A general semantics glossary.

Korzybski's Structural Differential with variations. We have come to the end of our General Semantics Glossary. Not to the end of formulations that could be included. Surely not to the end of what could be said about korzybskian general-semantics. Just to the end of what I have decided is a necessary minimum of terms and formulations that a student of general-semantics needs for a solid foundation for her/his studies; a platform from which to securely launch their flights and explorations into an epistemology sharply informed and illuminated by high-order consciousness of abstracting. As I wrote at the beginning of this exercise in 1991 (!), I assume that we all consider ourselves lifetime students of general-semantics. And 'everything' else.

Presenting a Synthetic Summary

My intent here is to present a synthetic summary of what has gone before (Glossary entries 1 through 21) by means of the Structural Differential and adaptations-explications-extrapolations I have made of the diagram over the years, primarily for my teaching sessions in Institute of General Semantics seminar-workshops. For this text, I have drawn on the typescript of my book, The Non-Identifying Person: Conscious Self-Restructuring for the Extra-Planetary Era (I love those brief, snappy, eighteenth-century type titles!). (1) Let's proceed. (You may want to first review glossary entry 3, "abstracting," in ETC., Vol. 49, No. 4, Winter 1992, pp. 470-473.)

A Seeable Model of the Process of Abstracting

Korzybski was keenly aware of the importance of visualization for perceiving and understanding relationships. Perhaps visualization is so powerful a tool for learning because of the massive optical connections (fibers, billions of neurons, etc.) of the eye-brain system (eventuating primarily in the occipital lobe) as compared to that other main portal of learning, the auditory cortex. Recognizing this, he struggled to come up with a seeable model of the process of abstracting and system building. He was especially pushed (stressfully) to invent such a model in advance of his presentation at the New School for Social Research, New York, in early 1923 before such luminaries as the "instrumentalist" philosopher and educator, John Dewey, and the behaviorist psychologist, J. B. Watson. (2) Korzybski said he wanted to "make good." And so he did.

Figure 1 represents a modification of Korzybski's "Structural Differential," a diagram for differentiating structure (the only 'content' of knowledge), especially with regard to abstracting. The diagram constitutes a relatively static representation of a very dynamic process. The structures of a process universe (the dynamic plenum/fullness) are of necessity dynamic; but for understanding, we humans need to make relatively static representations, remembering that we do that while we're doing it, so that we can, in our understanding of the process being represented, 'set it back in motion'.

The parabola shape at the 'top' of the diagram was chosen because the 'arms' of the parabola extend indefinitely and we are representing an indefinitely extended, vastly complex process whose limits (if any) are not known (1998). The ragged ('broken off') line at the top indicates that the model maker, though wishing to represent an 'infinite' structure, cannot make an 'infinite' model. Besides, he has to fit the diagram on the quite finite page! The jagged edge represents the model maker taking responsibility for his model qua model - the signature of the model maker. As I have told seminar students for more than thirty years, "An artist may fall in love with his model, but a scientist may not."

The parabola represents the process-plenum-fullness, the non-verbal, silent event level of happenings in and of the 'universe'; the levels of inferred subatomic, atomic, molecular, etc., structures - the stuff of which everything we know of, including humans, is made.

The 'dots' within the parabolic representation stand for presumed 'characteristics', to be inferred eventually through scientific investigations of the dynamic plenum - the fullness thereof. We do not know directly what these 'characteristics' are. So we must understand 'characteristics' at this level as whatever structure there may be, as whatever may be going on - silent happenings. We are not talking about 'colors', 'odors', 'hardness', 'shapes', etc. - characteristics as we usually declare them as human speakers (abstractors). 'Those' must await the 'next' level.

The circle below the parabola represents human nonverbal (silent) abstracting, the level at which we generate-construct the joint product of the observer-observed interaction: 'seeing', 'hardnesses', 'softnesses', intraorganismic 'feelings', mood-states, borborygmic events, etc. ("Borborygmus" refers to the characteristic, often audible churnings, rumblings and gurglings of the bowels, sometimes associated with a person's habits of evaluating. Some English wag once observed that the great G. K. Chesterton "mistook his own borborygmus for the rumblings of The Universe.")

