S. I. Hayakawa was a way better writer—that’s where I got all my reprocessed Korzybski as a kid, and that’s where I point people: Language in Thought and Action instead of Science and Sanity. I tried once to read the latter book as a kid, after being referred to it by Null-A. I was probably about… eleven years old? Thirteen? I gave up very, very rapidly, which I did not do for physics texts with math in them.
I won’t argue with the literary analysis; K was stupendously tedious. I can’t think of anyone more tiresome, although I have a feeling that his style was in vogue with various systematizers in the first half of the 20th century. I remember similar pain in reading Buckminster Fuller and Lugwig Von Mises, though I couldn’t finish Fuller (tried him in my teens), and Von Mises wasn’t quite as awful. Someone in the body awareness field as well—Joseph Pilates or Alexander. Less sure on the last one.
I trudged through Science and Sanity, often gritting my teeth, and think it was worth it.
My impression of Hayakawa is that he takes the conclusions but leaves out the metamodel which generates the conclusions and ties them together. I felt that K gave me a way of thinking, while Hayakawa packaged a lot of results, but left out the way of thinking. I read K first, so Hayakawa tasted like relatively weak tea and didn’t leave a big impression.
K was more meaty particularly on the Science/Mathematics side. Mathematics as an abstraction of functional relations of actions in the world—I don’t know if it was literally tossing pebbles in a bucket, but it was close. It was the physical action of counting. Science as a semantic enterprise—finding new semantic structures to model world. Space-Time as providing a static view of dynamic change. There was something good on differential equations too, something like reductionist locality turning nonlinear relations into linear relations. It’s been almost 20 years now, so I’m a little hazy.
Anyway, I’d recommend at least having a serious chat with someone well versed in the mathematical and scientific side of Korzybski and Science and Sanity, as there is a lot of good stuff in there that doesn’t get a lot of attention even from the General Semantics crowd, who, like Hayakawa, focus on the verbal aspects of the theory.
Thank you for this response. This has removed a confusion I’ve had since I’ve come to the site.
You say in the article:
Sometimes it still amazes me to contemplate that this proverb was invented at some point, and some fellow named Korzybski invented it,
At least in my recollection, you refer to AK as the inventor of “The Map is not the Territory” when you bring it up, and that always gave me the impression that you had read him. But then I would be puzzled because many of the other things he said were appropriate to the conversation, and you wouldn’t bring up those at all. And you didn’t even mention Hayakawa in the article.
When someone mentions an author as the originator of an idea they’re talking about, I assume he has read them, and bring that context to a reading of what they have written in turn. It would have been helpful to me if you had identified Hayakawa and Langauge in Thought in Action as where you had been exposed to the idea, distinguishing that from where Hayakawa had gotten the idea—AK. Maybe there aren’t a lot of people who have actually read AK, but I think it would be a good general practice to make your sources clear to your readers.
For me it was Heinlein --> Korzybski --> van Vogt in my early teens. I doggedly ploughed through Korzybski, but the curious thing is, in my early twenties I reread him, and found him, not exactly light reading, but far clearer than he had been on my first attempt.
S. I. Hayakawa was a way better writer—that’s where I got all my reprocessed Korzybski as a kid, and that’s where I point people: Language in Thought and Action instead of Science and Sanity. I tried once to read the latter book as a kid, after being referred to it by Null-A. I was probably about… eleven years old? Thirteen? I gave up very, very rapidly, which I did not do for physics texts with math in them.
I won’t argue with the literary analysis; K was stupendously tedious. I can’t think of anyone more tiresome, although I have a feeling that his style was in vogue with various systematizers in the first half of the 20th century. I remember similar pain in reading Buckminster Fuller and Lugwig Von Mises, though I couldn’t finish Fuller (tried him in my teens), and Von Mises wasn’t quite as awful. Someone in the body awareness field as well—Joseph Pilates or Alexander. Less sure on the last one.
I trudged through Science and Sanity, often gritting my teeth, and think it was worth it.
My impression of Hayakawa is that he takes the conclusions but leaves out the metamodel which generates the conclusions and ties them together. I felt that K gave me a way of thinking, while Hayakawa packaged a lot of results, but left out the way of thinking. I read K first, so Hayakawa tasted like relatively weak tea and didn’t leave a big impression.
K was more meaty particularly on the Science/Mathematics side. Mathematics as an abstraction of functional relations of actions in the world—I don’t know if it was literally tossing pebbles in a bucket, but it was close. It was the physical action of counting. Science as a semantic enterprise—finding new semantic structures to model world. Space-Time as providing a static view of dynamic change. There was something good on differential equations too, something like reductionist locality turning nonlinear relations into linear relations. It’s been almost 20 years now, so I’m a little hazy.
Anyway, I’d recommend at least having a serious chat with someone well versed in the mathematical and scientific side of Korzybski and Science and Sanity, as there is a lot of good stuff in there that doesn’t get a lot of attention even from the General Semantics crowd, who, like Hayakawa, focus on the verbal aspects of the theory.
Thank you for this response. This has removed a confusion I’ve had since I’ve come to the site.
You say in the article:
At least in my recollection, you refer to AK as the inventor of “The Map is not the Territory” when you bring it up, and that always gave me the impression that you had read him. But then I would be puzzled because many of the other things he said were appropriate to the conversation, and you wouldn’t bring up those at all. And you didn’t even mention Hayakawa in the article.
When someone mentions an author as the originator of an idea they’re talking about, I assume he has read them, and bring that context to a reading of what they have written in turn. It would have been helpful to me if you had identified Hayakawa and Langauge in Thought in Action as where you had been exposed to the idea, distinguishing that from where Hayakawa had gotten the idea—AK. Maybe there aren’t a lot of people who have actually read AK, but I think it would be a good general practice to make your sources clear to your readers.
For me it was Heinlein --> Korzybski --> van Vogt in my early teens. I doggedly ploughed through Korzybski, but the curious thing is, in my early twenties I reread him, and found him, not exactly light reading, but far clearer than he had been on my first attempt.