but so far all you’ve done is to observe that my writing doesn’t conform to some rules associated with him (I’m not sure whether they’re his or his followers’) which I currently see no sufficient reason to endorse.
Yes, I’m not trying to demonstrate that something is true but I’m trying to illustrate what Korzybyski’s ideas are about.
In the present case, note that “Is that all wrong?” is equivalent to “Does all that have the property of wrongness?” which doesn’t (either implicitly or explicitly) contain an “is”.
The issue is more that the word is appears. Right/Wrong is black-and-white dichotomous thinking.
Maps are not right or wrong but have degrees of accuracy in mapping certain teritory and usefulness for navigating the territory.
You will find somewhere a claim that humans have rougly 12 billion neurons. That happens to be clearly wrong and humans have more neurons but it doesn’t matter much to the main thesis and it’s not what makes reading the book hard.
Most sentence of the book are not clearly right or wrong. Mostly what’s driven the kind of criticism that Martin Gardner gives is not that Korzybyski says thinks that are easily shown to be wrong but that Korzybyski says things, where it’s not clear what point Korzybyski tries to make.
It’s a bit like reading a Zen Koan. You don’t ask yourself: “Is this claim wrong?” but “What is the author trying to tell me?”
I wonder what led you to see a “charge of not having influenced anybody” in what I wrote. It seems to me a rather curious error.
I refer to the quote “The simple reason is that Korzybyski made no contributions of significance to any of the fields about which he wrote with such seeming erudition”.
says things where it’s not clear what point Korzybyski tries to make
This sort of writing is only worth the effort of engaging with if there’s enough useful or interesting content there to warrant it. So we come back to my question: is there more there than if think from e.g. what Gardner wrote? This still isn’t clear to me.
I refer to the quote [...]
… which doesn’t say anything about whether he influenced anybody. At least, not when interpreted the way I meant it. Do you define “making a contribution of significance” to mean”influencing people”?
Yes, I’m not trying to demonstrate that something is true but I’m trying to illustrate what Korzybyski’s ideas are about.
The issue is more that the word is appears. Right/Wrong is black-and-white dichotomous thinking. Maps are not right or wrong but have degrees of accuracy in mapping certain teritory and usefulness for navigating the territory.
You will find somewhere a claim that humans have rougly 12 billion neurons. That happens to be clearly wrong and humans have more neurons but it doesn’t matter much to the main thesis and it’s not what makes reading the book hard.
Most sentence of the book are not clearly right or wrong. Mostly what’s driven the kind of criticism that Martin Gardner gives is not that Korzybyski says thinks that are easily shown to be wrong but that Korzybyski says things, where it’s not clear what point Korzybyski tries to make.
It’s a bit like reading a Zen Koan. You don’t ask yourself: “Is this claim wrong?” but “What is the author trying to tell me?”
I refer to the quote “The simple reason is that Korzybyski made no contributions of significance to any of the fields about which he wrote with such seeming erudition”.
Yes, I already addressed this.
This sort of writing is only worth the effort of engaging with if there’s enough useful or interesting content there to warrant it. So we come back to my question: is there more there than if think from e.g. what Gardner wrote? This still isn’t clear to me.
… which doesn’t say anything about whether he influenced anybody. At least, not when interpreted the way I meant it. Do you define “making a contribution of significance” to mean”influencing people”?