Thomas wrote I think of 'appropriate' and 'inappropriate' in the context of GS as applying to human vs. animal responses. AK often refers to humans copying animals nervous reactions and this is the standard to which you refer, I believe.
To begin with, what Korzybski described humans as is a "map", and we all know that the map is not the territory. When we start saying humans "ought" to behave the way this (or that) particular map "describes" humans, such as behaving in the manner that the map says is "not animalistic", amounts to using the map as a prescription for affecting the territory. The "map" (description) becomes an "ought" that tells people to behave in a certain way, and thence forth future descriptions of observed behavior will have a tendendency to remain consistent with what was originally a description. This kind of map become as "self-fulfilling" prophesy. With respect to the natural world it is called the "naturalistic fallacy" - to go from "is" to "ought".

Ben, recall the time-bound usage for appropriate. Note that it has as part of its core structure the character of relativeness to some situation, purpose, or use. In other words, "appropriate" implies the existence of some standard relative to the situation, purpose, use, etc.

When someone uses "appropriate" or "inapproprate" they are assuming both the existence of some standard as well as that the reader will be able to bring "the same" standard to bear.

Hearing the word "appropriate" without an explicit citation of a standard should raise a red flag to indicate an unspecified and assumed abstraction that represents an unknown that could be a source of disagreement.

I agree with you that anyone asserting something is "appropriate" or not is making or accepting a judgement as to what standards apply - and doing so implicitly, and perhaps unconsciously, possibly resulting in "externalizing" the responsibility for the judgement. There are hidden levels of abstraction beneath "appropriate" or "inappropriate".

So far, to the best of my knowledge, the Institute of general semantics has limited any official declaration of "appropriatness" with respect to persons' behavior to the simple statement of attendence at seminars. It does not have any standards of completion other than payment and attendance. Even completing two "advanced" coures does not get "certification" of anything more than "completing the requirements".

"... go by what Korzybski says?" . . .

Do we have any agreement as to what he said other than exact quotes? Do we have any paraphrased interpretation published as "official"?

....

What double bind research has been conducted to validate the so-called "critical inference tests"? Any? Anthing other than a few anecdotal reports highly abstracted by proponents? Where is there any scientific attempt to validate that these sets of questions actually measure anything? What do the scores corelate with?

While I agree with much of what Nora wrote, "appropriate" goes with "success" or "desired" and "inappropriate goes with "failure" or "undesired".

When we describe "appropriate" as to a "purpose", or "use" we are already at a very high - though implicit - level of abstraction that presupposes an entity capable of having a purpose - which is essentially a reason for doing something with something towward achieving an end - usually the satisfaction of a need - low or high level - of a mobile life form. The same applies when we use "appropriate" with respect to a situation. It generally applies to a behavior of a mobile organism.

An organism designes a tool for the purpose of accomplishing some task that ultimately contributes to its ability to survive or reproduce. This is description of an act that includes an infernce to a "hidden variable" as a shorhanded way of describing things.

An organism creates a tool.
The tool allows extracting food from places where the organism cannot reach without the tool.
This allows the organism to gain more food than one without such a tool. This allows the organism to survive longer, reproduce more often, and have more offspring. The genes that allow such creativity can remain in the gene pool longer.

No telology in the description - nor is the abstract word purpose used.

The following "values" are accepted by "science".

Occham's Razor
Explanations must be consistent.
Explanations must be testable.
Disconfirmed explanations are discarded.
Observations must be repeatable and "independently" verifiable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#Essential_criteria

"Appropriate" has no useful meaning outside of a context.

Thomas wrote No Ralph, we are using the map to navigate the territory - big difference. People ignorant of GS will not see behaviour in the same light as people familiar with the "map" of GS, obviously. You may think you are using the map which describes a difference and labels it a difference between people and animals as navigation, but when you or anyone says "do this like these" or "don't do these behaviors" that is no longer just "navigating". It is specifying behavior, and future observations of such specified behavior is seen as corroborating the original descriptive map when it has the structure of a self closing system. Look at Piaget's studies of child development. These have become unquestionable prescriptions for how to teach the young. Lawrence Kohlberg emphasized the naturalistic fallacy - may have coined the term? - to go from "is" to "ought". When you are pointing at a map and saying this is how you ought to behave, that is different from saying IF you go this way you will arive here and IF you go that way you will arrive there. The later two are navigating; whereas saying you should go "here" is not navigating. Your argument is a straw-man argument that confuses levels of abstraction.

