3 ms·

It would help to read your commentary on these.

by alok-g 8y ago

yesenadam 8y ago
Well, I don't know if mine will help. I love Goffman's book, it's super-readable, enlightening. It's about the different roles and..settings people operate in, and the rules and customs of those places, e.g. backstage, shopfront, military ranks, hospitality etc. Full of great stories quoted from an impressive number of sources, very diverse. Korzybski's book used to be huge, recommended by all kinds of famous people. I spent a few hours reading in it one day, to see for myself. (Plus had heard a fair bit about it before.) Korzybski basically seems a huge crank, who thought himself and his baby General Semantics[0] as important as Aristotle. The quote one always hears from it is "the map is not the territory", and well, that's about the only thing worth quoting from it. Plus he tried to get rid of "is" from the language, i.e. "A is B".[1] Seemingly because such sentences are deceptive - if you say "The car is red", well, it's many things besides red, so the sentence is a lie is many ways. It's a very strange objection. As if it's bad because it doesn't say everything, just one thing. Aristotle he's not. Also there's an interesting contraption featured in the book, made of metal with holes, strings, plugs, used to make maps of levels of concepts. I don't know if it's practically useful. Apart from that, what makes it a big slab of a book, are a host of chapters on different academic subjects serving as introductions to those subjects, e.g. one on maths, calculus I think, supposedly illustrating general semantics applied there. These seem mostly intended to give the impression Korzybski is a genius polymath. People who didn't know anything about that subject might learn something from that, and feel the book taught them something. But it's nothing to do with Korzybski's theories. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics [1] This was extended by a student of Korzybski's to E-Prime, a language without any form of the verb 'to be'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

It would help to read your commentary on these.

by alok-g 8y ago

It would help to read your commentary on these.

Well, I don't know if mine will help. I love Goffman's book, it's super-readable, enlightening. It's about the different roles and..settings people operate in, and the rules and customs of those places, e.g. backstage, shopfront, military ranks, hospitality etc. Full of great stories quoted from an impressive number of sources, very diverse. Korzybski's book used to be huge, recommended by all kinds of famous people. I spent a few hours reading in it one day, to see for myself. (Plus had heard a fair bit about it before.) Korzybski basically seems a huge crank, who thought himself and his baby General Semantics[0] as important as Aristotle. The quote one always hears from it is "the map is not the territory", and well, that's about the only thing worth quoting from it. Plus he tried to get rid of "is" from the language, i.e. "A is B".[1] Seemingly because such sentences are deceptive - if you say "The car is red", well, it's many things besides red, so the sentence is a lie is many ways. It's a very strange objection. As if it's bad because it doesn't say everything, just one thing. Aristotle he's not. Also there's an interesting contraption featured in the book, made of metal with holes, strings, plugs, used to make maps of levels of concepts. I don't know if it's practically useful. Apart from that, what makes it a big slab of a book, are a host of chapters on different academic subjects serving as introductions to those subjects, e.g. one on maths, calculus I think, supposedly illustrating general semantics applied there. These seem mostly intended to give the impression Korzybski is a genius polymath. People who didn't know anything about that subject might learn something from that, and feel the book taught them something. But it's nothing to do with Korzybski's theories. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics [1] This was extended by a student of Korzybski's to E-Prime, a language without any form of the verb 'to be'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime