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The Unity of Human Problems Through Method:


Korzybskis General-Semantics as a Transdisciplinary Discipline
By Bruce I. Kodish, PhD

Originally presented at the January 14, 2013,
Conference on General Semantics and Transdisciplinary Inquiry
at CHM College of the University of Mumbai,
Ulhasnagar, Maharashtra, India



Abstract: Interdisciplinary. Transdisciplinary. Where did these notions come from? Rigid
boundaries often unduly separate different academic departments and fields. How do we
get beyond polite general agreement about the need for transcending these boundaries, and
actually do it? Korzybski/General-Semantics scholar Bruce I. Kodish discusses a little-
known discipline that does this explicitly, general semantics, a transdisciplinary
discipline, i.e., a discipline with tools applicable across many different disciplines.
General Semantics (GS) functions more specifically as a meta-discipline, a discipline that
provides a formulational framework and a language for understanding and talking about
other disciplines. After discussing the core notion of interdisciplinarity (along with related
terms), Ill present an overview of GS, emphasizing some of its
interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary aspects. Ill conclude with some suggestions for how
GS can provide tools for interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary thinking, for better
appreciating and making use of the unity of human problems through method.






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Art, Science, History, Philosophy, etc. We may confront such traditional
disciplinary divisions with awe, forgetting that on the level at which we all live, they
dont exist as entirely separate, discrete entities (outside of university departments), nor
do they exist entirely apart from the humans who have studied and made them. Rather,
when we pull aside the curtains of seemingly disparate disciplines, we see only men and
women; writing, teaching, experimenting, constructing, creating, etc.and always talking.
Pulling the dividing curtains aside, looking at the various disciplines as forms of human
behavior, rather than Platonic forms provides one way to move towards a perspective
that goes beyond any particular discipline. Welcome to the world of interdisciplinarity.
In this essay, Ill explore interdisciplinarity, and related notions, which involve
various means devised to build bridges between different disciplines. General Semantics
(GS) will be my main focus, a transdisciplinary discipline that works as a metadiscipline
providing a unified framework and language for understanding and talking about other
disciplines. I'll conclude with some suggestions for how the evaluative tools of GS might
help advance knowledge exchange and development among the disciplines.
The Necessity and Danger of Disciplines
Lets start with some working definitions. First, what do I mean by a discipline?
Im treating the term as synonymous with a field of specialized knowledge and practice.
Increasing specialization and the concomitant multiplication of disciplines seems
inevitable, for no two individualshowever much they shareare exactly the same in all
respects. No two individualshowever similarwill see any thing or situation in exactly
the same way. However much alike, they will have had different experiences and will
necessarily live and work on the basis of somewhat different viewpoints and values, even
in the same field. With the increasing size and complexity of social groups, the specialized
knowledge developed by different humans will tend to grow as well. What initially began
as one field or discipline can expand and diverge into many subfields and branches. Since
no one individual can know everything, people thus tend to become more interdependent,
i.e., dependent upon the specialized knowledge that others have gained in their respective
fields and areas of expertise. This specialization of human labor and the development of
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knowledge must have started fairly early in human history. Picture the caveman Og and
his brother Gog. Og was not much of a hunter but he had the patience and fine-motor skill
to make the finest stone-chipped arrowheads, spear points, and knives for his tribe. His
brother Gog, on the other hand, with his fleeter legs, stronger arms, and more accurate
aim, became known as the tribes best hunter. Perhaps tool-making and hunting were
among the first specialized fields or disciplines that humans developed. Its only gotten
more complicated since caveman times.