Ben, I agree with you. "Appropriatness" is very simply an indicator of a value judgement - and a relative one at that. Science can be used to classify values, and it can be used to show how the behaviors of certain organisms can be interpreted as predictive of future behaviors - for which a hiddent intermediat "value" is postulated. But science makes not effort to create such values. I have already pointed out what some men of science hold to be values - and by association - "values of science".

Korzybski was silent on the topic of deontic logic. Said logic makes no attempt to specify the contents of obligations or permissions - only the relations among them. They are written as additional operators "O(x)" and "P(x)", and they would not be needed if the logic of description were adequate to specify oughts. Korzybski claimed that general semantics could provide the basis for an ethical system for mankind. When he did so, he stepped outside the boundaries of science - which is concerned with "knowing" what "is". He was, in essence, going against the principles of deontic logicy by committing the natualistic fallacy, although he did not actually specify what we "should" do. General semantics, according to the Institute in several different formulations is "modern, applied, open, epistemology" - and that is current, useful, subject to change, how we know what we know. It is also not what we shold do, whether what we should do is or is not based on what we think we know. There is a fairly sharp level of abstraction differencece between what we know, and what the consequences might be for what we do, and saying that we "should" do anything in particular, whether it be based on our current knowledge models or not. (Science and/contrastetd with [take you pick] religion, mysticism, voodo, cultural norms, ethics, etc.}

The difference is in being versus becoming. There is no natural force that connects the two - not since telology was superceded. Religion, values, beliefs (non-scientific), all provide a connection, but science does not, per se, provide one, and Korzybski's claim is essentially vacant.

You, and may other general semantics, may say that "it is good" NOT to behave like animals. That is such a value judgement, belief, etc., but it is not based on descriptions. It requires a jump to a higher level - like getting from a flat two-dimensional figure to a three-dimensional one. Nothing in the two dimensions can get you there; you have to introduce an external point.

The same is true of description and prescription. Nothing from description can get you from "is" to "ought", and it is a fallacy to think so - the "naturalistic fallacy". "We have a certain 'nature', therefore we 'ought' to behave according to our 'nature'". "Having such and such a 'nature' is not the same as 'knowing' what that 'nature' is, and any such statement is a mere map; maps are notoriously, so commanding one to behave according to the map will include commandments to behave contrary to the nature where the map is wrong, and if we so behave, we will get future descriptions that are more wrong maps.

Thomas, Korzybski "theorized" that performing the map of certain behaviors would result in dangers. And he went on to claim that these behaviers "were" (ARE) the "TRUE" nature of man. Wrong! They are a HYPOTHESIS as to man, and they were strongly biased by the desire or need to show something that could compete with religion and thus save "science" from being "valueless". (Look at Social Darwinism in the preceeding decades.) Remember that "Figures never lie" and "Liars never figure". Politics/propagand is an art of presenting almost anything so that it appears to be in agreement with the values of the target audience. It used to be call "rhetoric" - the art of making the weaker side appear the stronger.

The target audience here "believes in" Korzybski. For me EVERYTHING is open to question.

Ben, I understand your aversion to "appropriate", it has been thrown at me like a club altogether too often in the form of "inappropriate" with respect to my beliefs, values, actions, etc., by peopele who just held different values, but were largely intolerant. As I said earlier when you hear the word "appropriate" or "inappropriate" consider it a ref-flag indicator that somebody has a hidden value or value system and that may or may not be different from yours, but it indicates that the person using the word has "externalized" responsibility for judging the behavior to something other than themselves - namely a hidden or unconscious standard or value system. This is partly influenced by the American democrating culture - one of non-interference with others behavior. Consider the reaction to "You shouldn't do that!" - "Says who?!", "Don't do that!" - "Who are you to tell me what to do!?", "Please don't do that." - "Sorry, it's my right.", "That's wrong." - "Bull!"; "That's inappropriate." - "Oops...". or "Sorry." "That's 'inappropriate'." takes the issue of domininace or control out of the picture and externalizes the judgement of wrongness, so that the respondent can't focus on the speaker as the source of control. With general semantics consciousness of awareness, we can recognize that not only is some relative standard being appealed to, but the speaker may be unaware of being influenced by that alegged standard. My response now-a-days is "Why?" or "Why not?" to direct the person's focus back self-reflexively. If the respones is not a coherent reason, then you know that the person is not conscious of his or her abstractions with respect to the particular value involved.

