I've put the list in alphabetical order by author, but have ordered the books in terms of what I currently consider to be their most important work (and of course I may be mistaken in my evaluations of their relative merit).
_Language in Thought and Action_ by S. I. Hayakawa. Probably the best intro to Korzybski. One should remember that Hayakawa(1941), who wrote this book is not Hayakawa(1966 and after) whose actions as college president and senator inspired people to suggest that he might have much to learn from the earlier Hayakawa.
_People in Quandaries_ by Wendell Johnson. Another good intro, with emphasis on education issues.
_Insights for the Age of Aquarius_ by Gina Cerminara. A dumb title, and some may be put off by the book's positive approach to parapsycholgy and other "fringe" stuff. But the author applies the GS approach rigorously to these questions.
This is a marvelously thought-provoking and subversive book, large parts of which read like an independent rediscovery of GS principles and techniques by a research linguist concerned with the psychology of category representation in natural languages. Lakoff marshals powerful theoretical arguments and field evidence against several reigning dogmas in linguistics, including Chomsky's "Universal Grammar" and anti-Worfianism. He goes beyond this to a principled attack on the Aristotelian assumption of perfect categories, and shows how this philosophical error has systematically thwarted the understanding of category formation and use in natural languages. Strongly recommended, especially for anyone with a background in linguistics.
Also, I concur with Arthur's recommendation of "People In Quandaries" as an excellent introduction to GS. I learned GS from it at the age of 12.
Allow me to recommend "The Adapted Mind: Studies In Evolutionary Psychology" (Cosmides & Tooby). [It] has nothing directly to do with GS, but the analyses of human mental organization that come from asking questions about adaptive function have *really powerful* philosophical implications. [...] the argument [...] that the "reasonable validity" of phenomenal experience is an engineering consequence of human evolution [...] is not an insight contained in the book, but it is one strongly implied by things the book demonstrates.
I read _Science and Sanity_ in college--it didn't seem to have much in it that wasn't in TToW except for the idea of time-binding.
2 apples + 5 oranges -----------and mentions that just over one in four job applicants (all of whom appeared in response to an ad for people "good with numbers") answered correctly:
2 apples + 5 oranges ----------- 7 fruitThe book roars off from there. Macneal believes that he has invented, or at least, identified, a new field which he names "mathsemantics": "The word 'mathsemantics', by the way, happily contains every letter in 'mathematics' in the same sequence , plus just the letters s and n. Something New, slightly nutty, sounds nice."
The book is not "rigorous" in the mathematical sense, but Macneal does condense out 29 "mathsemantical propositions", which are really more like pithy observations, e.g.,
1. Whenever we add _things_, we must necessarily
add _different_ things, which we must then
group together under the same _name_.
3. For a count to make sense, you have to know
what you are counting.
9. Math enthusiasts need to watch their language.
27. Percentages are dangerous social and economic
tools that appear easy only to math teachers
and the inexperienced.
Other recent books that overlap with this are Paulos, _Innumeracy_,
and Huff, _How to Lie with Statistics_. _Mathsemantics_ is an attempt
to show why we have the problems described in the other two books, and
to an extent how we might start avoiding them.
I recommend every teacher of K-12 mathematics should be beaten over the head with this book until its contents are fully absorbed. Those few who might be capable of changing their methods as a result of merely _reading_ may only need one good whack.
Harry L Weinberg: Levels of Knowing and Existence
Studies in General Semantics
Institute of General Semantics
163 Engle Street
Englewood, NJ 07631
ISBN 0-910780-00-5
This struck me as a fairly rigorous while still informal
treatment of GS as I've come to understand it so far. It worked
at many levels of abstraction -- it was filled with illuminating
yet credible examples. I remember experiencing a big 'Ah-HA!'
with Weinberg's illustrations of multiordinality -- some of the
power of GS seems to be 'real-time' but we don't spend all our
time in interactions with others; after his descriptions of
multiordinality my 'brooding' experiences will never be the same.
The order and clarity of presentation were, in particular, quite satisfying. I don't know if what he presented is 'mainstream GS' but it made sense, it agreed with my experience, and it has already modified the way I look at the world.
The final chapters were less satisfying to me than the earlier chapters. His chapter on Religion seemed almost irrelevant to the concepts presented earlier, and his chapter on cybernetics seemed (at least to the degree it overlapped my engineering experience with control systems) inaccurate.
Susan Presby Kodish Ph.D. Drive Yourself Sane
Bruce I. Kodish Using the Uncommon Sense of Gen. Sem.
Institute of General Semantics
ISBN 0-910780-10-7
I was much less satisfied with this than with the Weinberg. In
some ways, the best part (for me) was the glossary. (I wish that
more authors would include a glossary -- even with the limitation
that "whatever you say a thing is, it is not," the glossary, even
if of limited utility, is a great aid in getting a 'handle' on
things. I found myself using the Kodish glossary while reading
Weinberg.) The presentation, from my perspective, was somewhat
disorganized, and had a greater quality of mysticism than I
thought necessary or helpful.
