Manhood's Fallacy
May 26, 2013
ⓒ Copyright 2013 by Ralph E. Kenyon, Jr.
27 years after the publication of Manhood of Humanity
Korzybski had nearly three decades to possibly grow his
understanding of science and apply the principles of general
semantics to his upcoming second edition. We see that little
change has been made. I'm not surprised. Both culture
and people follow Newton's first law of motion. (Look it up if you
don't know it.)
Irving M. Klotz, The N-Ray Affair, Scientific American Vol. 242, May
1980 noted:
"Early in this century an eminent physicist discovered a
new kind of radiation, and others confirmed his work. The
radiation turned out to be totally imaginary, proving that
believing can be seeing." p. 168
"Maxwell is said to have observed in an introductory
lecture on light: "There are two theories of the nature of light,
the corpuscle theory and the wave theory; we used to believe in
the corpuscle theory; now we believe in the wave theory because
all those who believed in the corpuscle theory have died." p. 175
In 1950 Korzybski published his considered view in "What I believe"
in the second edition of "Manhood of Humanity".
Remember as you read this what Korzybski wrote in 1950 about what
he wrote.
"This was originally written in 1948 in response
to an invitation from Mr. Krishna Mangesh Talgeri, M.A. of 26, Atul Grove, New Delhi, India,
to contribute to a symposium entitled, The Faith
I Live By. It is to be published soon, and includes such international contributors as
Gandhi, Nehru, Montessori, John H . Holmes, Radhakrishnan and others. I admit
that without Mr. Talgeri's invitation, and the most valuable assistance of
Miss Charlotte Schuchardt, which I wish to gratefully acknowledge, I
would never have undertaken the difficult task of formulating such a
condensed summary of life studies and experiences which any `credo' would
require.
What follows is in the form of a dialogue in which I "answer" the
statements made by a dead nervous system - which is what
time-binding is supposed to be about. As you read this, remember
that it represents Korzybski's views as of 1948 (written) -1950
(published). Thus begins the comment and modern response on this
second addition to Manhood of Humanity.
pp. Xlii
AK: My observations and theoretical studies of life and mathematics,
mathematical foundations, many branches of sciences, also history,
history of cultures, anthropology, `philosophy', `psychology',
`logic', comparative religions, etc., convinced me that:
1) Human evaluations with reference to themselves were mythological
or zoological, or a combination of both; but,
RK: In other words, Humans believe they were either divine creations
of a deity or evolved from lower order animals. The tension between
religion and science was heavy in the context with fighting in the
courts over teaching the bible vs evolution.
AK: 2) Neither of these approaches could give us a workable base for
understanding the living, uniquely human, extremely complex (deeply
inter-related) reactions of Smith1, Smith2, etc., generalized in
such high-order abstractions as `mind', or `intellect' ; and,
RK: Each view did, and still does, have its paradigm, and each
paradigm explains how humans came to be and fit into the world, as
well as well as directly or implicitly places demands on our
behavior, and the adherents of each group managed and still manage
to carry on with their lives. What Korzybski is saying is that
he thought he had a better way to explain "man" as a species.
AK: 3) A functional analysis, free from the old mythological and
zoological assumptions, showed that humans, with the most highly
developed nervous system, are uniquely characterized by the capacity
of an individual or a generation to begin where the former left off.
RK: This characterization suffers from a glossing over of the
difficulties and completely ignoring the amount of learning a child
must go through before he or she can even begin to advance beyond
where his parents (former generation) was continuing to go. Every
person must learn a fraction of the human historical record and
choose a portion - an extremely limited portion - of the information
available to learn and make it his or her own knowledge. Then, and
only then, when he or she can begin to navigate the information maze
with little or no *additional* help from living teachers, will he or
she be able to begin to construct new information that he or she or
other teachers can impart as knowledge in new students.
Information accumulates with every generation, but no human can
learn that information; it is far too vast. A human learns the
basics through the first twenty years of schooling in developed
countries, perhaps ten years in primitive cultures (with much less
information). In all cases, this preliminary learning is through
direct contact with "elders" or others previously so initiated. We
have the capacity to find a limited, very restricted, set of
information that we can learn up to the current frontier of that
information, making it our own knowledge, so we can begin
abstracting to new ideas and contributing to advancing the frontier
by encoding our new knowledge into new recorded information and
expanding the frontier of that recorded information, and hopefully
we, and those we worked with, can use their knowledge of this newly
recorded information to assist others in making this new information
a future copy of the knowledge (in new people) of how to use it.