Consider the question "Why?" or "Why not?" a general semantict tool to bring a little bit of consciousness of abstracting to light.

The definition of "Science" accepted by the Institute of General semantics (at least until recently) is Popper's characterization. Theory statement make predictions capably of falsifying the theory, and these are tested. There is a LOT of "wiggle room" and ambiguity in the high level abstractions in which general semantics is expressed.

If I do X, and the theory states X causes Y, and I then observe NOT Y, in fact something incompatible with Y, then the theory is "proved" false by modus tolens, which Stuart Mayper liked to call "Popper's chopper" to be in parallel construction with Occahm's Razor.

Correlations observed do not constitute solid theories that can be so tested; in those cases we need confidence limits and various tests comparing against the probabilities due to chance. We only end up with probable theories with a statistical corroboraton within a confidence interval. We cannot say the theory in question is either true or false, so Popper's definition is only probabalistically applicable.

Many so-called general semanticists seem to take this wishy-washy approach to the proof or disproof of general semantics, but that cannot be done, because proof and disproof - even corroboration and disconformation is a binary - two-valued - concept, whereas prabablistic thinking has no absolutes. A coin with its edge sharpened to the consistency of a razor blade, flipped, and bounced on a level steel plate has an infintesimal probability of remaining on it's edge when dropped. We can flip such a coin a million times, and come up with ratio that is not exactly .5, but we cannot say for sure that any such measure is the "actual" probablity for that coin to come up heads. We can say that the coin is fair to within .000001 (for example), but we cannot say that the coin is fair (with no qualification interval).

Science, as a system for deducing and testing theories from observation, does not say what one ought to do. Where Korzybski does, he deviates from science. Where general semanticists do, they deviate from science.

There are many facets to general semantic - what has been published and advocated under the name - and many if not most of them are not science - behavior, perhaps, but not a scientific theory of human behavior.

The structural differential represents an abstraction of salient structural features common to both the human nervous system processing and the growth of the cultural repository of "knowledge".

Both grow by testing new ideas, and tentatively keeping the ones that work. - This is the abstract descriptive map represented in the structural differential. But it requires much more amplification, and people attempt to use it as a prescriptive device to support certain content behaviors. Then it is no longer science.

It just isn't appropriate to classify general semantics as a science when you include any prescription as to what to do.

The definition of "Science" accepted by the Institute of General semantics (at least until recently) is Popper's characterization. Theory statements make predictions capably of falsifying the theory, and these are tested. There is a LOT of "wiggle room" and ambiguity in the high level abstractions in which general semantics is expressed.

If I do X, and the theory states X causes Y, and I then observe NOT Y, in fact something incompatible with Y, then the theory is "proved" false by modus tolens, which Stuart Mayper liked to call "Popper's chopper" to be in parallel construction with Occahm's Razor.

Correlations observed do not constitute solid theories that can be so tested; in those cases we need confidence limits and various tests comparing against the probabilities due to chance. We only end up with probable theories with a statistical corroboraton within a confidence interval. We cannot say the theory in question is either true or false, so Popper's definition is only probabalistically applicable.

Many so-called general semanticists seem to take this wishy-washy approach to the proof or disproof of general semantics. But that cannot be done, because proof and disproof - even corroboration and disconformation is a binary - two-valued - concept, whereas prabablistic thinking has no absolutes. A coin with its edge sharpened to the consistency of a razor blade, flipped, and bounced on a level steel plate has an infintesimal but non-zero probability of remaining on it's edge when dropped. We can flip such a coin a million times, and come up with ratio that is not exactly .5, but we cannot say for sure that any such measure is the "actual" probablity for that coin to come up heads. We can say that the coin is fair to within .000001 (for example), but we cannot say that the coin is fair (with no qualification interval).

For practical purposes we treat the world mostly in terms of abstractions that go all the way to binary distinctions. "Theory: Turning the key starts my car". We deviate from this binary orientation only when the maps at that level fail. [Or, if we are general semanticists, when a fellow general semanticist chides us for doing so.] Who seriously considers that an ordinary coin may land on its edge when using such an ordinary coin to make a choice?