If I was going to give you a comprehensive history of disciplines and disciplinarity,
I would have to discuss the work of the ancient Greeks like Plato and Aristotle, who
distinguished and classified different realms of theoretical and practical knowledge. I
would have to continue this with a discussion of the later Classical and Medieval
European divisions of the seven liberal arts: the trivium and quadrivium. The distinctions
between departments of knowledge that the Greeks and others developed may still have
some usefulness, but even fairly early in human history, some thinkers were pointing out
the pitfalls that develop as differing viewpoints and theories become fields of knowledge
that grow into mutually incomprehensible disciplines. In India, at least a couple of
thousand years ago, Jain thinkers challenged the absolutism of overly-sharp divisions
among different areas of knowledge with the notion of anekaant (non-absolutism or the
multi-sidedness of truth) as exemplified by their story of the blind men and the elephant.
You recall the story.
Much later in Europe at the height of the 17th Centurys Scientific Revolution, the
great mathematician and engineer/scientist/philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz,
felt strongly that the sciences, i.e., the body of reliable human knowledge at a given date,
comprised the greatest treasure of mankind, (Leibniz 1979, 33) a storehouse to which
even the most humble person might be able to contribute. However, even in 1680, Leibniz
felt very concerned about the horrible mass of books which keeps on growing...creating
a disorder that will become nearly insurmountable; the indefinite multitude of authors
will shortly expose them all to the danger of general oblivion;....with books continuing to
increase in number, we shall be wearied by their confusion... (29-30) He made special
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note of the pressing need to reduce the divisions and increase intercommunication among
people pursuing different areas of specialized knowledge: The entire body of the
sciences may be regarded as an ocean, continuous everywheres and without a break or
division. (73) He also wrote about his dream that some day a great, free and curious
prince, a glorious amateur, or perhaps himself a learned man, understanding the
importance of the matter, will cause to undertake under the best auspices what Alexander
the Great commanded Aristotle to do with the natural sciences,...that the quintessence of
the best books be extracted and joined to the best observations, not yet written, of the
most expert in each profession, in order to build systems of solid knowledge for
promoting mans happiness.(32)
Interdisciplinarity, Etc.
The Jain sages and people like Leibniz were among the early formulators of
interdisciplinarity. But the term interdisciplinary was not invented until the early 20th
Century when highly specialists in many areas of inquiry were beginning to tackle more
complex problems and began to feel a pressing need to coordinate their work with those in
other relevant fields.
What does interdisciplinary work consist of? For one thing, it requires going beyond
the confining boundaries of any traditional field. By doing so, researchers can expand the
context of their studies and make use of the perspectives and tools of other fields. For
example, a political scientist may explore social psychology, psychoanalysis, and
anthropology for insights into the world views and culture of politicians and diplomats.
This multidisciplinary approach which brings together individuals and knowledge in
different fields in order to deal with a particular set of concerns.
Another sort of interdisciplinarity may involve the creation of new fields to "fill the
gaps" between two or more accepted fields, or to fill a place that didnt even exist before.
Thus the creation of molecular anthropology, cybernetics, etc.
Or interdisciplinarity may result as a way of dealing with broad inclusive themes
and patterns useful in a variety of fields of study. Such notions as "systems,"
"feedback," "chaos (non-linear dynamics), among others, because they cut across many
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different fields may qualify for what we may venture to call transdisciplinary
formulations.
The urge to unify different theories and to connect apparently disconnected
phenomena seems like a strong motivating force behind many interdisciplinary efforts,
evident even within a particular discipline, like physics, where for example Newton
with his laws of motion and theory of universal gravitationshowed the underlying unity
of celestial and earthly motion (until then considered unconnected). Einstein later
formulated space and time as interconnected dimensions of an underlying unity, the
space-time manifold, and explained gravitation in terms of its curvature. More recent
efforts in physics have attempted to further unify the fundamental forces of nature.
Engineering projects like the Manhattan project of World War II in the U.S. which
produced the first atomic bomb (however we evaluate the results) also require an
interdisciplinary mind-set. The practical solution of complex problems may require the
input of people from many different areas of knowledge.
What characterizes all of these forms of interdisciplinarity? Besides an urge for
unification, I contend that at some point someone chooses to `look behind the curtain' of
their discipline and realizes that the way they divide up the world may not be the only or
the best way. They find other men and women behind the curtain. In other words, they
more or less consciously discover that their unquestioned (at a date) categories and related
assumptions, doctrines, and beliefs, constitute human creations that they may be able to
modify to suit them better in their quest for knowledge.
