Talk:General semantics

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[edit] Criticisms?

Unlike most articles on Philosophy and Semantics, this one neither cites common objections nor provides links to off-site argumentations. I haven't been able to find any reliable sources, probably due to the relationship with scientology and Ron L. Hubbard, so, does any know or could provide some of those? --TheOtherStephan 00:33, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, that seems like a reasonable request. But I don't know if I could fairly describe the opposing views. The article contains a link to "Contra Max Black", a response by GS writer Bruce Kodish to the one scholarly critique of GS that I've managed to find. Kodish's account of that critique seems accurate and fair to me, but you may want to see if you can locate Black's original essay yourself. I found the book (Max Black's Language and Philosophy) through inter-library loan. Kodish also addresses some of Gardner's criticisms, but the warning about hearsay may apply more strongly here. Sadly, in order to give a fair account of Gardner's best argument I would have to put words in his mouth, because IIRC he did not even attempt to put that argument in strict logical form. Dan 08:08, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
I'll give you an example of the problem. Gardner (I think) wrote that even if we use many-valued logic in some cases, we would have to use 2-valued logic when evaluating math. Since many-valued logics count as math, 'we would actually be using 2-valued logic on a deeper level'. Gardner sees this as a refutation of Korzybski's (perceived) attack on traditional logic. Now, since Korzybski described two-valued logic as a special case of the many-valued version (namely, a case where we can safely ignore the other values) and since he urged the use of two-valued logic in certain cases, Gardner seems to refute a strawman. This illustrates a general problem: while general semantics may well suffer from flaws, none of its famous critics seem to grasp it well enough to find those flaws! (Addendum: Lotfi Zadeh...showed that fuzzy logic was a generalisation of classical logic.) Dan 08:42, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I moved some criticism here from another article. I also added the one anti-gs argument, in my judgement, that doesn't beg the question or confuse the issue. We can't settle the question of empirical evidence with words. You'd have to decide for yourself if the evidence justifies using any given practice from general semantics. Dan 23:59, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I changed "His E-Prime response to them was: 'I said what I said. I did not say what I did not say,' to "His response to them was: 'I said what I said. I did not say what I did not say.'" The former might imply that Korzybski consciously used E-Prime to make that statement, when actually E-Prime did not exist then (it was formulated some years after Korzybski's death by David Bourland). -JDF, 19 January 2007.

[edit] Old talk

The article says: "One of the few other prescriptions that can be found in the book is to end every sentence with two periods, the extra one to remind one that things were left out." Now, I may have forgotten large chunks of the book, but I know it didn't end every sentence with two periods. What did the author actually say about this? I seem to recall he wrote a comma and period at the end of lists, as a way of writing "etc.", like so: ",." I suspect he recommended thinking "etc." whenever one sees a period. But if he literally wanted people to use double periods constantly, seems like he would have led by example, as he did with other abbreviations and neologisms.

I see someone has changed this, but I still don't see a page number. Nor a direct quote. 172.131.184.81 17:08, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
JDF: On page 16, Korzybski listed the punctuation that he would use throughout the book for abbreviating et cetera, e.g., he would write ".," for "etc.,"; he would write ",." for ",etc."; and so on. He never recommended ending every sentence with et cetera, abbreviated or not, or with double periods. He simply indicated that every sentence could theoretically have an 'et cetera' at the end because there is always more that can be said about anything.


[edit] The role of magic in popular culture

The article says: "One novel idea from General Semantics concerns the role of magic in popular culture, especially notable in the use of such incantations as political and advertising slogans."

What exactly is "the role of magic in popular culture" supposed to mean here? Can somebody who understands this please clarify?

That struck me as a little odd, too, and a little like something Theodor Adorno might say, though as far as I know he didn't have much if anything to do with general semantics. Certainly without explanation it probably shouldn't be in the article, which suggests to me that maybe I should take it out until someone wants to expand it. --Seth Mahoney 18:07, Jun 30, 2004 (UTC)

Moved from main page by Seth Mahoney until expanded to clear up just what exactly is meant:

One novel idea from General Semantics concerns the role of magic in popular culture, especially notable in the use of such incantations as political and advertising slogans.