Now we can deal with the 'strings' between the parabola-shape and the circle. The 'strings' (that's what they were on the three-dimensional [actually, four-dimensional space-time structure] version). The 'strings' hanging unattached represent events, potential 'stimuli', etc., of the plenum to which human organisms do not or, for structural reasons, cannot respond. The connecting 'strings' represent silent (pre-linguistic) interface-ic, intraorganismic abstracting. This represents the aforementioned 'seeing', etc., the level at which we perceive-construct-project 'objects'; therefore called the "object level."

The enclosing circle shape was used to indicate the severely limited character of what a human abstracts with relation to the vast number of happenings at the event level. We're simply not built to 'take it all in'. That, too, is why the number of characteristics represented by the dots is small compared to the number represented in the parabola. (Please remember, we're describing aspects of how we, you and I, function.)

The circle to the left of the human 'object' represents animal abstracting; Korzybski called it "Fido." We can see that "Fido's" abstracting, as Russell Meyers has pointed out in his 1985 Alfred Korzybski Lecture, (3) stops at some level, and the animal is thus not able to develop theories, build libraries, etc. The animal, as Edelman has pointed out, seems limited to primary consciousness, i.e., for known neurological reasons, is not able to proceed to higher order consciousness (higher order abstractings, consciousness of abstracting, etc.). (Some people, Disney-bred anthropomorphists, don't like this. They see it as 'putting down' our wee beastie brothers and sisters. When I see a dog- or dolphin-built library, I'll reconsider the issue.)

So far the levels/orders we have been formulating 'occupy' the lower order, silent, pre-linguistic orders of abstracting. When we move on ('down' in the diagram), we come to the uniquely human domain, the levels/orders of abstracting at which our abstracting is expressed in symbols. (Words qualify as symbols: that which stands for, represents, something else. "The word is not the thing.") Let's not understand the levels in too sharp a way. We are describing a dynamic gradient here, with formulated structural changes along the way. We don't want to be elementalistic in positing our levels, lest we formulate an "abstraction ladder," a la Hayakawa.(4)

Having interacted with the dynamic plenum, abstracted-constructed our impressions, we humans can label (speak, write, sign, etc.) our experience, i.e., we can abstract further. The first and simplest level is the level of naming and describing (reporting). "That's a dog. I see a dog running across the lawn." Neurolinguistically, not far removed from the level of Dick and Jane. But this level of naming and describing can be far more sophisticated than the Dick and Jane operation. It represents the level at which we make, to the extent that we do, statements of 'fact'. Nevertheless, for distinguishing levels of abstracting, we would still allocate those more sophisticated evaluations to first order verbal abstracting.

Having abstracted to basic languaging, we can abstract further. We can make a second order verbal abstraction, a first order inference: "The dog is happy."

We can make a third order verbal abstraction, a second order inference: "The dog's owner treats it well." (We can't tell the sex of the dog from here, thus, it.)

We can make a fourth order verbal abstraction, a third order inference: "All happy dogs have good owners." We have now reached the level of generalization, based, albeit loosely, on a bundle of inferences. "Generalization" as a neurolinguistic designation is neutral (and natural, i.e., inevitable). The question here is, is the generalization an appropriate one? In this case, no. It affirms too much on the basis of too little first order evidence. The popular notion that "You shouldn't generalize" is, of course, mistaken. Without generalizing, you wouldn't be able to organize experience, get in an elevator a second time, make categories on the basis of similarities, e.g., "All of Chopin's mazurkas are in 3/4 time." (Indeed, that's part of what makes them mazurkas.) This is about as far as most people go consciously. But we all proceed further, if we're in good health. Scientists, logicians, non-mystical philosophers, coherent novelists, some lawyers, et al., proceed further with varying degrees of awareness and rigor. A scientist, especially a research or theoretical scientist, is likely to recognize at some point that s/he has a bundle of generalizations that cohere and that can be expressed in a hypothesis. "If owners of dogs are happy, their dogs will be happy." Unfortunately, this hypothesis is not disconfirmable, i.e., testable. There is no way to challenge the hypothesis to see if it will hold up. It does not qualify as a scientific hypothesis; it is rather of the type that proliferates in the political, social and economic 'sciences'. How, for example, could you determine, as part of your pre-testing protocol, what constitutes a 'happy owner'? - not to mention, but I do, a 'happy dog'. Nevertheless, most of us proceed merrily along, semi-consciously, reaching myriad conclusions and related behaviors as we construct our dimly seen view of the world - through a glass, darkly.

