The father of general semantics, Alford Korzybski stated, "A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness". What this means is that our perception of reality is not reality itself but our own version of it, or our "map".

This position was met with some opposition, as Erwin A. Esper (1968) notes, "Oertel (1901, p. 59) commented on 'the ill-advised and misleading metaphors in which linguistic writers indulged, borrowing their terms from the dissecting-room and the physiological and biological laboratories,' and referred to denunciations of the biological analogy by Gaston Paris, Osthoff and Brugmann, Wundt, and V. Henry" (Esper 1968:99). The concern that borrowing methodology from a relatively unrelated discipline could mislead linguistics should the analogy be taken too seriously was a very real one. Schleicher referred to "linguistic organisms", and concepts from Darwinian evolution were judiciously applied to language in attempting a historical-comparative approach to language study (Esper 1968:97). However, because these decades marked the general emergence of modern linguistic methodology, it set up an ideal for objective analysis which was felt to be necessary for the separation and defining of a linguistic science.

Some of this does look kind of New Age-y. The Neuro-Linguistic Programming pages look like classic self-help with a cyber twist. Korzybski and General Semantics I had heard of through reading about the science fiction writer A E Van Vogt, who was also into an early form of (pre-Scientology) Dianetics. I really don't know how much crossover there is with this work and the academic semiotics we know and love (Derrida, etc).
- tom moody 8-10-2005 4:56 am [add a comment]

I took a General Semantics course in college, precisely because I didn’t know the difference between it and semiotics. It was miles away from the language science that was then taking over academia, not to mention Artforum, and I considered the class a mistake. I gained some respect for GS years later when I learned that Robert Anton Wilson was a fan. I haven’t even read that much RAW, but he’s a pretty interesting character. Some of us saw him talk at a GS sponsored dinner at the Harvard Club or some such august place a few years back (we couldn’t actually go to the dinner; we just waited around till after to hear him talk, sort of like standing-room tickets…) Anyway, I can’t claim to have actually gotten very far with GS. Interesting you found a Dianetics connection; GS is not really a cult (let alone a self-proclaimed “religion”) but it is a “brand” in a way that “semiotics” is not, and GS is trying to wake you up in the way that a religious conversion would. The class I had came on with all sorts of very basic methods of proving that language and reality are not exactly the same thing (duh,) like the teacher going around the room asking each person if they could come up with a sentence that would always be true, which he would then shoot down. On a more sophisticated level, RAW was into E-Prime, an approach to the English language that came out of GS which disallows the use of any form of the verb “to be” (being being too much of an assertion for us to make, so to speak.) RAW said he could write E-Prime, but it was damned hard to speak it. And you probably wouldn’t want to listen anyway. I certainly didn’t when I was in school; it all seemed rather flat-footed and obvious to me. Clearly GS is deeper than I realized, but it wasn’t sexy the way the nexus of semiotics, formalism, structuralism and post structuralism was in those days. The names could get confusing, and I couldn’t always sort out the interrelationships between the disciplines, but as I studied the stuff that gave me the most help understanding art, language, the mystery of being, what have you, General Semantics did not come up very often.
- alex 8-12-2005 4:52 am [add a comment]

thanks alex - i decided to get back to basics and ordered a used copy of the oxford university press encyclopedia of semiotics from amazon for 24 bucks plus 3 bucks postage. should ship by 8/17 - more in 17 to 90 days depending on the usps.


- bill 8-13-2005 10:34 pm [add a comment]

Good essay, Alex, thanks. It makes sense that Van Vogt would be drawn to GS because he had a highly systematic approach to writing. Several of his stories had "null-A" in the title--that was supposed to stand for non-Aristotelian and was related somehow to GS. He mainly used it for mystification, though, I think--he ultimately couldn't abandon logic to tell stories about an illogical, paradigm-shaking frame of reference, at least intentionally.
- tom moody 8-13-2005 11:00 pm [add a comment]