1.r gs intro

Radical ‘General Semantics’ (GS)

‘General Semantics’

Confusion of GS (‘general semantics’) with ‘semantics’—the branch of linguistics and logic that studies word ‘meanings’.

. . .I introduced the term General Semantics to indicate a

general theory of values, a general theory of evaluation of facts, relations, ‘feelings’, etc.,

not of meanings by mere verbal definition. It must be emphasized that the term evaluation involves both ‘emotions’ and ‘intellect’, and so automatically does not split the personality into verbalistic

fictions of separate ‘emotions’ and ‘intellect’. In General Semantics we are interested in actual evaluational reactions, and not only

w h a t we say about them.

‘Thinking’

‘Feeling’

‘Thinking’ — ‘Feeling’

‘Feeling’ — ‘Thinking’

Evaluating..

an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment response to

words, symbols, and other events

Evaluation (s.r) implies an

evaluator...

...and is not verbal.

J. Samuel Bois, “Semantic Transactor” diagram, The Art of Awareness, Fourth Edition, p. 32

Lemon

Korzybski used this evaluational framework (thinking in terms of holistic human evaluation) to study the questions:

* What do we know about how we know what we ‘think’ we know?

*Can understanding this process better give us practical methods to improve our evaluating in science and daily life?

how we know ...what we think we know?

What do we know about ...

‘philosophy’ vs. ‘science’

Neural Correlates of Consciousness by Mormann & Koch, http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness

Up-to-date, Applied

Epistemology