If we recognize (or not) that we have a bundle of related hypotheses, we may summarize-abstract them into a theory. Philosophers of science, epistemologists (such as you and I, if you've read this far) may abstract yet further and formulate a theory of theories, i.e., a theory of how theories are built up as a function of abstracting to higher and higher orders; what, indeed, Korzybski did. This process can be extended indefinitely; thus the jagged 'last' label on the diagram. But sooner or later, preferably sooner along the way, we need to check our higher order abstractings against our lower order (perhaps more secure, 'anchored') abstractions. This is what the arrow 'returning' to the process-plenum, object, and lower verbal orders represents: checking ourselves out, to the extent we can, against our lower order abstractings; how do our maps relate to the territory.

This activity has taken up some space-time. So our new abstractings are occurring later than when we 'started'. The prior abstractings will structure the current abstractings which will structure subsequent abstractings. That space-time factor is indicated by the breaks in the trajectory of the 'going back to lower levels' arrow. The arrow also represents what in 1968 I termed "neurolinguistic feedback." Edelman has validated this in great detail. (5) We will flesh this out a bit more below. (I say 'we' because I recognize that your glossary entry 'by' Bob Pula is a function of your abstracting.)

Figure 2 shows an adaptive use of the Structural Differential.

Korzybski developed various representations of the abstracting process via variants of the Structural Differential. Figure 2 represents my adaptation of the one that appears in Science and Sanity on p. 396. My primary concern here is to show the space-time driven 'spiraling' abstracting in a single human abstractor, what Korzybski called "the circularity of human knowledge": that, as indicated above, our 'highest' order abstractings are precisely about the 'lowest' order represented on the diagram. And, as we (you and I) have discussed above (do you not comment while you're reading?), that, through neurolinguistic feedback and feedforward mechanisms, higher orders affect lower orders and vice versa: the trembling, undulating, vibrating, reciprocal substrate of all our evaluating, all along a dynamic space-time gradient until the period-and-stop of our personal coagulation.

Only One Dynamic Plenum/fullness

With one parabola (there being only one dynamic plenum/fullness, including so-called 'multiple universes'), the diagram [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] shows four abstracting sequences within one person, each at a differentiated space-time, represented by the 't's' with subscripts, [t.sub.1], [t.sub.2], [t.sub.3], ... [t.sub.n]. [T.sub.n] represents any number of individual abstracting nervous system events, the implication being that abstracting at lower and higher orders and 'back' (properly, from a space-time view, forward) can (will) go on until the individual stops (death), but will go on indefinitely for the group (species).

The line spiraling from sequence to sequence represents the ongoing process of abstracting-over-'time': the spirality of human knowledge as represented in one individual.

A 5-second 'Cross-section' of Space-time

Figure 3 represents a group of people (say, six billion?) abstracting-interacting through a 5-second 'cross-section' of space-time; think of it as a time-lapse photo sequence frozen so that we can examine it closely.

Figure 3 diagrams individual-group interactive abstracting within the space-time-matter-energy plenum/fullness. Note that, as the many arrows indicate, once we have abstracted to the point of placing our abstracting products within the extra-neural plenum via speaking, writing, painting, musicing, gesturing, etc., those products become abstractable by others; thus we time-bind, for good or ill and a zillion 'points' in between. I have individualized the shapes of each 'abstractor' to indicate the individual, unique 'style' of each of us. We all abstract but, by neurological necessity, in a most personal way. While the mechanisms of abstracting are similar from nervous system/brain to nervous system/brain, their results are never operationally, as manifested in different organisms, the 'same'.

Figure 4 diagrams the realization that, if the parabola of the Structural Differential represents everything that's going on, what we have described in Figures 1, 2, and 3 'resides' within the parabola at the quantum level of analysis. Remember that we make relatively static segmented analytical diagrams (models, maps, representations, etc.) for better understanding of the non-diagrammatic process. ("The map is not the territory"; "Maps are self-reflexive," self-referring, self-influencing, etc.) When we're 'done', we need to 'reanimate' the model, and, as it were, send it back to where it came from; namely, us as functions of the plenum/fullness.

Neurolinguistic abstracting, the mechanism of e-valueating, when it matures (evolves) to formulating, seems the engine which drives human living. How it goes in individual cases must be, then, vital to vita. We humans are particularly susceptible to confusing orders of abstracting, i.e., taking (mistaking) 'one' for the 'other'. Korzybski formulated this "confusion of orders of abstracting" as identity or identification or identifying. In general-semantics we promote non-identity through consciousness of abstracting, prophylactically avoiding those confusions of orders of abstracting. By not responding to an inference as if it were a description (statement of 'fact'). Not treating as 'the same' higher and lower orders of abstracting. Not responding to a definition (most useful, definitions) as if it were the thing defined. Not responding to a word as if it were the thing represented by that word. Not absolutely identifying a diagnosis with the non-verbal patient. Not mistaking a map, however useful, for its presumed territory. Not mistaking your book review for the book reviewed. Not, not, not. Sounds 'negative'. Yet this denial of identity, usually expressed via the "is of identity," turns out to be a very positive thing. With it, we can develop enhanced consciousness of abstracting, the habit of checking higher order abstractings against lower orders (the extensional orientation), and even the 'sending' of 'instructive' signals to lower centers.

Edelman has shown us that, through intra-organismic selection, we self-define at the git-go - at the most fundamental level of our functioning. Hobson (6) has shown that, at levels of higher order consciousness, we can, to a perhaps surprising degree (especially surprising to those who see themselves as 'manipulates', defined from without, determined 'victims' of various sorts), take charge of the defining process, exert cortical 'top-down' impulses to restructure in accordance with our examinations of ourselves-in-an-environment and strategies derived therefrom, environments which include our siblings, extended families, 'significant others', members of our communities, etc. - the dynamic plenum/fullness and all in it, and all that happens in it, remaining fully natural throughout.

Thus general-semantics.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Robert P. Pula, The Non-Identifying Person: Conscious Self-Restructuring for the Extra-Planetary Era. Completed December 28, 1997. Unpublished typescript which I am now circulating to a group of readers ('volunteers') in advance of submitting the volume to the "trade."

2. For an informal account of this incident and for Korzybski's spoken elucidation of the Structural Differential, hear the audio cassette, Historical Note on the Structural Differential, available from the Institute of General Semantics ($12.95). Initially Korzybski referred to his "epistemological model," then to the "Anthropometer" ('measure of man'), then the "Time-Binding Differential," finally "The Structural Differential." He made both diagrammatic and 3D versions. An instructive evolution.

3. Russell Meyers, 'Glossary', "The Potentials of Neurosemantics for Modern Neuropsychology," The Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, 1985, General Semantics Bulletin, No. 54, 1989, pp. 13-60, especially pp. 50-51.

4. S. I. Hayakawa was a student of Korzybski who wrote the best-selling Language in Action, which still makes its way in the world as Language in Thought and Action (5th Edition). New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1990. A book with many excellent qualities, it nevertheless fails to address and/or misrepresents some of the deeper epistemological concerns of general-semantics.

5. Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: The Matter of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1992, passim. See my review of Edelman (and Patrida Smith Churchland and Steven Rose), "Neuroscience [Update.sup.1995]" in General Semantics Bulletin, No. 62, 1995, pp. 29-52, and in my soon to be published (1998) Knowledge, Uncertainty and Courage: Selected General Semantics Writings of Robert P. Pula (International Non-Aristotelian Library/Institute of General Semantics).

6. J. Allan Hobson, The Chemistry of Conscious States. Boston/New York/Toronto/London: Little, Brown and Company, 1994, passim.

Robert Pula edited the General Semantics Bulletin from 1977-1985; in December 1997, after the death of Stuart Mayper, he resumed the editorship. He served as Director of the Institute of General Semantics from 1983-1986, and is now Director Emeritus of the Institute.