JDF: There is no "idea from general semantics" concerning "the role of magic in popular culture." Korzybski simply said that a scientific study of magic with its "methods of psycho-logical deception" is "most revealing, as it shows the mechanisms by which we are continually and unknowingly being deceived in science and daily life." He said,"These general, and so common, psycho-logical mechanisms [resulting in deceptions, especially self-deceptions] are very deep, and to a large extent are connected with the aristotelian type of intensional, subject-predicate orientations, which ultimately may become harmful."


[edit] Cleanup request

This article has unusual capitalizations in headers and some unnecessarily complicated writing (e.g., first bullet in other aspects...).

I am also dubious about the overall positive evaluation of General Semantics. Seems to me to be a discredited theory, but I will defer this opinion to other neutral commentators.

I did remove "philosophical logic" from the categories, since this topic has nothing at all to do with that category. I added "pseudoscience", due to the discussion in Gardner's book, but if others think that category is unfair, I'll accept it. Nonetheless, this sure as heck shouldn't be in philosophical logic (and on that point I am very confident). --Phiwum 18:07, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Phiwum, you were right to remove "philosophical logic", but wrong to add "pseudoscience". Even Homer nods, and in this instance Martin Gardner was simply wrong. It is difficult to blame him; like many others, he appears to have been taken in by L. Ron Hubbard's attempt to co-opt GS for Dianetics into believing the former is just as bogus as the latter. It isn't. Sorry, I've mislaid my login, but this is Eric Steven Raymond (yes, "ESR", and a GS student for more than thirty years) writing. I'm going to go remove the pseudoscience tag now.
I will defer to your opinion, Eric. Although I found Gardner's description a pretty plausible argument for the "pseudoscience" tag, I admit that I don't know anything about General Semantics aside from that description and Wikipedia. Phiwum 15:43, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
But this entry is still in the category of "human communication", which it shares with smoke signals, cheering, human-computer interaction and (inexplicably) "charisma". Surely, whatever the heck GS is, it is not a form of human communication. (Neither is neuro-linguistic programming, of course.)
It is also doubtful that GS counts as a study of human communication. It's closer to psychology than linguistics. Shouldn't we remove that category, too? --Phiwum 18:52, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
ESR again...Hmmm...I'm kind of on the fence about the "Human Communications" category. There is, actually, a significant tie to linguistics, especially psycholinguistics. On the other hand, this category sounds vague enough not to be very useful. I won't remove it myself, but I won't object if someone else does.


[edit] Response to Cleanup request

As I wrote a lot of the current entry, I would like to work with you to change the article to meet valid objections where possible or appropriate. I made some changes to the "Other aspects of the system" section, and other changes elsewhere, and would like your response. --JDF Oct 6, 2005.

The main changes I requested seem to have been made. I'll remove the tag. Thanks. --Phiwum 07:23, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
OK, thanks. --JDF Oct 8, 2005.


[edit] Self-reflexive?

Would someone be willing to add some text to the entry, describing what is meant by "self-reflexive" in axiom 3? I know it means "reflecting the self," but I'm having difficulty figuring out what that means in context. --Jay (Histrion) 18:17, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I think that explaining 'self-reflexive' might take up too much space and perhaps clutter the entry, as it might involve a long explanation to do it properly. It involves Josiah Royce's discovery that an ideal map would include a map of the map. In terms of reactions, one can react to something that happens, e.g., become angry, and then react to one's reaction (perhaps becoming even more angry). The latter reaction would be self-reflexive, no longer reacting to the actual situation, but reacting to one's reaction. Self-reflection occurs constantly in language, as we can make a statement, and then make a statement about the statement, and so on. Also, on higher orders of abstraction, we can doubt our doubt, or believe in belief, etc. Fear of fear is second-order fear. Self-reflexiveness in logic and other places can lead to paradoxes, and so on. Politics, war, etc., just about anything you can imagine may have self-reflexiveness as a component. Most people are totally oblivious to self-reflexiveness, confusing it with other relations that are different, e.g., in the example of the angry person, not knowing that he or she is no longer reacting to the situation, but reacting angrily to the anger reaction. I've described this mostly in negative terms, but self-reflection is a fact of life and has many positive elements as well. There are many examples in the physical universe, bilological functions, and so on. As a GS formulation, it's neutral in value, like a variable that can represent many things, depending on the context. The important thing is to be aware of it. --JDF, 31 October 2005
JDF, I think the fact that "self-reflexive" is left dangling in this entry is a symptom of a larger problem. Namely, your opening summary is trying to do too much. I may take a crack at trying to write a better one. ESR, 2 December 2005.
OK, I ended up revising this entry pretty massively. What's there wasn't wrong, but it was poorly written and indifferently organized. I think I've fixed that. --ESSR, 2 December 2005.

