable. However, regardless of how it is phrased, murder is murder! At 3:20 on the afternoon of March 13, 1957, fifty attackers from the “DR”, led by Carlos Gutiérrez Menoyo, attacked the Presidential Palace. Menoyo had fought in the Sahara Desert against the German forces under General Rommel during World War II. By demonstrating great courage, Carlos had been decorated and given the rank of second lieutenant in the French army and was uniquely suited for this task. Now, with workers representing labor, and rebellious students from the university, they drove up to the entrance to the Presidential Palace in delivery van #7, marked “Fast Delivery S.A.” They also had two additional cars weighted down with bombs, rifles, and automatic weapons… (Read more in the Exciting Story of Cuba)

Cults and outlaw terrorists generally follow the above procedures by further rewiring of the fourth, socio-sexual circuit. (Governments usually leave that circuit alone, since government agents are largely puritanical-authoritarian and afraid to get involved at all with raw Eros.) It is no secret that the most powerful secret society of the middle ages, the Knights Templar, forced recruits to participate in both blasphemy and sodomy. Just as the deliberate nonsense of all cultish third-circuit semantics isolates the group from the rest of society, this initiation separated the Templars from the rest of Christendom; the alienation could easily be conditioned into a sense of superiority. The Mau-Maus in Kenya also insisted on one act of homosexuality to break the new member’s previous conditioning toward heterosexuality and monogamy. Other cults, some quite well known, attempt to repress sexuality entirely — another way of breaking the statistically normal imprinting of the fourth circuit.

What is called an “emotion” in everyday elementalistic language I would redescribe as an evaluational-reaction containing intense sensations. So then, an intense evaluational-reaction (IER), which can be more or less ‘negative’, that is, undesirable, as contributing to unnecessary suffering and to unsanity.

So let’s proceed with Chisholm’s exposition: SiS “can be seen best if we do not define it, but rather illustrate it with a few examples… There is a SiS between the grooves in the phonograph record and the music that is played from it… between a blueprint and a machine that is made from it… If you have learned to do something the way somebody else does it, there is a SiS between your habits and his… SiS depends, you see, on order and on relations which exist in the territory and in the symbolism….(p.37)

Or we can encounter the square as tangential to our sinuous spiral curve - a temporary container for a part of our life’s path. These hates and these attachments we feel are the square’s edges for us at any given moment. As we spiral we see them as limits that give shape; we approach these old feelings-thoughts and accept them, touch them and let them touch us without fear, because we know they are merely the limit of a spiral path that runs at a tangent to those ‘hard lines.’ In time, those old attachments and hates will seem like such a small square compared to the new regions we explore.

We came to the conclusion that valid knowledge is not knowledge of… things directly but of the relations which exist between the energies and entities of the territory and the symbols that we have for them….Think of structure as simply a bundle of relations among things: the structure of an automobile is how the parts are related… the dynamic interplay of the parts… You can apply the notion to anything… to organisms. The relationship of parts and the interplay of organs determine the functioning of the organism (pp.43, 44).

Korzybski’s notion of Similarity in Structure is a master stroke without which the understanding of General Semantics risks sliding back to the Aristotelian orientation. That’s why he usually avoided conventional formulations which might appear to give maps the magical power to ‘represent’, ‘correspond to’ or ‘mirror’ a territory. A non-Aristotelian map has the scientific power to deliver similarity-in-structure to a territory. Not similarity, but similarity in structure. ‘Structure’ for AK is a mathematical term involving ‘order’ and especially ‘relations’.

I love the way those terms roll off my tongue and I love to reply to someone’s query—‘what is General Semantics’ with: ‘Its about dynamo- genic differentiation—or changing how you “think” about things.’ To me, the term ‘dynamo’ means ‘the process of change which occurs within the nervous system.’ And the term ‘genic’ means ‘suitable to the processes of change.

The square’s edge is not truly an obstacle to our dynamo-genic differentiation but only a tangent giving shape to the ongoing process of the curve. Perhaps we did not see this because we were moving too much in a straight line, trying to cross or break the line, to have revenge on the line of the square. We can extensionally transcend any given ‘square’ of life but only by following the natural curve of the spiral, which gently touches the edges of the square, tangentially, before moving on.

the IER will dissipate and be subject to re-evaluation if its experiential components are first de-fused, separated, differentiated, and then revised as appropriate in the direction of greater sanity.

If you do the math and start small, you will grow and grow. The new growth will spur newer growth and that growth will catalyze more growth and sanity still in an on-going progressive fashion. The world should take on brighter and more colorful hues and you should be able to flip through fresh pages of life on which happiness and success can be written.

Precisely! Once an individual responds differently to a recurring situation or one that has held him/her in a transfixed state of identification, a new chemical-physical-colloidal matrix is established within the nervous system and this creates a new base from which the new tangent can propagate itself to form newer responses to former situations instead of reacting similarly.

The Structural-Differential (SD) points to the human ability to experience the difference, to differentiate, between the object level sensations which give to the IER its felt intensity, and the label level verbalizations, explicit and implicit, which give conceptual meaning to the sensations.

If you follow the progression of squares and rectangles you will discover a progression which occurs naturally in life and seems to persist in spite of disruptions. We go along in life quite happily and then something may happen, let’s say at one of the small squares, and unhappiness sets in. If we don’t have a method with which to deal with the sharp blow or painful circumstance we become led astray by ‘identification’ and continue to assign blame to that event and our life becomes entangled within that ‘engram.’ We get stuck and don’t move as we should in a four-dimensional world. And ‘pathology’ ensues.

