General semantics is a program begun in the 1920’s that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain.
General semantics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
General semantics is a program begun in the 1920’s that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain.
After partial program launches under the trial names “human engineering” and “humanology,”[1] Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski[2] (1879–1950) fully launched the program as “general semantics” when he self-published in 1933 his 800-page Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.
General semantics is not generalized semantics. Misunderstandings traceable to the program’s name have greatly complicated the program’s history and development.[3]
The sourcebook for general semantics, Science and Sanity presents general semantics as both a theoretical and a practical system whose adoption can reliably alter human behavior in the direction of greater sanity. Its author asserted that general semantics training could eventually unify people and nations. 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.” [4]
Most recognized specialists in the knowledge areas where Korzybski claimed to have anchored general semantics—biology, epistemology, mathematics, neurology, physics, psychiatry, etc.—have ignored general semantics or discarded it as trivial or confused.
Starting around 1940, university English professor S.I. Hayakawa (1906–1992) 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, [5] continues today.