Weblet.environnement.org/client/_DVLPT_lettre_forme.asp?ID=455&Mode=dispatch&USER_ID=109. Imagine that you are in a foreign country, searching for the right directions.
You have a road map providing you with indications, but you get lost all the same. As you are asking your way to somebody, you realize that your so precious map does not show your final destination… it is obsolete ! Our language looks like maps we use for describing and understanding the world as guides. General Semantics teaches us how to review our mental maps so that they are closer to the environment we evolve in, and thus avoid their being obsolete. The language we use impacts on the way we process information and vice versa, the information we process modifies (or should modify) the way we represent it. Well…most often, we are tempted by the comfort that our already-made maps provide us with… and we are surprised, not to say powerless, when events, facts, etc. do not come up with vision and our expectations. The New York Society for General Semantics. Dave's Home Page. GeneralSemantics.
Milton Dawes » General Semantics Advanced Thinking » A System-Discipline Concerned with the Sanity of the Race & the Individual. ThisIsNotThat.com: Differences that make a difference. Korzybski Files. General Semantics Home Page of Steven Lewis. Off the Map: Notes from the Territory. I admit: I’ve had considerable difficulty embracing general semantics as what some call “a system.”
The difficulty stems from not being able to point at a system to know what the word “system” represents. However, I was watching the documentary Pina last night and it got me thinking about what a system might actually constitute. In the documentary about acclaimed dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, you have in Pina someone with a distinctive view of movement and dance and what it should accomplish. And you have in Pina a leader whom others adored and followed. The leader-follower aspect of the Pina dynamic is not the interesting point but the supplemental point: That she had followers implies to a particular degree that she had an appreciable perspective.
What makes up a perspective? If I look at you and say, “You are a woman,” I have thus framed you as “a woman.” Now, I’m not a huge fan of the word “frame” but that hopefully got you to understand my point. Leave a Comment (1 So Far) The Institute of General Semantics. ESGS General Semantics page. Alfred Korzybski. Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics.
He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory". Early life and career[edit] Korzybski was educated at the Warsaw University of Technology in engineering. During the First World War Korzybski served as an intelligence officer in the Russian Army. His first book, Manhood of Humanity, was published in 1921. General semantics[edit] He sought to train our awareness of abstracting, using techniques he had derived from his study of mathematics and science.