Events, as Leibniz pointed out, dont necessarily remain strictly within the
boundaries of the academic divisions by which people try to understand things. Fresh
ways to structure the way we perceive and label events may be possible. And we can
learn how to make this process more conscious. In the remainder of this presentation, I
will discuss a transdisciplinary approach that takes this as its focus: general semantics.
Applied Epistemology: General-Semantics
The discipline of general semantics (GS) was founded by Polish-American engineer,
scholar, and teacher Alfred Korzybski (18791950). (See Korzybski: A Biography for
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more on his life and work.) Korzybski had long railed against those whom he considered
stuck in their narrow petty departments. Because concern with the acquisition and
growth of human knowledge was at the core of his work, Korzybski had what we would
now call an interdisciplinary outlook as a necessity.
In his first published work, the 1921 Manhood of Humanity, he proposed humanity
as an entirely new biological kingdom: Time-Binders. As the only known time-binding
class of life on planet Earth, humans have a unique and defining capacity: each generation
can start where the previous generation has left off. According to Korzybski, this
capacity entirely depends upon the characteristic human ability, involving language and
other symbolism, to transmit information across time and thus, to create culture.
A trained engineer (graduated from the Warsaw Polytechnic) and advanced
studentand loverof science and mathematics, Korzybski didnt hesitate to quantify
whatever he could and offered in his book a formula by which one could describe and
compare different rates of time-binding: PR
T
. Whatever merits or demerits the formula
has, it neatly expresses an exponential function of time. For Korzybski this had great
significance; for him it seemed that the rapidly and exponentially accelerating acceleration
of so many areas of human life was an inevitable consequence of the time-binding nature
of humanity.
His inquiry into the nature of human life had begun in his childhood in Poland, as
the son of landed aristocrats. On his familys farm estate, he had long understood the
intelligence of animals, like the horses he had begun training as a boy. For years he had
pondered the question of how humans differ from animals. From childhood, he had also
seen the differences between different types of humans from different classes, ethnic
groups, religious groups, language groups, professions, etc. As a young man, he especially
wondered about those people, like his engineer father, who develop knowledge and apply
it to get things done (scientists, mathematicians, and engineers). How do they do what
they do so well, as compared to those who claim to have some knowledge of human
affairs, such as economists, and those who claim to apply it, such as inept politicians.
Having served in the Russian Army on the Eastern Front at the start of World War I,
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Korzybski experienced first-hand the devastation wreaked by the most up-to-date
scientific weaponry developed by engineers, at the command, ultimately, of those inept
politicians.
At the end of 1915, Korzybski came the United States where he continued his war-
related work and where he remained after the war, having married an American woman,
Mira Edgerly a renowned portrait painter. His desire to understand the deeper causes of
the war and find some ways to help prevent future wars, drove him to develop the notion
of time-binding. When he did so, he could see that his formula explained the differences
between the narrow but rapid and successful development of scientifically-oriented fields,
such as weapons technology, as compared with the slower and faultier social
developments, which he saw in much of the rest of human life. Different levels of success
seemed reflected by a disparity in rates of time-binding. In the exact sciences and
technology, time-binding seemed to work reasonably well, a relatively rapid rate. In the
rest of human life, at a relatively slower rate, not so much,. (And according to his formula,
time-binding advancements could even be stopped or reversed if the rate became zero or
negative.) Korzybski predicted the results of this disparity of rates, which if not
corrected could only become greater with time: a seemingly endless and increasingly
dangerous spiral of crises, revolutions, and wars. As he saw it, correcting this situation
depended on humans becoming conscious of their existence as time-binders, and then
time-binding consciously. This would require taking the narrowly-focused clarity of
thinking embodied in the more advanced time-binding spirit of mathematics, science,
and engineering, and somehow finding a way to broaden and diffuse it into the rest of
human culture.
