We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.
- Alfred Korzybski

3 Questions: "What?"........."So what?"........."Now what?"
- Coro wisdom

"The world we have created today as a result of our thinking thus far has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them."
- Albert Einstein

"The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything."
- George Santayana

"If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a 10-foot chain."
- Adlai Stevenson

"Teaching and learning that lead to no significant change in behavior are practically worthless."
– Irving Lee

"Learning to un-learn to learn, for me, best describes the process of learning the discipline theoretically (verbally) and organismically."
– M. Kendig

"Learning is the gradual replacement of fantasy with fact."
- Gifford Pinchot

"The trouble with people is not so much with their ignorance as it is with their knowing so many things that are not so."
- William Alanson White

"You can't no more teach what you ain't learned than you can come from where you ain't been."
- Mark Twain

"A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it."
- Alfred Korzybski

"You can't step into the same river twice."
- Heraclitus

"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions."
- Leonardo da Vinci

"Happiness is not something that happens….It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"We are always getting to live, but never living."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"God may forgive your sins. But your nervous system won't."
- Alfred Korzybski

"The self explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes an explorer of everything else."
- Elias Canetti

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
- Albert Einstein

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits."
- Mark Twain

"Time is but the stream I go fishing in."
- Henry David Thoreau

"It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and only lukewarm defenders among those who may do well under the new."
- Machiavelli

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw

"To progress, man must re-make himself, and he cannot re-make himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor."
- Alexis Carrel

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
- Elvis Costello

Institute of General Semantics

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General Semantics

General Semantics

Improve Your Day-to-Day Activities, Interactions, and Relationships

General Semantics ... it's not what you think. It's how you think ... how you feel ... what you see ... what you hear ... it's what you do.

	For an overview of General Semantics in French, click here.
	For an overview of General Semantics in Spanish, click here.

General Semantics (or GS) can be referred to as a general system of evaluation and awareness. It provides a systematic methodology to understand how you relate to the world around you, how you react to this world, how you react to your reactions, and how you may adjust your behavior accordingly.

Basic Understandings

Time-binding

Only humans have demonstrated the capability to build on the knowledge of prior generations.

Alfred Korzybski

time-binding

Language serves as the principle tool that facilitates time-binding.
Time-binding forms the basis for an ethical standard by which to evaluate human behavior; does the behavior advance time-binding and human progress based on what is known at the time, or does it deny time-binding?
Acknowledging our time-binding inheritance dispels us of the "self-made" notion; as we understand how much we owe to others, we begin to understand our own limitations.

Scientific Approach

Humankind's ability to time-bind is most evident when we apply a scientific approach, method or attitude in our evaluations and judgments.
A scientific approach involves the process of continually testing your assumptions and beliefs, gathering as many facts and as much data as possible, revising your assumptions and beliefs as appropriate, and holding your conclusions and judgments tentatively.
Hidden, or unstated assumptions and "unknown unknown's" guide our behavior to some degree; therefore we do well to acknowledge their influence and attempt to increase our awareness of them.
We live in a process-oriented universe in which everything changes all the time. The changes may be readily apparent to us, or microscopic, or even sub-microscopic (inferred).
Many times we are not concerned with the lack of apparent change. However, we invite trouble when we sometimes fail to account for change in people or things and act as if no change occurred.

Important Terms

General Semantics draws together and integrates knowledge from across the spectrum of academic disciplines. But it has also developed its own lexicon of terms that have particular and specific usages within GS. Some of the most important terms, as formulated by Alfred Korzybski and others, include:

absolutistic terms: Our language ought to reflect what we understand about the world and our experiences in that world, just as a map should be expected to accurately reflect the actual territory it depicts. If we acknowledge the limitations of our abstracting processes, that everything around us is in continual (if imperceptible) change, and that we can never know everything about anything, those limitations ought to be reflected in the language we use. Therefore we find relatively few instances to appropriately use absolutistic terms such as all, never, always, every, exact same, absolutely, exactly, certainly, etc.

abstracting: Our awareness of an event or happening is not the same as the actual event or happening. Each nervous system abstracts a limited number of characteristics about an event, from which that individual constructs what she senses and experiences. When she describes or talks about that experience, she continues to abstract by selecting certain aspects and ignoring others. Abstracting refers to this ongoing human process of selecting, rejecting, and constructing our own individual experiences from everything that goes on around us. In other words, what we sense is not the same as what happens, what we can describe is not the same as what we sense, and the significance we give to what happens is more than what we can merely describe.

Notable Individuals

A notable, if somewhat eclectic, group of individuals has crossed paths with general semantics over the years. Here are some names you might recognize. Also, don't overlook the impressive list of speakers for the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture (AKML) series, sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics since 1952.

A few of the more notable individuals who have been involved in general semantics include (in alphabetical order):

Steve Allen Author, entertainer and composer attended a seminar-workshop at the Institute of General Semantics in 1961. In his book Dumbth: And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter, he included a chapter encouraging readers to become familiar with general semantics. He also delivered the 1992 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture.

Stuart Chase Noted economist and writer, wrote the first 'popularization' of general semantics, The Tyranny of Words. In a national magazine article noting the most influential developments of the first half of the 20th century, Chase included Science and Sanity as one of the top three books.

Dr. Albert Ellis Noted psychologist, originator of Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), cited Korzybski's work in books he authored such as A Guide to Rational Living, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy and How to Live With A "Neurotic". Dr. Ellis also wrote the Foreword to Drive Yourself Sane, by Susan and Bruce Kodish. Dr. Ellis died in July 2007 and was remembered in the October 2007 issue of the Institute's journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics.

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