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From: rfvetter@ridgecrest.ca.us (Ronald F. Vetter)
Subject: Re: Do any scholars take GS/Korzybski seriously? Sapir-Whorf = bogus?
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Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 15:59:35 GMT
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In article <pjvm.141.000ABF68@euronet.nl>, pjvm@euronet.nl
(Pieter_J._van_Megchelen) wrote:

> In article <4ehnl8$2br@medici.trl.OZ.AU> jbm@newsserver.trl.oz.au
(Jacques Guy) writes:
> 
> >I read Korzybski's book "General Semantics" a looong time ago, when
> >I was doing my PhD in linguistics, just out of curiosity, because
> >I had read mentions of it years earlier in the now defunct
snip
> Well... Yes, that's the bottom line of it, and yes Count Korzybski wasn't the 
> guy who put it all as concise as we would want it nowadays, but in his
days he 
> _was_ kind of a revolutionary. Mind that he wrote his stuff in the thirties 
> and forties, when there was not such an interest in Taoism and all that jazz. 
> I remember he also was quite opposed to Aristotelian logic and tried to 
> incorporate non-Newtonian physics and non-Euclidian mathematics into the
world 
> view of the 'learned' community.
> So maybe for a 1990's reader there is not so much 'new' about his theories, 
> but that only means that his way of thinking has influenced our culture 
> already 'beyond repair' (luckily). On the other hand, there are zillions of 
> people still confusing 'the map with the territory' - try to have a rational 
> discussion with a fundamentalist christian, muslim or other monomaniacal 
> theist. Or try to explain to people why there are more ways to look at their 
> particular world view, whatever it may be. Most of the time, people get
angry, 
> confused, etc. Korzybski did have something to say about avoiding conflicts 
> like those, by using very precise language.
> 
> He also introduced a  model of the human brain as the 
> basis of communication, with (if I remember well) emphasis on the interaction 
> between the cortex and the limbic system. With a lot of 'updates' this basic 
> pattern could still be useful in understanding human behaviour and human 
> communication.
> 
> So I think there are reasons to take GS and Korzybski seriously. But then, I 
> am not a scholar. 
> 
> Pi.

Perhaps I feel compelled to argue that you mustbe somewhat of a scholar to
have read, understood, and retained - use - some of what Korzybski wrote
in Science and Sanity.  

I recommend the book be read to the middle of the many pages.  This must
be done in the sense of understanding what the author was trying to
elucidate about the process of abstracting.  The observation in physics is
doable without interference with the observed reality until the measuring
is attempted with energy level or size being significant in the quanta
size.

The discipline of reading to understand is excellent learning.  The
abstracting is the cognitive thinking.  It becomes very difficult to
determine how we think cognitively - when we must use symbols (abstracts
of some preciseness) to do the thinking, the mesuring, and the
explanation.
ron    in Ridgecrest, CA
http://www1.ridgecrest.ca.us/~rfvetter/