AK: I called this essential capacity 'time-binding'. This can be
accomplished only by a class of life which uses symbols as means for
time-binding. Such a capacity depends on and necessitates
`intelligence', means of communication, etc.
RK: Korzybski's "Etc.", must include all of the childhood learning
and education involving contact with parents, teachers, role-models,
and others, that brings the child to the state of experience and
knowledge necessary to assimilate even a fraction of the symbolic
information and to know how to use it. But that 'etc.' does not
include "super-intellects" who can assimilate "all" of current human
information, so no-one can begin where the entire generation left
off.
AK: On this inherently human level of interdependence time-binding
leads inevitably to feelings of responsibility, duty toward others
and the future, and therefore to some type of ethics, morals, and
similar social and/or socio-cultural reactions.
RK: Here Korzybski commits the naturalistic fallacy. He is
projecting his own long frustrated longing for peace in a world with
no wars.
Studies have supported kinship altruism (behavior that appears to be
"altruistic" correlates with a survival advantage to the genes in
the pool of related individuals), but otherwise the studies were
ambiguous or conflicting.
Time-binding, the capacity to communicate and to build the supply of
symbolic information about the world and everything humans can think
about and talk about also facilitates all the negative human
actions, beliefs, and behaviors. The more communicating you do, the
more information you will assimilate, including information about
the culture, the economy, the behavior of others, their wealth,
where they keep it, other secrets, and knowing how to "lie" allows
using that information against others as well as for others.
The difference is determined by the values held by the individuals,
and the groups they inhabit, and those values vary across the board
- from murderous through apathy through sacrifice.
So called "time-binding" include all the abilities of humans enhanced
by communications and motives, not just the ones that benefit the
entire species. As a matter of fact, having a variety of value
systems tends to enhance the survival in varying conditions.
In May 2013 Archaeologists revealed corroborating physical evidence
that the 60 Jamestown colonists survived by resorting to human
cannibalism. Korzybski fails to consider the full range of human
activities, and blindly assumes that "Knowledge" [obtained from
information] would be used to benefit everybody whereas human
behavior has shown that the vast majority of the ways information is
used is in survival, which entails competition with peers,
competition for jobs, for homes, for cars, for status, for power,
for "keeping up with the Joneses", etc. The prevalence of cheating
in schools and in colleges shows just one part of this.
Korzybski is going from "is" (in this case his abstracted
description) to "ought" (in this case his long frustrated hatred of
war), picking out his dream of how humanity might be. As long
as we live with any semblance of haves and have-nots in our culture,
there will be a force of conflict and competition. The
difference will push the underdogs to want "a fair and equal
distribution" and it will push the overdogs to protect their
territory, to keep their way of life.
Descriptions of humanity, including as a symbol users building an
ever increasing store of information, can not be abstracted to a
value that that is the way they should behave. Values are relative
to organisms and contexts, and neither is an absolute determinant of
behavior. Nor does thinking about it provide any method of going
from quantified predicate calculus to
deontic logic. It is the
difference in level of abstraction, in fact, it is the incompleteness
theorem of Gödel. Descriptive level can not get to values level
without adding a new axiom, and that axiom, postulate, assumption,
is choosing to value one kind of behavior over another. Different
choices produce different, and conflicting, systems as the evidence
of clashing religions shows. Korzybski commits the naturalistic
fallacy by confusing levels of abstraction between descriptions and
values. Since the major thrust of Manhood of Humanity is
exactly this project of getting humans to "behave better", he has
tripped himself up by committing the fallacy. We know the argument
is flawed. In addition to being fallacious, it tries to do what
Gödel's incompleteness theorem proved cannot be done.
