General Semantics

Less than a cult, more than a theory of linguistics. See [http://www.general-semantics.org/].

The use of EprimeLanguage is a GS practice.

Reminiscent of Freud: start out a student of some interesting questions, end up an intolerant proponent of a set of interesting answers, with a cult following.

I have a sample copy of the InstituteOfGeneralSemantics? journal: "Etc." Odd stuff, full of profundity and bathos.

--KeithBraithwaite

For a critical review of General Semantics (that is, Korzybski's Semantics), see the last section of Language and Philosophy by Max Black. --DavidPorter

I would say it's more like philosophy mixed with psychology. Group therapy emerged from GeneralSemantics to help veterans of WorldWar2 overcome their "ShellShock?"/post-traumatic stress disorders. -- KeithRay

Did it?

VanVogt? was big into GeneralSemantics, and did a patently awful job of explaining it in his ScienceFiction. --DanielKnapp (signed for culpability)

I lived for some years with a student of Count AlfredKorzybski?, and was treated to a number of AK anecdotes from a first-hand witness. It was instructive to have the insights of someone who was there.

One thing AK was very careful of was observation. He would stage demonstrations that "invited" the audience to draw wrong conclusions from what they thought they saw. He was also the proponent of "TheMapIsNotTheTerritory" as a regulator for drawing conclusions from representations as opposed to direct observation.

He stressed critical thinking and precision of expression.

An interesting aspect of the man was his singularity of focus as exemplified by his typing of the papers for his central thesis. He had never learned to touch-type, so he typed the whole thing hunt-and-peck. When the tips of his forefingers split and bled, he bandaged them and carried on. He didn't want to distract himself with the process of learning to type.

If you disagreed with him, your defense of any counter-thesis needed to be rigorous. Anything less was sloppy work.

He didn't have all the answers, but his discipline was intended to disambiguate the expressions of those answers when they came.

(As it happens, my understanding of "map is not territory" was sort of academic for years -- one of those partly grasped things that you assume you know -- until one particular software project brought it home to me.)

-- GarryHamilton