Statement Of General Semantics

General Semantics
Manya Wadhwa
2012144
In the 1930s a Polish Count, Alfred Korzybski wrote a book in which he introduced a new concept called ‘General Semantics’ . General Semantics provides a system of logic and of studying man’s relation to his world, to accompany the new more wholistics and fluid, models of science. Korzybski maintained that humans are limited in what they know by two reasons – the structure of their languages and the structure of their nervous system. Humans cannot experience the world directly, but only through their ‘abstractions’ (through verbal indicators expressed and derived from language). These sometimes mislead us into thinking and believing into certain things.
The most important statement of General Semantics

Because of these maps we derive a lot of conclusions, we create beliefs and arrive at perceptions of events that happen to us. We mis-interpret this information that we believe to be true as objective and assume that this is reality. All the external information that now enters our minds is through this mental map. Thus, even if all information is reaching our brain, it gets filtered because our mental map ends up blocking a lot of information and only the information relevant to this map reaches us. For example, let us assume that I am afraid of dogs because a dog once bit me. The next time I see a dog, even though it might be a nice and friendly I will be scared of it because I have started associating dogs with pain or fear. Thus my mental map is blocking me from receiving the right information or any more information because of my previous experience with a dog. This becomes my version of reality which will be unique to me. There will be people who are not scared of dogs (their mental map) however, I won’t be open to accepting it because of my mental map.
Like mentioned above, we think our world is real, however that is not the case. The extent of reality of our world depends on how accurate our own world is. All of us look at the world in a different way, from different angles or from different observation points. Our observations are mainly used to support our previous experiences , assumptions

We should be open to changing our map. Since everything in this world is different – the system of 1980 will not be the same as the system of 1981, everyone should be open towards changing their mental map of things and the world. A more accurate map is closer to the real world. If we are full of distortions, and biases then our map can never be accurate and will be far from reality.
Everyone lives in the same world and shares the same objective reality. However, everyone perceives the world in their own way through their eyes and through their map which gives rise to individual subjective uniqueness and realities and a way of different