Что такое общая семантика?, и какая от неё польза народному хозяйству Опции

[Oleg Matveev]

Из глоссария Роберта Пулы, достаточно исчерпывающее... надеюсь, даже основ английского вполне достаточно для того, чтобы его корректно воспроизвести:

General-semantics can be called a system, i.e., a set of related propositions (statements), first formulated by Alfred Korzybski in his major cumulative work, Science and Sanity, published in 1933. Korzybski's system is concerned throughout with what he called structure: a complex of relations. The structures (relations, orderings, often complex) Korzybski most concerned himself with may be laid out as follows:

structure1 — the non-verbal world as given by physics, neuro-biology, etc., i.e., the responsible self-challenging sciences at a given date, moving cumulatively (time-binding) to the on-going present.
structure2 — the human organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment-at-a-given-date, particularly focussed with relation to its highly-evolved nervous system/ brain
structure3 — language(s), understood as symbol systems which organize (structure) our worlds in particular ways which may or may not be appropriate
structure4 — behavior, what people do/say as an expression of all of the above

Korzybski claimed that if we study and apply general-semantics we can learn to better evaluate what seems to be going on in the world, ourselves included and, having done so, make new formulations for ourselves to make things better. As you can see, a "full" understanding of general-semantics and its underpinnings may take some effort. Why not? The issues are only a matter of life and death and, avoiding death for a while, degrees of personal-social misery and happiness.

We can summarize for now: general-semantics constitutes a neuro-linguistic, neuro-semantic system-discipline originally formulated by Alfred Korzybski for the understanding of and as a correction for human mis-evaluating.