Just a note: "Self-reflexive" and "self-reflection" aren't interchangeable. The former is a property, the latter is an action. Namely, the former is a property of maps-in-a-particular-territory that depict themselves. The latter is an action someone does when he looks back at something. Language, or maybe more specifically linguistics, is called "self-reflexive"--you can have language2 about language1. If I have a reaction2 to a reaction1 I had, reactions can be called "self-reflexive" as I can have a reaction2 about a reaction1. That second reaction may be said to come by means of *the act of* "self-reflection"--from looking back at a reaction I had had before (where one's reaction1 is considered one's "self"). But that's distinctly different from "self-reflexive." A great example as I see it of self-reflexiveness is "this phrase," where the phrase is pointing to itself. Self-reflection is more something-you-do, a behavior. - BH, 11/22/2006

[edit] Move to lowercase

Any reason why this is at General Semantics instead of general semantics? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 17:56, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Because it is a movement and not a field or discipline? --maru (talk) contribs 17:48, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
Would you capitalize "antinomianism" in the middle of a sentence? What about "conceptualism"? (See article.) --Dan 23:55, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Depends on the context. --maru (talk) contribs 03:09, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Considering that a simple Google search shows that outside wikimirrors lower case is the preffered usage, I'll move this article soon unless there are any objections.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 02:43, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

They mean different things. "General Semantics" is meant as a simple (inseparable) grammatical unit and refers to a very specific thing, namely a particular intellectual movement. Its meaning is not derived from consideration of the two constituent words; these are arbitrary. Had its founders called it "Gungly Frobozz" it would be used in the same sense, so long as they were consistent. Whereas "general semantics" is two separate words appearing together. The reader interprets it as a noun qualified by an adjective; it refers to semantics having the property of generality, whatever that means to the reader. We use capitals to disambiguate, to tell the reader this is to be parsed as one single unit with a fixed meaning rather than to make of its constituents what you will... hence General Motors, the Declaration of Independence and the Beat Generation are marked as context-independent terms, rather than "motors considered generally, an instance in which someone declared their independence, and a generation that was beat". To summarize: "General Semantics" and "general semantics" have different meanings.

To answer a point made above, antinomianism and conceptualism are difficult (impossible?) to parse in any other sense than their (narrow) technical meaning - "ism" implies a movement, and so you are forced to look for its historical definition rather than try an interpretation. The term Pre-Raphaelite is capitalised for this very reason (they came hundreds of years AFTER Raphael!)

Sounds pedantic, I know, but in this case there is quite a practical use: someone unfamiliar with the technical meaning (i.e. most people looking up a definition here) will try to make sense of the phrase in terms of its constituent words, and will get themselves in a horrible mess. GS is not a subfield of semantics, and we capitalize to drop the reader a clue ("there's a more specific meaning to this term, so stay alert..."). Moving to lower-case would be a cruel and unusual punishment. I believe there are international treaties against this.

[edit] Misstatement - anon's 'plaint

"Popular acceptance has likewise been very limited. As of 2005, the reputation of General Semantics has yet to recover from the damage Martin Gardner and L. Ron Hubbard did to it. Matters have not been helped by the fact that most General Semantics advocates, like Korzybski himself, have never learned how to write both precisely and clearly. Thus, the value in General Semantics tends to be obscured beneath clouds of jargon-filled pedantry."

