General Semantics

Philosophy created by Alfred Korzybski. His key book was Science And Sanity, which I have but will probably never read in full. (Here's the archive of an online reading group from 1996.)

See http://www.general-semantics.org/ and http://www.generalsemantics.org/

Some definitions are here: http://www.generalsemantics.org/Education/gsdef.htm

A handy iterative process for exploring your thoughts.

The Map Is Not The Territory.

I discovered GS via Robert Anton Wilson.

The basis for the language EPrime.

Words And What They Do To You, an online book - "Beginning Lessons in General Semantics for Junior and Senior High School" (Educating Kids)

A Notion of Concept

Some consider it a Religious Cult.

A forerunner of NLP. Inspiration of REBT.

There seems to be some connections between GS and the Scientologist crowd. The GS crowd denies this.

• A E Van Vogt's World Of Null A books (which I enjoyed) are considered to be good examples of GS thinking, but he was involved in scientology.

• others consider scientology to be a bastardized version of GS (like a laser being turned into a weapon instead of a surgical instrument):

  • see Alex Burns quote Although his cavalier lifestyle and counterculture status has overshadowed his multimedia experiments, William S Burroughs studied with Alfred Korzybski (who formulated General Semantics and EPrime), and was a fierce critic of Scientology's psycho-linguistic games. Burroughs' interest in epigenetic (brain) and cultural (Memetic) Evolution as the basis of contemporary Advertising techniques anticipated Howard Bloom's research that the Co-Evolution of language and brain contains Viral elements.

  • also see Eric Raymond in 2002-04-30-c

(comment from reader)

GS & Scientology --2003/09/06 05:56 GMT
First, the GS crowd is not a person and has no single official voice. I personally reserve judgement on the question of Scientology borrowing from GS. Second, the page you link to argues that the evidence shows no significant links between GS and Scientology, not that we can't find "some connections between GS and the Scientologist crowd". (See Ravenhurst's Law. If that page confuses you, see http://www.bluecowpress.com/students/jesusc/omark/ ) At first, I thought some of the Hubbard quotes on that GS page resembled Korzybski. Then I saw the quote that said, "Mr. X looks at a horse knows it's a house knows it's a schoolteacher," and that made it all look like an uninformed parody of Korzybski. But I suppose the webpage's creator(s) could have ignored other Hubbard quotes that would hurt the argument. (I just don't care enough to voluntarily read Hubbard!)