My criticisms, however, are based on my highly subjective perspective as a person who has been a student of contemporary science for many, many years. My criticisms might not apply to the non-scientist.
S.I. Hayakawa Language in Thought and Action (5th ed.)
Alan R. Hayakawa Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
ISBN 0-15-648240-1
In some ways, I found this to be a model of clarity -- while in
other ways I found it to be a political tract, with all the
semantic seduction one might expect from such a book. The
biggest shortcoming I found was that it passed over (or at least
de-emphasized to the point where I didn't notice it)
multiordinality. The 'levels of abstraction' description seemed
to miss the point almost entirely -- so perhaps this is not a
book about general semantics as much as a book about semantics --
in general. Still, with its charm and clarity, I'm happy that it
(and the van Vogt novel) were the first things I read. Hayakawa
may not be a good place to end, but is (I think) a good place to
start.
A.E. van Vogt The World of Null-A -- rev. 1970
Berkley Publishing Corp.
SBN 425-03322-8
Gilbert Gosseyn (Go-Sane) is the hero of this novel, and what van
Vogt considers the epitomization of the GS-mind. This is a
blazingly good story, and a wonderful antidote to anyone who has
overdosed on "Atlas Shrugged." Is it GS? Who cares!
Jacob Bronowski The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination
Yale University
ISBN 0-300-02192-5
Bronowski is *not* a student of GS. Neither General Semantics
nor Korzybski are mentioned anyplace in the text. The 'rules'
of GS are not evident -- nowhere is there a single mention that
"the map is not the territory."
The book consists of a series of transcriptions of lectures at Yale delivered as "Silliman Lectures" in 1967. The lecture titles are:
"A deceptive beginning, introducing the theme of appearance versus essence by way of a charming poem by Yeats, promptly leads into a discussion of some of the most complex areas of knowledge, where the scholar--the "natural philosopher," as Bronowski chooses to call himself--comes to grips with the epistemological questions that concern the nature of limits to human understanding. ...
"The nature and power of human language as a creative instrument for ordering and giving structure to human experience; the nature of time and the meaning of relativity; the limits of physical measurements as interpreted by quantum mechanics; the boundaries to formalization of knowledge inherent in the axiomatic structure of mathematics--these and other topics become accessible, indeed humanized, by the author's insistence that they should be looked at not just as constuctions within science but as expressions of the human mind defining itself in action.
"Throughout the book the interest of the reader is stimulated by the interplay of two themes that recur almost like melodies in a sonata and give the text its intellectual unity. These themes are the role of conscious human activity in the creation of knowledge and the imaginative content of that knowledge."
Bronowski lives up to his introduction. No -- Bronowski provides few 'tools,' so this is *not* GS. But Bronowski opens the reader's eyes to what might be, given the tools, and so paves the road -- indeed, he presents an engraved invitation to sanity.
Consider the short quotation below:
"The logical and the factual do not meet. ...
"Scientific claims or statements are inexact and provisional. They depend on dozens of *simplifying* assumptions and on a particular choice of words and symbols and on 'all other things being equal.' There are just too many molecules involved in a 'fact' for a declarative sentence to cover them all. When you speak, you simplify. And when you simplify, you lie."
I found some parts of the book almost incomprehensible, and other parts of the book -- uhhh -- a rather unrestrained and, I thought, angry dismisal of the general disregard for fuzzy logic in academic circles of the U.S.. Still, the parts that were clear and to the point were quite illuminating -- not just the not-bivalent (non- Aristotelian) logic, but the strong consciousness presented of multi- source causes and multiple-consequence effects. One of the traps of syllogism that Kosko rather thoroughly explores is that syllogism tends to lead us to thinking of single-causes and single-effects. In general, that's not how the world works, as anyone who has ever tried to set up a laboratory experiment (that excludes all causes except the one being tested) can attest. Neither true nor false but both at the same time in degrees; not "if this then that" It's non-Aristotelian, all right.
Towards the end of the book, Kosko delves into neural networks -- "wet stuff," the way our brains work. It's a fascinating description, roughly at a level you might expect in Scientific American (simplified but not so simplified as to become meaningless, yet not so jargon- filled and detailed as to be comprehensible only to researchers in the field.) One particularly startling example was of self-learning neural networks applied to pattern matching. The feedback mechanisms in a machine designed that way are such as to generate a pattern match even if there is no pattern! Sounds human to me.
I concluded that fuzzy logic is *not* g.s., but that there is a lot to be gained in an appreciation of g.s. through the appreciation of fuzzy logic. Some sections of the book were what I considered almost bizarrely personal (the section about working-out then meditating in a hot tub and having an image of a water-bed suspended above the hot tub with strings dangling down struck me as -- odd), nonetheless "Fuzzy Thinking" provides a rigorous approach to non-Aristotelian logic that I found most useful.
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