Korzybski needed to treat the prescription as a value to sell to
humans, but trying to take the value choice away with a fallacy, in
violation of Gödel, just works against him. ( It gets worse
when he starts throwing the "animal" label at people who don't
comply. ) Korzybski would need to claim directly that he is
adding a value to the description and advocating its behavior - but
that has already been done as with the "golden rule", and you just
have to look around to see how effective that was absorbed. I have
my reasons for accepting it, but they do not include the fallacious
idea that it follows in a logical and scientific way from my symbol
use cooperation. I got it at my mother's knee, but I also
chose to keep it, because it promises less conflict and stress, but
based on the actions of bullies in high school, it does not protect
me from that hostile action. I was forced on one occasion to
resort to their tactics, and punch the kid in the nose, just to stop
them from abusing me. It took a couple of these incidents to
to "establish" that I was not at the bottom of the pecking
order. In doing so, I did not feel proud, but it did gain me
some peace for the rest of school. So even choosing such a value in
a culture of varied value systems does not guarantee what Korzybski
BELIEVED would follow "logically" from his "time-binding nature" of
humankind.
AK: In the time-binding orientation I took those characteristics for
granted as the empirical end-products of the functioning of the
healthy human nervous system.
RK: He has swallowed his own fallacy, succumbed to his own
propaganda, hoisting himself by his own petard. The use of this
fallacy and the constant and continued repetition as a "science of
man" becomes a broken record with a broken message.
AK: It was a fundamental error of the old evaluations to postulate
`human nature' as `evil'. `Human nature' depends to a large extent
on the character of our creeds or rationalizations, etc., for these
ultimately build up our socio-cultural and other environments.
RK: He's misrepresenting multiple views. Humans have been described
as "moral" by religions, as "evil" in the characterization of the
evolutionists by the religious and amoral by relativists, as well as
simply relativists. But we can agree with him that human "behavior"
depends on these things. We can't know what "human nature" means,
because if we thought we did, we would simply have a model that
would be either scientific (and testable) or not scientific (and
hence a matter of faith). In true Gödel fashion we have many
value systems, especially religions, most of which clash with each
other, because their primary "value" axiom is stated differently,
and expanded with multiple cultures. Korzybski seems to ignore the
value systems which deny that man is "evil". Well, presenting
half the story (lying by omission) is part of propaganda,
salesmanship, competition with other views (Oh, look at that - he's
behaving in Animalistic competitive manners trying to "sell" his
view).
AK I believe that our approaches to the problems of humans have been
vitiated by primitive methods of evaluation which still often
dominate our attitudes and outlooks.
RK: ("Bad" habits of thinking - no longer used in science.)
Also, Korzybski's paradigm did not include evolutionary
epistemology. His view was basically a fusion of Logical Positivism
and Nihilism where Logical Positivism builds on observation and
Nihilism accounts for the inability to "know" what is going on.
The parabola in the structural differential represents the unknown
(epidemiological nihilism) and the remainder, object and label
levels
represent what we "know". I would add that the "knowledge" is
strictly internal to people, hence resides at non-verbal levels.
Once verbal levels are transitions into symbols, they become mere
information, as the "knowledge" cannot be removed from the nervous
system of the beholder. Each of us has our own unique "knowledge",
caused by interaction with what is going on, but not of what is
going on. It is merely our model to use for predicting future
experiences, which sometimes works and sometimes does not.
AK: With a time-binding consciousness, our criteria of values, and
so behavior, are based on the study of human potentialities, not on
statistical averages on the level of homo homini lupus drawn from
primitive and/or un-sane semantic (evaluational) reactions which are
on record.
RK: Often enough values are determined by behavior, the reverse of
Korzybski's order; however, as I showed above, values do not follow
from the description of humans as time-binders, so consciousness
that we bind time, and how we bind time, has no bearing on what is
valued, other than as it facilitates our survival. Studying human
potentialities - what we could do, can include nefarious conflicts
and how to win just as easily as how to cooperate. Korzybski
is
again applying the naturalistic fallacy and assuming that the study
of human potentialities will show better results than what?
Moreover, studying "potential" is studying projections of the person
doing the studying. Potentials are not observations.
Potentials are conjectures. This is about as pure an
intentional orientation as one can get. We would need
experiments with tests to gain something extensional to study.
Secondly he couples "statistical averages" with human predators, and
assumes that all records of human behavior have not used scientific
methods. We are lead to follow his implication that the statistical
averages on record are primitive and un-sane. I dare say the
bureaus of prisons would disagree. If it weren't for knowledge
of the naturalistic fallacy, we might have been sucked in long ago,
but everything is contaminated by the naturalistic fallacy, which as
I note above is also related to Gödel's incompleteness
theorems.
