Martin Gardner vs General Semantics

Korzybski never tired of knocking over “Aristotelian” habits of thought, in spite of the fact that what he called Aristotelian was a straw structure which bore almost no resemblance to the Greek philosopher’s manner of thinking. Actually, the Count had considerable respect for Aristotle (one of the many thinkers to whom his book is dedicated). But he believed that the Greek philosopher’s reasoning was badly distorted by verbal habits which were bound up with the Indo-European language structure, [1] especially the subject-predicate form with its emphasis on the word “is.” “Isness,” the Count once said, ‘is insanity,” apparently without realizing that such concepts as “isomorphic,” which he used constantly, cannot be defined without assuming the identity of mathematical structures.

Another “Aristotelian” habit against which the Count inveighed is that of thinking in terms of a ”two-valued logic” in which statements must be either true or false. No one would deny that many errors of reasoning spring from an attempt to apply an “either/or” logic to situations where it is not applicable, as all logicians from Aristotle onward have recognized. But many of the Count’s followers have failed to realize that there is a sense in which the two-valued orientation is inescapable. In all the “multi-valued logics” which have been devised, a deduction within the system is still “true” or “false.” To give a simple illustration, let us assume that a man owns a mechanical pencil of a type which comes in only three colors—red, blue, and green. If we are told that his pencil is neither blue nor green we then conclude that it is red. This would be a “true” deduction within a three-valued system. [2] It would be “false” to deduce that the pencil was blue, since this would contradict one of the premises. No one has yet succeeded in creating a logic in which the two-valued orientation of true and false could be dispensed with, though of course the dichotomy can be given other names. There is no reason to be ashamed of this fact, and once it is understood, a great deal of general semantic tilting at two-valued logic is seen to be a tilting at a harmless windmill.

* * *

According to the Count, people are “unsane” when their mental maps of reality are slightly out of correspondence with the real world. If the inner world is too much askew, they become “insane.” A principal cause of all this is the Aristotelian mental orientation, which distorts reality. It assumes, for example, that an object is either a chair or not a chair, when clearly there are all kinds of objects which may or may not be called chairs depending on how you define “chair.” But a precise definition is impossible. “Chair” is simply a word we apply to a group of things more or less alike, but which fade off in all directions, along continuums, into other objects which are not called chairs. As H. G. Wells expressed it, in his delightful essay on metaphysics in First and Last Things:

. . . Think of armchairs and reading-chairs and dining-room chairs, and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentist’s chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward term. In cooperation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me.

The non-Aristotelian mental attitude is, in essence, a recognition of the above elementary fact. There is no such thing as pure “chairishness.” There are only chair 1, chair 2, chair 3, et cetera! This assigning of numbers is a process Korzybski called “indexing.” In similar fashion, the same chair changes constantly in time. Because of weathering, use, and so forth, it is not the same chair from one moment to the next. We recognize this by the process of “dating.” We speak of chair 1952, chair 1953, et cetera! The Count was convinced that the unsane, and many insane, could be helped back to sanity by teaching them to think in these and similar non-Aristotelian ways. For example, a neurotic may hate all mothers. The reason may be that a childhood situation caused him to hate his own mother. Not having broken free of Aristotelian habits, he thinks all mothers are alike because they are all called by the same word. But the word, as Korzybski was fond of repeating, is not the thing. When a man learns to index mothers—that is, call them mother 1, mother 2, mother 3, et cetera—he then perceives that other mothers are not identical with his own mother. In addition, even his mother is not the same mother she was when he was a child. Instead there are mother 1910, mother 1911, mother 1912, et cetera. Understanding all this, the neurotic’s hatred for mothers is supposed to diminish greatly.

Of course there is more to the non-Aristotelian orientation than just indexing and dating. To understand levels of abstraction, for example, the Count invented a pedagogical device called the “structural differential.” It is a series of small plates with holes punched in them, connected in various ways by strings and pegs. The “Semantic Rosary,” as it was called by Time magazine, is impressive to anyone encountering epistemology for the first time.

* * *

[Key paragraphs on non-Aristotelianism follow. Then comes an account of Jacob L. Moreno’s psychodrama movement.]

* * *

The case of A. E. van Vogt of Los Angeles suggests the new trend. Van Vogt is the author of many popular science-fiction novels of the superman type, including one called The World of A, the action of which involves a future society that has adopted A, or Korzybski's non-Aristotelian orientation. A few years ago, van Vogt was proposing that general semantics go underground on a cellular basis. The United States might have another great depression, he feared, and fall into the hands of the Communists, who do not care for Korzybski's views. He even toyed with the notion of a General Semantics Church, with its own sacred literature, but this idea proved abortive and nothing came of it. At the moment, van Vogt has lost his former enthusiasm for semantics and Dr. Bates' eye exercises. He is head of the California branch of the dianetics movement.

* * *

CHAPTER 23 Notes

1. A point of view held chiefly by philologists and cultural anthropologists who like to imagine that their subject-matter (words or culture) underlies logic and mathematics. See “Words, Logic, and Grammar,” by H. Sweet, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1876. Because Aristotelian logic rests upon grammatical rules peculiar to the Aryan language, Sweet argues, the “whole fabric of formal logic falls to the ground.”

2. Strictly, this is a three-valued logic with two-valued functions. But even in the more exciting multi-valued logics that have multi-valued functions, deductions remain two-valued in the sense that they must be either valid or invalid in terms of the rules of the system.

3. Dr. Ernest Nagel, in a letter to the New Republic, Dec. 26, 1934 (replying to protests against his unfavorable review of Science and Sanity in the Oct. 24 issue), expresses this point as follows: “... it is my considered opinion that Science and Sanity has no merit whatever, and is not worth the serious attention of readers of the New Republic. Its main thesis rests on a misunderstanding of recent work on the foundation of logic. The few interesting suggestions on technical problems, to which I referred in my note, have not been systematically developed by Count Korzybski, and they play only a very inconsiderable role in his book.” See also Paul Kecskemeti’s penetrating “Review of General Semantics,” New Leader, April 25, 1955.

4. Max Eastman, in his amusing piece “Showing up Semantics,” The Freeman, May 31, 1954, quotes the following pompous passage from The Mankind of Humanity: "This mighty term—time-binding—when comprehended, will be found to embrace the whole of the natural laws, the natural economics, the natural governance, to be brought into the education of time-binders; then really peaceful and progressive civilization, without periodical collapses and violent readjustments, will commence; not before.”

SOURCE: Gardner, Martin. “General Semantics, Etc.," in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, 2^nd ed. New York: Dover Publications, 1957, pp. 281-91, reproduced above: 2 excerpts plus final paragraph of the section on General Semantics; plus endnotes.

See also this excerpt: the article’s 2^nd to the penultimate paragraph on Gardner..

Critiques of Gardner with excerpts:

Critique of Gardner, World and Thinking site

Analyzes Gardner paragraph by paragraph and reproduces Gardner’s endnotes.

In The Name of Skepticism: Martin Gardner’s Misrepresentations of General Semantics by Bruce Kodish, General Semantics Bulletin, 2004.

Critique of Korzybski and Kodish:

A Criticism to General Semantics by Spinoza in blank, Medium, July 20, 2024