(Comment: This statement is highly debatable. With the exception of Korzybski -- for whom English was not his first language -- the major popularizers of General Semantics -- e.g. Stuart Chase, S.I. Hayakawa, Irving Lee, Wendell Johnson, Anatol Rapoport, Neil Postman, Edward MacNeal -- are all clear and straightforward writers. Indeed, it is part of the intrinsic discipline of General Semantics that they should strive to be clear and straightforward; again, Korzybski is the exception, as even his admirers admit (see Neil Postman's essay on Korzybski in his collection Conscientious Objections (1988) and Rapoport's view of the history of General Semantics in his autobiography Certainties and Doubts (2000)) -- although Korzybski also can be reasonably clear for a few pages at a time in Science and Sanity.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.82.188.68 (talk • contribs)

I'm the author of the above comment. (Posting from public terminals at the University of British Columbia, hence the different addresses.) I'd also add that I have read (or browsed) my way through a complete UBC library collection of ETC. (the quarterly journal of General Semantics founded by Hayakawa) from 1943 on and it had good articles in every issue from 1943 up to about 1992 (Neil Postman was editor from 1976 to 1986) or so, when I noticed a big fall-off in quality. (Did all the old, good guys die off?) I think a critic would justifiably have a markedly different opinion of the quality of General Semantics writing based on the last fifteen years of ETC. (e.g. fetishizing of EPRIME) rather than (roughly) the first fifty years. If I was going to introduce someone to General Semantics I'd hand them a copy of Neil Postman's Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk (1976) which, to my mind, is -- as all of Postman's writing is -- as clear and straightforward as writing gets. 142.103.168.16 05:54, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I think we want to edit the paragraph that you responded to. The comment you added to the article makes a good point, but does not fit the format of Wikipedia (or indeed any encyclopedia). We could either delete the debatable statement on the grounds that nobody's supplied a source for its claim, or modify that paragraph to describe the dispute from a neutral point of view. Incidentally, can you give an example of "fetishizing of E-Prime" from that magazine? I don't know it as well as you do. Dan 22:37, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

E-Prime was an enthusiasm of D. David Bourland, Jr. (I think now deceased), which is English without any form of the verb to be. (See "To be or not to be: E-Prime as a tool for critical thinking" by D. David Bourland in the December 2004 issue of ETC: A Review of General Semantics -- this article is a reprint from an earlier ETC.) I say "fetishizing" -- perhaps unfairly -- because in his articles on E-Prime Bourland seemed to hold the idea that with a few constraints on common English usage one could avoid the major map/territory pitfalls identified by General Semantics, which to my mind is a symptom of the very disease it purports to cure.

Korzybski *did* have elements of the crackpot and authoritarian cult leader (see Anatol Rapoport's autobiography) in his work and personality and this casts a certain shadow, but in my considered opinion it is not the lack of good writing on General Semantics post-Korzybski that has hindered its acceptance; rather (following Postman) it cuts too deep in many sensitive areas relating to the social construction of social reality. E.g. see the Postman quote (which I entered) relating to the Rosenhan experiment. 142.103.168.16 06:32, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

I removed those last two sentences. Let's give them citations and counterarguments if someone wants to include them in the article. Dan 23:57, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Asimov

Ok guys, what about Asimov's books ? They are quite funny and quite related to this. Shall I ? --DLL 21:29, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Go ahead. I can't think what you mean at the moment. Dan 08:13, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
Oops, t'was Van Vogt. Nevermind. --DLL 20:50, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] time-binding

Why does the article give "time-binding" as an alternative name? Someone may use it that way, but it originally had a more general meaning. Dan 00:21, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

I think I added it some time ago due to a redirect, but it may be confusing considering that time bind is a sociological concept introduced by Arlie Russell Hochschild. We could use an article on that subject, and perhaps disambig at time binding?--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 02:39, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Yes, that sounds good. You seem to know more about it than I do. Dan 19:28, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
Done.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 01:09, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
It seems we misunderstood each other. While someone, somewhere might use "time-binding" to mean general-semantics, Korzybski used it to mean something much more general. The article itself explains this fairly well. I will therefore change the first sentence of the article. Dan 04:46, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Addition of Chomsky's criticism

