Word: korzybski
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...small office two blocks from the University of Chicago campus, shiny-pated. khaki-clad Count Alfred Korzybski toys with an odd little implement. He calls it the "structural differential." It consists of a series of plates punched full of holes (see cut). Like scientists who make models of atomic structures, Count Alfred, who is head of the Institute of General Semantics, expects important developments from his implement. With it and the theory it illustrates, he hopes to wipe out mankind's time-worn thinking habits, revolutionize its educational systems, create a sane new world. Last week he reported progress...
...resident since the War, during which he was on the Russian general staff, is the founder of the new science of General Semantics (lately popularized, superficially, by Stuart Chase). His Science and Sanity, published in 1933, is its most profound and practical textbook. A renowned engineer and mathematician, Korzybski is respected by scientists also for his contributions to psychiatry, psychology and other sciences...
Theory of General Semantics is exceedingly complex (Korzybski calls it a "non-Aristotelian system"), but its method of instruction is simple. Chief instrument of training is the "structural differential." By handling this implement, students (who call it "the semantic rosary") learn graphically that there are different, "nonidentical" orders of meaning connected with each basic phenomenon. Thus, one plate in the implement represents a phenomenon (e.g., an apple), and the holes in it represent its infinite number of scientific characteristics, some perceptible to man, some unknown. Linked to that is a disc representing the physical, perceptible object, and to that...
This process of advancing from one order of meaning to another, Korzybski calls abstracting. Purpose of his instruction is to make individuals conscious of this process, teach them that a word or symbol is not identical with the object it represents, slow up their automatic, conditioned responses to symbols. The concept of "identity," in Korzybski's view, is responsible for mankind's "false knowledge," harmful nervous reactions (e.g., a child who hates all men because it is mistreated by its father...
...Meaning, followed by Ogden's invention of an 850-word vocabulary called Basic English. Indicative of the complexity of semantics is the fact that while Ogden is an orthologist and psychologist and Richards is an esthetician, important contributions have been made by a Polish mathematician, Count Alfred Korzybski, and a Harvard physicist, Percy Williams Bridgman. Semantics ranges from the equator of Basic English through the lush tropics of political bunkum to the North Pole of James Joyce's word-coining...