General semantics
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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General semantics is a self improvement and therapy program begun in the 1920s that seeks to regulate human mental habits and behaviors. After partial launches under the names human engineering and humanology, Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) fully launched the program as general semantics in 1933 with the publication of Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.
In Science and Sanity, general semantics is presented as both a theoretical and a practical system whose adoption can reliably alter human behavior in the direction of greater sanity. In the 1947 preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity, Korzybski wrote: "We need not blind ourselves with the old dogma that 'human nature cannot be changed', for we find that it can be changed." However, in the opinion of a majority of psychiatrists, the tenets and practices of general semantics are not an effective way of treating patients with psychological or mental illnesses. While Korzybski considered his program to be empirically based and to strictly follow the scientific method, general semantics has been described by some as veering into the domain of pseudoscience.
Starting around 1940, university English professor S. I. Hayakawa (1906–1992), speech professor Wendell Johnson, speech professor Irving J. Lee, and others assembled elements of general semantics into a package suitable for incorporation into mainstream communications curricula. The Institute of General Semantics, which Korzybski and co-workers founded in 1938, continues today. General semantics as a movement has waned considerably since the 1950sTemplate:Citation needed, although many of its ideas live on in other movements, such as rational emotive behavior therapy.
See also
- Related fields
- Cognitive science
- Cognitive therapy
- E-Prime
- Gestalt Therapy
- Language and thought
- Linguistic relativity
- Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
- Related subjects
- Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture
- Harold Innis's communications theories
- Map–territory relation
- Maybe Logic
- Neuro-linguistic programming
- Non-Aristotelian logic - Use in science fiction
- Propaganda
- Related persons
- Gregory Bateson
- Sanford I. Berman
- Elwood Murray
- Allen Walker Read
- William Vogt
- Robert Anton Wilson
- Wilhelm Reich
- Ida P. Rolf
- Albert Ellis
- Related books
- Levels of Knowing and Existence: Studies in General Semantics, by Harry L. Weinberg.
- Assignment in Eternity, (science fiction) by Robert A. Heinlein magnifies Korzybski in the supermen of the "Gulf" novella.