I don't like to just delete someone's addition -- I get enraged when someone does this to me -- but I think these Chomsky quotes are completely off the point and don't have any substantive content either. It is a pure argument from authority -- "some big name doesn't like Korzybski." ("I wrote an undergrad paper sixty years ago."!!) Note that Chomsky's professional expertise is in syntactic transformations which is not what general semantics is about at all. What do others think? 142.103.168.24 04:44, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I see content that seems false, unless someone knows where Korzybski endorsed E-Prime. I also see a sentence I don't follow at all, about "being swayed by someone's opinion", so in theory he could have a substantive argument there. If so, I wish someone would spell it out. On the face of it, he seems to ignore a claim from general semantics that I consider demonstrably true, namely that we can change our thinking by changing our speech. (This of course does not prove Korzybski's specific claims about the benefits of certain specific changes.) Dan 04:54, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
Yes, agreed. I should have said either does not have substantive content or when substantive, is false. To my mind, if someone wants to create a separate Criticisms of General Semantics page (as they have with Criticisms of Noam Chomsky) then they can pile on all the criticism there, but I'm loathe to let them do it on the General Semantics page itself because it gives the naive reader the deeply false idea that there is no wisdom to be gained from this subject. The real issue in criticism here, to my mind, is this: 1) Korzybski should be given the appropriate historical credit for focussing attention on important epistemological issues and inspiring others (some, like Anatol Rapoport, more scientifically competent than Korzybski himself) to examine the same issues, but 2) Yes, he was a bit of a crackpot/authoritarian cult leader and 3) I wouldn't recommend Science and Sanity as the first book (or even the fifth!) to a GS newcomer. 142.103.168.16 06:31, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Apparently someone with an AOL ip address has added this and even less relevant-looking statements to various articles. Part of it attacks behaviorism, which Korzybski also criticized for different reasons. Part of it invokes unnamed critics to accuse Korzybski of a "disguised aristotelian approach". Now, maybe someone, somewhere has foolishly published this argument. I know some people confuse "non-Aristotelian" with "anti" Aristotelian (as if Einstein attacked everything Newton wrote when he gave us the start of non-Newtonian physics). But unless someone supplies a citation, this goes. I don't know what to do about the earlier Chomsky edits. Enough people know of him that I'd want to include his arguments, but they seem to give Korzybski and Bourland views which those people did not in fact hold. Dan 02:11, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Anonymous poster using an oft-banned address, why did you revert the passage I deleted? On the face of it, the quote seems to refer to behaviorism. You don't explain just what behaviorist doctrine Chomsky discredited, or how he did so, or whether anyone disputes this, or how the doctrine in question relates to general semantics. (Or NLP, for that matter.) On the face of it, the passage seems vague, question-begging and irrelevant. If you want it to stay, either spell out what it logically implies about general semantics, or cite Chomsky saying that it relates to GS and NLP. And whichever course you take, I'd appreciate it if you would either spell out what the passage actually means or link to some source explaining this. Dan 17:43, 3 May 2006 (UTC) (On a sidenote, maru, why did you edit direct quotes?)

As my recent edits suggest, I've just gone through an online version of Science and Sanity. My browser reported no instance of the phrase any proposition containing the word "is" in any part of the book. Indeed, if that quote came from Korzybski, I'd expect Bourland and other promoters of E-Prime to mention it frequently. Google says they do not. Dan 20:36, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Someone supplied a link to wikiquote. Astonishingly, that Wikiquote page does not contain a single sourced quote from Korzybski! It labels all the quotes "Attributed", and gives no references. In many cases we could supply references (maybe when I have time), but as I said, I couldn't find the disputed quote anywhere despite searching an online version of Science and Sanity. Nor does the literal reading of the quote seem compatible with the verifiable, expressed views of Korzybski, Bourland and pretty much every other proponent of general semantics. I will thus remove it, along with Chomsky's alleged response to this seeming strawman. Please do not add the disputed Korzybski quote again without a verifiable citation. Dan 16:35, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I want to register my continued protest against the Chomsky quotes. In his linguistic work Chomsky has never had much (if anything) to say about the whole language-as-a-map-of-reality issue that is at the core of general semantics. In fact, on many occasions (e.g. his interviews with David Barsamian) Chomsky has explicitly disavowed that his technical knowledge in linguistics is of any relevance in his analysis of political propaganda -- as opposed, for example, to George Lakoff who does use his knowledge of metaphorical thinking to analyze the metaphors behind the rhetoric of political propaganda -- as Lakoff did quite brilliantly in his net-circulated essay "Metaphor and War" before Gulf War I. I'd delete the Chomsky quotes on the best Chomskyan principles -- that they are an ignorant appeal to authority. 137.82.188.68 06:05, 5 May 2006 (UTC)