Korzybskis work after his 1921 book focused on his efforts to do just that, by
putting an epistemological focus on human behavior. His interdisciplinary research in a
broad range of disciplines, from physics to psychiatry, involved surveying the results of
the scientific research of his time for naturalistic insights into how we evaluate (what he
called peoples semantic or evaluational reactions) as we seek knowledge of the world
inside and outside our skins. How do we know what we say we know and what effect
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does this have on our lives? Korzybski viewed his own work in investigating the
structure of human knowledge (Korzybski, 73) as an up-to-date epistemology (554).
As part of his research, he also studied the scientists. Viewing science as an exemplary
mode of human behavior, he compared the ways of thinking that scientists and
mathematicians display when working at their best and the ways of thinking that they
and other people use the rest of the time. As a result, Korzybski discovered a link
between a generalized scientific attitude and sanity, presenting the results of his research
in his second 1933 book, Science and Sanity, where he elaborated a new scientifically-
based world outlook and an accompanying methodology (labeled general semantics)
simple enough to teach children.
The system he developed challenged basic assumptions of many fields in a way that
perhaps most people would call philosophical. But Korzybski did not find that term
congenial, feeling that many philosophers specialized in combining ignorance of
scientific researches with non-productive verbalistic speculations (Korzybski, xxvii-xxx).
For Korzybski, the questioning of fundamental assumptions constituted a basic activity
of science, which for him included mathematics. He clearly saw what he was proposing as
within the realm of science, suggesting further research based on his formulations and
presenting his system of applied scientific epistemology (which he called general-
semantics) as a foundation for a new interdisciplinary science of man [humanity]
(Korzybski, 17).
One of Korzybskis students, psychologist and speech pathologist Wendell
Johnson, contended that Korzybski's greatest contribution to our thinking was this
proposition, that the scientific method be taken out of the laboratory and be put to use in
everyday life (W. Johnson 1972, 33-34). You dont have to be a scientist to do this.
What we call science is the most evident fruit of a more general attitude towards living
that Korzybski called an extensional orientation. An extensional orientation consists of
orienting ourselves primarily to non-verbal happenings and facts, with the ability to use
and not abuse higher-order verbal abstractions and other symbolism as needed. Johnson
wrote that an extensional, scientific orientation ...reduces essentially to three
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questions... What do you mean?...How do you know? and What then?I have
discovered, he said, that these three are about the most liberating questions you can
imagine (37).
These central, liberating, epistemological questions convey the practical orientation
of general semantics. Viewing GS as applied epistemology may at the very least discourage
identifying it with narrower linguistic semantics. More hopefully, it may suggest the
broader intellectual context of the discipline and its potential for enhancing
interdisciplinary efforts and human welfare. Korzybskis student, J. Samuel Bois wrote in
his book The Art of Awareness that, applied epistemology or as he called it:
Epistemics...the discipline derived from epistemology and that emerged from General
Semantics...It takes Homo sapiens as the only form of life that can influence the
course of its own evolution. It has for its objective the knowledge and the practice of
the skills of awareness and self-management as preparation for innovating in human
participation. (15)
GS and the Transdisciplinary Unity of Method
The splitting and separation implied in certain basic common sense terms about
our functioningfor example, the separation of mind from body, subjective from
objective, intellect from emotion, thinking from feeling, knowledge from
valuesmay constitute the largest obstacle for a broader, interdisciplinary view. What
Korzybski explicitly sought to do was to heal the false divisions of these ultimately
inseparable dimensions of experience. He believed that reifying these higher-order
abstractions by treating them as if they existed concretely as discrete and separate
elements in the non-verbal world, distorted the actualities of nervous system and
behavior. Korzybski referred to such conceptual splitting as elementalism,
unconsciously dividing up in our evaluating and language what we dont find divided in
the non-verbal world. In doing so we thereby neglect important relationships, contexts,
and connections. Elementalistic language use that results from such splitting suggests
false-to-fact, static, isolated structures. Non-elementalism, recognizing and remedying
elementalisms by acknowledging relationshipsand making them explicit in how we
formulate and talkbecame a major part of Korzybskis teaching. He accepted as a basic
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major premise that no object exists in absolute isolation, quoting his friend and mentor
mathematician Cassius J. Keyser who wrote, To be is to be related. On this basis, he
formulated the non-elementalistic notion of evaluation or semantic (evaluational)
reaction, which more clearly connects knowledge to values, thinking' to feeling,
intellect to emotion, etc. as the basic unit of study for general semantics, which he
referred to as a general theory of evaluation.