The moral of the story is that we are conditioned by evolution to be energy efficient, and that means using a map the level of abstraction of which readily conform in structure to our perceptions and actions. We simply don't want a map that shows every street and house number when we want to go across the country. It would take too much energy and time to process. Give us a map that only shows the major high-level abstractions relevant to our task.

Language, with its classification systems, and logic, with its abstraction potential, gives us "quick and dirty" maps that have a high degree of reliability. Even a number of logical fallacies correlate with the desired result often enough to be thoroughly ingrained in our "ordinary" reasoning. Jumping to conclusions "work" often enough to be rewarding, even though it is not logically sound. Even "affirming the consequent" has operational frequency of success high enough for many people to not realize that it's a fallacy, until trained in (formal) logic.

The upshot is that "poor" reasoning works often enough to fall under the behaviorist ruberic of "random reinforcement", and much of that require little "(rational) thought".

For Ben and Nora,
As moderators of this forum, presumably with some real or "artificial" standing in general semantics as a result of that "status", I would think that you would choose to become well versed in both the philosophy of science and in Korzybski's proclamations about science - if nothing more than to be able to represent both "accurately" - regardless of what you may personally desire science to be "best formulated as". For two "representatives" of the Institute of General Semantics to "find [each other's] evaluation both of 'science' and of AK's use of the term so far from [their own] that [they] seem to be talking two different languages," seems to me a disservice. This would be the place-time for a joint research project cumulating in a report to the Institute that satisfies academic requirements for citations that can demonstrate that using general semantics can allow two seemingly disparate perspectives to use extensional methods to arrive at something that the Institute could publish as its "approved" formulation for what is meant by the term science in official general semantics formulations. What does it say about the so-called cooperative nature of humans as compared with the competitive nature of animals when one or both "disputants" withdraws without working towards a joint understanding?

I personally would like to see what common, joint, agred to result the two of you might come up with as a cooperative project.

Feel free to quote or paraphrase Humpty Dumpty.

Please ignore the duplication. I seem to have started with an incomplete post that had already gone through.

The title "Science and Sanity" probably means something like how we might use science to effect or improve sanity.


I have a treasure map. It shows bird seed as one treasure. It shows worms as another treasure. It shows birds as another treasure. It shows gold as another treasure. It shows many other treausures and how to get there. It is written in many languages includig such things as non verbal and non-lexical signs, such as a trail of bread crumbs. Many different species can use the map, but each species chooses a different treasure to go to. The map makes no provision for what is a treasure either (those words were mine to get your attention).

As a result somethings are sought and some are avoided by different species.

The map is science. It does not say anything about what treasure anybody should go for. It's only a how-to that anybody can use.

(And it's incomplete and in error).

Thomas,
The fewer words you use the more abstract the map, and hence the more ambiguity in the formulation. Time-binding requires some semblance of commonality of usage, and that means associating terms with non-verbal actions and objects - extensional, and lower order abstractions. "Definitions" allow expanding a single word "down the abstraction order" to lower levels involving more words. Only when participants agree on the words and their order in such an expansion do the participants have any hope of being talking about the "same" "thing" or "experience". Nora and Ben likely have a much smaller "shared" vocabulary and experience - due to age, gender, profession, history, etc..

My academic specialization area is metaphysics and epistemology with a special focus on mathematics, logic, and the philosophy of science, and I took that route because of my prior exposure to general semantics. Prior to that my "field" was nuclear propulsion engineering, mathematics, management, and computer science.

I don't expect anyone to take my word for what science, logic, mathematics, epistemology, etc., "is", but I can point them to various time-binding sources as I have found useful or interesting.

The more exposure I have to people in the general semantics community the more intensionality I seem to encounter and the less hope I have of seeing a functioning cooperating community with shared goals and a common purpose.

I will be gone for a few days - at the annual "Danse Sport Montreal" competition, and I'm getting more and more inclined to spend more time dancing than reading (and writing ) intractable opinions.

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Not only is this not true but it represents an attitude that leads to constant arguments about terms.

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Time-binding requires some semblance of commonality of usage, and that means associating terms with non-verbal actions and objects - extensional, and lower order abstractions. "Definitions" allow expanding a single word "down the abstraction order" to lower levels involving more words. Only when participants agree on the words and their order in such an expansion do the participants have any hope of being talking about the "same" "thing" or "experience".

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