General-Semantics is not so much about what to think as about how to think and how to think about thinking, so then, a discipline and a meta-discipline available in appropriately different degrees of complexity to every human being from the young child to the physics professor. Not a special field but “a general science of human evaluation,” encyclopedic in scope, involving methodical “neurosemantic” training of the human being as “organism as a whole in an environment” and relevant to all human concerns from the personal to the political, to natural and social sciences, to art and religion.

with the semantics from general context, it can be seen that “helper” is not synonymous to “slave.” If a person were to state that he/she “helped” a friend with his/her homework, would that mean that the helper is insignificant? Of course not. When a person helps another person with homework, he/she is actually the one who consolidates the understanding of the person who receives their help, which does oppose the claim that “helpers” are inferiors. In fact, in Psalms 54:4 and John 14:26, God and the Holy Spirit are referred to as “helpers,” which was the same word Eve was referred to: “See, God is my helper. The Lord is the one who keeps my soul alive.” (Psalms 54:4) “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” (John 14:26)

You can know the name, but not understand or know the named.

But quite frequently I get very pained letters from very sincere people asking, “What the hell do you mean?” They can’t realize that I’m trying to get beyond yes and no and show alternatives, what de Bono calls po thinking. Yes is yes, no is no, and po is let’s consider it. And that’s what I’m always doing. Quite often people write naive letters of great emotional pain, saying “Are we supposed to believe it or not?” And the answer is, from my point of view, you’re not supposed to believe anything: you’re supposed to think about it. Of course, there is a big influence on me, not just from General Semantics and Korzybski, but also from modern physics which has always been a hobby of mind. Since the 1920s quantum physics has given up talking about “truth.” You hardly ever hear physicists utter the word “truth.” They don’t even use the word theory anymore; they prefer the word model. And the General approach is: which model is most useful right now? Your assumption is that there will be a better model in a couple of years. They are doing what de Bono calls lateral thinking and Korzybski calls non-Aristotelian thinking and I call Guerrilla Ontology.

The word “psychosomatic” has been around long enough to be generally understood; unfortunately, it is another semantic spook. The concept of “psyche” or “soul” was borrowed from the theologians, who, being bankrupt, are in no position to lend anything.

As a matter of fact we live in a world in which non-identity is as entirely general as gravitation, and so every identification is bound to be in some degree a mis-evaluation. In a four-dimentional world where 'every geometrical point has a date,' even an 'electron' at different dates is not identical with itself, because the sub-microscopic processes actually going on in this world cannot empirically be stopped but only transformed.

In Aristotle's system as applied, the split becomes complete and institutionalized, with jails for the 'animal' and churches for the 'soul'. Now we begin to realize how pernicious and retarding for civilization that split is. For instance, only since Einstein and Minkowski do we begin to understand that 'space' and 'time' cannot be split empirically, otherwise we create for ourselves delusional worlds. Only since their work has modern sub-microscopic physics with all its accomplishments become possible.

Another very serious mechanism of identification is found in language. A) Thus we have only one name, say 'apple' for the: (a)un-speakable, un-eatable event or scientific process; (b) the un-speakable but eatable abstraction of low order, the object; (c) the un-speakable and un-eatable 'mental' picture, or higher order abstraction, on semantic levels; (d) and for a definition on verbal levels.

Modern scientific definitions show that what we label 'objects' or 'objective' are mere nervous constructs inside our skulls which our nervous system has abstracted electro-colloidally from the actual world of electronic processes on the sub-microscopic level. And so we have to face a complete methodological departure from two-valued, 'objective' orientations to general, infinite-valued, process orientations, as necessitated by scientific discoveries for at least the past sixty years.

We start with the negative [non-Aristotelian] premise that words are not the un-speakable objective level, such as the actual objects outside of our skin and our personal feelings inside our skin. It follows that the only link between the objective and the verbal world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all 'knowledge' is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex pf relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order.

You can say too much without talking too much.

Denying Cross-linguistic Influence, Communicative Approaches seem to surmise that, as in L1 acquisition, L2 word-formation morphemes possessing Semantic Transparency and Productivity will be acquired early by pre intermediate L2 learners, and even may be the sole morpheme pre intermediate L2 learners acquire; which, as we shall demonstrate, is not necessarily the case for pre intermediate L2 learners. A second assumption we deduce from Communicative Approaches is that, as in L1 acquisition, L2 learners will show a similar sensitivity for L2 productive word-formation rules and patterns (e. g. noun-noun compounds, compounding in general etc.) with that of English children acquiring their L1; which, as we shall argue below, is not in all occasions true for pre intermediate L2 learners.

In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called “the mind.” (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone “has a good mind,” we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)

Thus, a genius is one who, by some internal process, breaks through to Circuit VII — a minor neurological miracle loosely called “intuition” — and comes back down to the third circuit with the capacity to paint a new semantic map, build a new model of experience. Needless to say, this is always a profound shock to those still trapped in the old robot-imprints, and is generally considered a threat to territory (ideological head space). The long list of martyrs to free enquiry, from Socrates onward, shows how mechanical this neophobia (fear of new semantic signals) is.