Viewing human knowing in terms of evaluation marks the distinct approach of GS, a
value-based method, more specifically an applied epistemology involving a standard of
evaluation, and thus a criterion of misevaluation, based upon time-binding. What kind of
evaluating leads to progress, the ability to build upon our own and others experience in
a positive manner? And what kind evaluating leads to more problems and confusion?
Not simple questions to answer simply, but ones that can be approached by spiraling
towards this notion of unity of all (legitimately all) human problems through method.
In a short, unpublished article written in 1943 during World War II, Note on Unity
of Problems Through Method, which I will now quote from in full, Korzybskis co-
worker M. [Marjorie Mercer] Kendig wrote:
The problems we face in making the war and winning the peace are only intensifications
of our weaknesses, difficulties, inadequacies of orientation and evaluation in ordinary life
problems of personal and social organization, adjustment, and survival as free men [and
women]. The problems of a physician, a teacher, a scholar, a research worker, a social
worker, a business man [or woman], a labor organizer, a senator, a farmer, an ambassador, a
mother, a sergeant, an admiral, etc. are not unrelated. Their problems are all of a piece
methodologically. All are complex. They differ only in degrees of complexity, in the number
and kind of unseen factors that must be taken into account of for adequate evaluation and
maximum predictability. For instance, some which deal with the tangible and seen, can be
muddled through by so-called common sense without a sharp and conscious revision of our
methods of evaluation.
This commonality of problems is hardly a new notion. But we are not so accustomed to
think of this truism in terms of method. We are even less accustomed to the saying that it all
comes down to how we use our nervous systems, nor are we accustomed to talk in terms of
how we evaluate, how we deal neuro-semantically and neuro-linguistically inside our skins
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with ourselves, with others, with the world.
The way we think and feel and speak about the facts we have to deal with is like a
map of a territory. Facing facts is just a clich unless we see it as a problem of making our
maps fit the territory. This implies the need for a method of adjusting our learned definitions,
generalizations, attitudes, beliefs, to fit the changing facts in the dynamic continuum of our
experience. For example, situation today is not situation yesterday or 1920 or 1890 or 1776
(the politician to the contrary).
The opposite is wishful thinking, equally a verbalism unless we visualize the
mechanism; i.e., that we impose our map-definitions, etc. (learned as definitions, or
generalized from experience) on the territory-facts without inspection of the present facts
and appropriate revision of our generalizations to fit them. This in brief constitutes [what
Korzybski called] the intensional attitude and method in life. If we stick to intension, to our
definitions, to our wishful thinking, we have poor predictability, our maps are poor guides
to the territory. We are constantly shocked because things dont work out the way they ought
to. We have no freedom to act; we are slaves to the past when we define the present by the
past instead of learning from it as an aid in making better maps to fit the territory with its
many different factors. We end up semantically [evaluationally] resentful and bewildered and
nervously disintegrated, or succumb to a deadening state of static adjustment to our
maladjustments.
When we face facts, i.e., fit our maps to the changing territory, we are in adjustment
with the world at a date. So we can better control ourselves and the facts. We do not impose
our past experience on the present, we allow for new factors. We are not word-bound,
definition-bound, we keep our spontaneity, we are free to act by the facts as we find them
today. We keep control of our own adjustment. Adjustment thus becomes a dynamic and
purposeful process. We have some predictability in our affairs. There is a larger degree of
probability that our plans, our blueprints of what we want will work out in some satisfying
approximation. This in brief constitutes the extensional attitude and method of life.