AK: Instead of studying elementalistic `thinking', `feeling',
`intellect, `emotion', etc., a misguiding approach implying the
inherited archaic, artificial, divisions or schizophrenic splits of
human characteristics which actually cannot be split, I investigated
functionally and therefore non-elementalistically the
psycho-biological mechanisms of time-binding-how they work.
RK: This what we call psychobabble. The notion of elementalism,
defined as "split[ting] ... characteristics which actually cannot be
split." All the words we use abstract some characteristics,
which we wish to examine both as differentiated from their context
as well as in relation to other abstractions in the concept.
Calling the use of a word an "elementalism" suggest that we should
not use the word or talk about the characteristic. Where would
we be if we could not talk about hydrogen and oxygen separately
because they were "elementalism", and we were forced to speak only
of water? We cannot examine a structure at a lower level of
abstraction if we cannot differentiate it into sub-structures and
look at the relations among those sub-structures and how they
contribute to understanding the whole. We have "thinking and
feeling", and how we talk about each depends on how we differentiate
them, and how we characterize each. They are, after all, maps, and
we know the map is not the territory; what's more, we do not know
what "actually" "is", so any claim that something "actually can not
be split" confuses the map with the territory. Neither we nor
Korzybski knows what "actually is the case" with regard to any
"territory" our words are are chosen to abstract characteristics
from.
The attitude theory of emotions by Nina Bull provides a structuring
for motor attitude, well described in her experiments, feelings, as
identified by subjects with specific labels (words) and behavior as
described by trained observers. If you always have to put
think-feel together, you are only allowed to talk about the higher
level of abstraction in a context in which getting more extensional
was the entire purpose of the experiments. Virtually all so-called
"elementalisms" are arbitrary prohibitions on taking the perspective
and discussion to a more extensional level, which, by the way, is
one of general semantics specified means of resolving conflict. Characteristics of human behavior are abstraction
we make to be more extensional - to address some part of human
interaction a) in isolation so as to formulate it, b) in relation to
other abstractions, c) to hypothesize and consider a structural
model to account for some of the overall behavior, and d) to devises
way of testing the model.
In Korzybski's time this may have been thought of as "dissecting"
human experience. During the early part of the twentieth
century "scientific management" was taking complete control of
workers, down to specifying what finger movement to make when. This
"Taylorism", dehumanizing human workers in the name of total
management control for efficiency, dominated in the 1910's and
20's. The humanity of the workers was irrelevant. Also,
various theories of society supposedly applying biological concepts
to sociology and politics from the 1870's on became known in 1944 as
"social Darwinism" a pejorative term opposing those "mechanistic and
amoral" characterizations of humans. This process literally
showed that humans could be and were characterized as "nothing but
(more intelligent) *animals*". "SCIENCE" was stripping
humanity of humanity, and the religious backlash included the
"Scopes Monkey Trial" (1925). By claiming in "Manhood of
Humanity" that, with a new way of looking at people, animals, and
plants, science could abstract a scientific human system of ethics
and values. It would also counteract the claim that "Man was
just an animal" by showing a way to see man as majorly different
from animals without having to resort to religion to do so.
The dimensions of chemistry, space, and time, which directly
paralleled the hard science physics MASS, LENGTH, and TIME
dimensions, promised to restore humanity to its exalted status
"above" the animals, and put science on par with the religions that
already offered that status. So Manhood of Humanity
counteracted the dehumanizing work of management, of social
Darwinism (before it was called that), and simple science that only
classified us in mineral, plant, and animal. It did it, however, by
selling a fallacy in the name of science. But human nature,
being what it "is", (which we cannot say), went right on behaving as
it does with more great acts and more horrendous acts, and more
science, some of which proved that there can be no such human
science based ethical and value system, because the values are
independent of the descriptions, leading to the ability to have
various different ethical and value systems. So, we still have
all the religious and nonreligious ethical and value system that
co-exis - often in conflict, some of which have the value to wipe
out all others. Logic will not solve the problems because we live in
symbolic and semantic environments superimposed on top of physical
environments.