I have remove the following section about Chomsky since I can find no evidence that he said it.

Noam Chomsky, an expert in linguistics, has said that "little can be resurrected" from Korzybski's work because it was "based on serious confusion":
"We don't need Korzybski to tell us that [what people say alters our perception]. And it's not 'confusion of [linguistic] representation with reality,' rather, being swayed by someones opinion, which is often quite reasonable."
Chomsky also said:
"Sometimes what we say can be misleading, sometimes not, depending on whether we are careful. If there's anything else [in Korzybski's work], I don't see it. That was the conclusion of my undergrad papers 60 years ago. Reading Korzybski extensively, I couldn't find anything that was not either trivial or false. As for neurolinguistic effects on the brain, nothing was known when he wrote and very little of that is relevant now."
Chomsky, an anarchist maintains that the greatest distorters of our perception are concentrations of power,(e.g. states, corporations) because they have the means to propagate their point of view and influence our perception of reality, much more than use of the verb "to be" or other elements Korzybski pointed to.

--AlmostC 18:05, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Weasel words"

I don't remember if Gardner made that criticism explicitly. Frankly, I don't know if he understood GS well enough to see the importance of the criticism. But he accuses Korzybski of "confused ideas, unconscious metaphysics, and highly dubious speculations", while calling GS a cult, all in his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I think that strongly implies the charge of unscientific behavior. (The first section of this talk page gives my reasons for including it.) The other quotes give K's own explanation for his terms. Gutenberg gives us reason to think that he quoted Whitehead accurately and fairly. Please justify the inclusion of the template. Dan 17:50, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Criticism" Section

This seems way unbalanced -- the section seems to be about 75% given over to the defense. The ideas of critics such as Martin Gardner are not quoted or sourced, while "rebuttal" material (from 20 years earlier!) is quoted repeatedly and at length. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Patzer42 (talk • contribs) 18:15, 14 December 2006 (UTC).

Well, again, I had to paraphrase Gardner to present what I saw as the best argument for his side. I also included his line about Aristotle, although this critique seems much weaker, because for some reason people use the argument so often that we have to include it. We also have to include a general-semantics view of the criticism. And since my (unposted) attempt at a summary read something like, 'Gardner willfully ignores the fact that Korzybski addressed this issue at length many years before,' I just presented the quotes from K. and Whitehead without comment. I want to let the evidence speak for itself.
If you know a good anti-GS argument that you want to add, please do. The section looks the way it does because basically nobody else added any critiques. Except for the one alleged Chomsky quote -- which I think would warrant inclusion despite seeming logically dubious, if we could prove that Chomsky said it.
There is an "exposé of the cult" at [1] that quotes Gardner from a chapter of Fad and Fallacies in the Name of Science. There is also a quote there from a negative review in the Journal of Philosophy. DLeonard 14:20, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Do you want to include more of Gardner's essay? He seems to me more interested in mockery than logical critique. Again, I tried to present the best arguments I could draw out of his words. Dan 08:48, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Other Aspects of the System" Section

Deleted the "Word Magic" comments because what they discuss seems like an idea or definition external to general semantics specifically, rather than an element of general-semantics proper. "Word magic" is mentioned by Korzybski as an example of primitive evaluation, but what the writer says is too far removed from Korzybski's comments about it to be recognizable. JDF, March 2, 2007 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.32.2.75 (talk) 01:36, 3 March 2007 (UTC).