We all use the extensional method some of the time. The problem is how to train
ourselves and others to use it consciously as an attitude and a method most of the time.
Unless we concentrate on that as a major project in general mass education in the broadest
sense, our ability to use our knowledge, our tremendous technological resources, etc., our
plans and our goals at home and abroad will remain to be swallowed up in the realities of
unpredicted and so uncontrolled factors such as they were after World War I. By method and
method alone can we make a direct attack on changing the neuro-social continuum of old
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habits, old institutions, old ways. As Korzybski says, the task before us is tremendous. At
least we can make a start. The Papers from the Second American Congress on General
Semantics [just published in 1943] just scratch the surface in indicating the possibilities. But
essentially they do show us what can be done by teaching a new method of evaluation. They
show that the extensional method of general semantics is generally teachable and workable,
that we can predict results in terms of more flexible personal and social adjustments, now and
in the uncertain future.
Kendigsand Korzybskisemphasis upon the unity of human problems through
method may clarify the trans-disciplinary intent of GS, a methodological approach for
cutting across and bridging not only formal academic disciplines but also the variety of
viewpoints among any individuals. What if GS does constitute such a transdisciplinary
discipline with a common formulational structure and meta-language for working and
talking across disciplines and perspectives? If so, doesnt it deserve more careful attention
by anyone who has interdisciplinary concerns?
Using the Transdisciplinary Tools of General Semantics
Our evaluations feed back to us to become part of the structure of the world that
we react to. In other words, we react to our reactions and the results of our reactions in a
spiral manner; our subsequent evaluating is influenced by our prior evaluating.
Consciously taking advantage of this mechanism, Korzybski and others have derived from
GS theory, and incorporated from other approaches, many ways to move towards an
extensional (fact-based) orientation. These methods involve a continuum of non-verbal
and verbal extensional practices including: the study of ones own abstracting processes
(how we receive, perceive, and organize information from the world outside and inside our
skins); the purposeful practice of various forms of non-verbal awareness and
visualization; the cultivation of basic observational and inquiry skills; and the practice of
various methods of restructuring ones language as a means of more consciously directing
ones perceiving-labeling-acting processes. Korzybskian scholar and former editor of the
General Semantics Bulletin, James D. French described the interplay of these non-verbal
and verbal aspects of GS: As a field of study, general semantics is not predominantly
about language but (one might say) about neuro-evaluating; and yet language and how we
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use it play a prominent role in apprehending and using the discipline.
The structure of our language at various levels and how we use it certainly has
importance. Restructuring your language can provide a vital means for more consciously
directing your own perceiving-labelling-acting processes. Ill briefly discuss here some
linguistic extensional devices for doing so. Remember, your most enchanted listener
remains you. (W. Johnson 1956)
Recognizing the uniqueness of every individual person, object, or other item that we
deal with, we can practice indexing by applying an index number to a term. So, for
example, we can index the meanings that the term interdisciplinary has for different
people. Interdisciplinarity
1
is not necessarily interdisciplinarity
2
. We can also use
indexing to specify terms that represent processes along a continuum. Thinking in terms
of a continuum with degrees of interdisciplinarity may help us to have more realistic
expectations in evaluating our own work and those of others.
The chain-index brings the environment or context of whatever we are talking about
into the picture. The chain part comes from the analogy to a chain reaction where some
process doubles or otherwise multiplies with each iteration of the process, as in a nuclear
or chemical chain reaction. With the chain-index, we make our own little chain reaction of
of differentiating, noting differences within one thing in our classification or naming, so
that it becomes two or more things depending on its context of time and place (although
the time dimension is more directly addressed with the device of dating, discussed below).
Further differentiating as to context, although often not necessary, can go on indefinitely.
So individual
1
(in context
1
) is not exactly the same in all respects as that same
individual
1
(in context
2
). Every thing-as-a-whole-in-its-environment remains different
from itself in a different environment. For example, we cannot adequately understand
how a gorilla might behave living in a community in the African jungle, by studying the
behavior of an isolated gorilla living in a zoo. Ken Keyes called the chain-index the when
index. It remains a matter of judgment to decide whether differences in the environmental
context makes a difference to us or notin a particular time and location. In other words,
our assessments should get chain-indexed too if we want to remain careful evaluators.
