General Semantics: Your Own Un-Reality

Welcome to Part 4 of my exploration of my introductory series on General Semantics.

The Structural Differential
Korzybski wrote about 500 pages in his Science and Sanity before he touched upon the Structural Differential, since people were so entrenched in their way of confusing words with objects, partial facts with total realities. In Science he says that adults would have a hard time digesting the various premises of the Structural Differential, declaring it more useful in the education of children, so their semantic reactions could be corrected before they were entrenched in thinking and acting using Aristotelian logic by adolescence.

Here it is, in all its odd shaped glory.

E stands for an event in space-time. The event or object has multifarious and indefinite characteristics on the microscopic and macroscopic levels. The scene which one sees/hears/feels is not the complete picture. (O - object, non-verbal reaction) This is all one can sense on the objective, silent level. The strings tie our awareness of this information to the different levels. As you can see, some strings from the E level do not make it to the objective "O" level. Then, once we introduce words to label such an event or object. (D - verbal name) For instance, using Hayakawa's example of "Bessie the cow" we identify Bessie (D) as a "cow" (I1 - inferential level) which is part of an abstraction "livestock" (I2 - general level) which can be abstracted even further to "commodity" (I3 - higher-level abstractions) which can continue indefinitely. Using the Structural Differential is essential in developing the consciousness of abstraction.

This consciousness is the awareness that words cannot ever accurately describe the totality of an object, event or person etc., (what Robert Anton Wilson would call "sombunallism" - that we can only know some, but not all of what we know) and that we abstract certain parts of our experience without touching an objective, non-verbal level (the "silence" in your mind when one perceives something) that can develop imbalances in our thinking, neurosis and what Korzybski struggled all his life to prevent - unsanity.

Next time: Preventing unsanity - GS and its links to therapeutic and cognitive psychology

References
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, Institute of General Semantics, 1950, 4th edition.
Language in Thought and Action: Fourth Edition, Samuel I. Hayakawa, Harcourt, 1972.
The New Inquisition, Robert Anton Wilson, New Falcon Publications, 1986.