Semantics and its scientific implications for sanity --- Your definition, Mohammad, is a useful approach to prompt our thinking about the discipline of semantics. Published in 1948 Alfred Korzybski proposed what was then a new understanding of semantics based on the training of the human nervous system.

His seminal text is entitled “Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics” (4th edition, 1973, Institute of General Semantics).

In Korzybski’s introduction to the 2nd edition he writes:

“General semantics is not any ‘philosophy’, or ‘psychology’, or ‘logic’, in the ordinary sense: it is a new extensional discipline which explains and trains us how to use our nervous systems most efficiently. It is not a medical science, but like bacteriology, it is indispensable for medicine in general, and for psychiatry, mental hygiene, and education."

"In brief, it is the formulation of a new non-Aristotelian system of orientation which affects every branch of science and life. The separate issues involved are not entirely new; their methodological formulation as a system which is workable, teachable, and so elementary that it can be applied by children, is entirely new.”

I hope we may explore your ideas using a semantic map to traverse the terrain of language and diplomacy.

Source author: John D. Hipsley jhipsley@igc.org