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Another extensional device is called dating. With dating we put a date on the terms
and statements that we make. We dont live in a static, timeless world but in a dynamic,
process one. The use of dating reminds us of the individuality of things, people and
events over time and of the necessity of reevaluating from moment to moment. An
extensionally oriented person will treat him/herself in a similar manner to George Bernard
Shaw's tailor: "The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measure
anew each time he sees me, whilst all the rest go on with their old measurements and
expect them to fit me" (K. G. Johnson 13). Thus the state of our knowledge and the
disciplines that we create to organize it may have significantly changed from one time to
another. We can apply a date, knowledge1995, knowledge2012 , etc., to recognize this.
We make use of the term et cetera (etc.) which comes from the Latin for "and other
things." Explicit use of etc. encourages a non-allness attitude towards our theories,
observations, etc. To behave extensionally you can look for and enumerate examples
when you speak and write. After you've done this you still haven't said it all. When you
hear yourself or others saying things like "The only way to treat this problem...", you can
usefully ask yourself: what have I left out?, what else?, what else?, etc. This can help you
stay open to new ways of viewing and doing things, an important aspect of
interdisciplinarity.
You may have noticed my use of single quotes throughout this article. Language
meanings' that we share give words a socio-historical baggage. The inherited implications
of the words we use and of other language structures may represent unquestioned
assumptions about our subject; for example, that meanings' reside in words apart from
the people using them. We can put quotes around a word or phrase as a reminder to stay
alert when using it in order to avoid getting led astray by possible false implications. For
example, if we insist on using the terms `mind' and `body,' `physical' and `mental,'
`thinking' and `feeling,' the use of quotes can aid us in not treating these words as if they
correspond to separate entities that exist in the non-verbal world. As previously noted,
Korzybski discussed in detail the error of "elementalism, the perceptual-conceptual-
verbal splitting of what remains related and unsplit in the non-verbal world. For example,
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I suggest that the disputes between so-called `biological' and `psychological' approaches
in psychiatry, or of biology and culture in anthropology, results from overly-rigid,
elementalistic categorizations in some people's headsnot in the phenomena they study.
We can also use hyphens to connect terms that suggest such a separation of what
exists in the world as a unified process. Restoring such connections, moves us toward a
non-elementalistic perspective in our labelling-perceiving. For instance, a physical
therapist (physiotherapist) cannot work with just the physical since human beings
function as unified psycho-physical organisms. Neither do psychologists or psychiatrists
work on something separate from a body called the mind. In these professions,
becoming aware of elementalistic modes of thinking-speaking and making non-
elementalistic corrections can help nudge us towards a more integrated bio-psycho-social
view. Such language behavior encourages connecting different points of view for a more
accurate understanding of a complex, multi-leveled, but in some sense, unitary
phenomenon.
My wife Susan and I have written about these and the other extensional techniques
elsewhere. (See Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics.)
These methods may seem deceptively childlike and simple. However, when used, they
can foster an awareness of our evaluative processes and can help us as individuals to
function more extensionally in our personal and professional lives. Using the
transdisciplinary formulations and tools of GS, we can look behind the curtains of overly-
restrictive disciplinary divisions and see the unity through method of problems and
solutions. Putting a hyphen between the disciplines, we can move among them and
beyond them.






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Works Cited

Bois, J. Samuel. (1978). The Art of Awareness: A Textbook on General Semantics and
Epistemics. Third Edition. Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Co., 1978.

French, James D. 2002. Editors Essay 2001. General Semantics Bulletin 65-68: 8-10.

Johnson, Kenneth G. 1972. General Semantics: An Outline Survey. San Francisco:
International Society for General Semantics.

Johnson, Wendell. 1956. Your Most Enchanted Listener. New York: Harper & Row.

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