THE AIMS AND TASKS OF GENERAL SEMANTICS: Implications of the Time-Binding Theory (Part I).

S. I. HAYAKAWA [*]

HE AIMS AND TASKS of general semantics, however numerous they may seem to be to the many students of the subject who are busy applying its formulations to the sciences, to humanistic studies, and to practical affairs in business or education, may all be regarded as parts of one large, all-embracing task, namely, that of advancing human time-binding. It is the task of students of general semantics first to bring to wider scientific and public awareness the fact of time-binding as the central mechanism of human survival. Secondly, it is their task to encourage and strengthen those cultural institutions and forms (economic, political, and social) under which time-binding best flourishes, and to oppose those cultural conditions which would discourage or limit time-binding. Third, it is the task of students of general semantics to nurture in individuals, through education and through the support of parallel tendencies in the educational efforts of others, those conditions of emotional maturity such as will insure the fullest possible realization of the time-binding potential that resides in every human being.

The foregoing paragraph would be entirely clear, I am sure, if only the term "time-binding" were explained. Time-binding is the term used by the late Alfred Korzybski to describe the fact that the unique survival mechanism of human beings is not, as among oysters, a hard shell and extreme fecundity; not, as among wolves, ferocity and sharp teeth; not, as among giraffes, long necks and fleetness of feet; but the ability to organize social cooperation at a distance and to accumulate knowledge over generations of time through the use of symbols. When human beings communicate with each other with drums beaten in the jungle or with radio-waves carried half way around the world, they are behaving in ways specific to their species. Similarly, when human beings make use of science, geography, technologies, ethical systems, laws, or literature, they are using the accumulated product of the insights, intuitions, and observations of thousands of fellow-members of their species, most of them long dead. The ability of hu man beings to accumulate and add to their information and knowledge and techniques from generation to generation, so that each generation starts where the last generation left off, Korzybski calls the time-binding capacity. Human beings are, then, the "time-binding class of life." All the fruits of scholarship, of science, of poetic or ethical vision, of handicrafts and skills and technologies, which we have received from the past are products of "time-binding." All that we have in the present which we find worth saving and passing on to our children and our children's children we pass on because we are "time-binders."

Time-Binding vs. Culture-Bearing

The definition of man as time-binder is not dissimilar to the anthropologist's definition of man as culture-bearer. Both definitions place emphasis on the fact that men are social products, each man being a member of a society which includes not only his living contemporaries but the dead -- the long line of cultural ancestors whose contributions make a culture what it is. The anthropologist, however, tends to refrain from passing judgment on the superiority or inferiority of the customs and institutions of one culture over those of another. The student of general semantics respects the anthropologist's desire for descriptive accuracy that prompts this suspension of value-judgments, but he cannot go all the way with the anthropologist in this suspension.

The definition of man as time-binder, like the definition of man as culture-bearer, implies that man has got as far as he has as the result of the pooling of knowledge, as the result of the exchange and transmission over generations of information, technologies, and accumulated wisdom. It differs from the definition of man as culture-bearer in that it implies that constant and continuing exchange of knowledge, so that the sum of available knowledge increases in predictive value from generation to generation, is not only desirable, but mandatory to survival. The time-binding formulation implies, in other words, that when man is functioning to his full potentialities, the artistic or technical or medical or philosophical resources of a culture will progressively become richer as time goes on. Time, says Korzybski, is the human dimension, so that static cultures, in which generations may pass without change, are doomed cultures.

Nevertheless, all cultures, throughout historic time, have placed limits on time-binding. There have been, and still are, topics forbidden to investigation in all known cultures. There have been, and still are, limits placed on the exchange of information in all known cultures: the restriction of communication between classes and castes, and the forced exclusion of ideas imported from other tribes or other nations. Practically all cultures believe that on certain topics all that can be known or is necessary to be known has already been accumulated; consequently those who might wish to question or add to knowledge on those topics are persecuted. These and many other limitations placed upon the time-binding process are, to be sure, themselves products of culture. But they run directly counter to the process by which culture is created.

Hence, as I have said, the general semanticist cannot go all the way with the anthropologist in refusing to evaluate the relative merits of cultures. He must prefer those cultures which place few limitations on time-binding over those which place many. He must prefer those actions and measures which increase the total amount of time-binding over those which may arrest or decrease time-binding. For the definition of man as time-binder is essentially a definition of man as a co-operative class of life; the more men co-operate, the more do they manifest and realize their humanness. The preference that the general semanticist shows for cultures that permit more rather than less time-binding is therefore a preference for the more human rather than the less human cultures.

Political Implications

Consequently, the student of general semantics, as a citizen, will tend to support ideals of international and cultural cooperation such as are held by people of good will, of many different faiths and nationalities, all over the world. He will tend to support such ideals as those of the United Nations, which hopes to transcend the limited time-binding of separate and sovereign nations with fuller time-binding on an international scale: the pooling of the material, technical, and intellectual resources of all the nations of the world for the purpose of solving problems wherever they may arise. He will tend to oppose political thought-control wherever it may arise, for thought-control is the antithesis of time-binding. He will oppose racial and religious discrimination, not solely out of democratic sentiment, but also out of a conviction that fullest time-binding necessitates the freest cultural interchange between all races and creeds and classes. He will support freedom of speech, press, and assembly not so lely because he is culturally conditioned to value these freedoms (although this no doubt will be a large part of his reason), but also because he holds that restrictions of these freedoms are denials of the cultural process.

The difference between the point of view of general semanticists and that of some cultural anthropologists is illustrated in a conversation I recently had, in which an anthropologist said in reply to an unfavorable comment I had made regarding a dogmatic and closed cultural system, "You were brought up in an open-ended system, so you like open-ended systems. But open and closed systems are simply alternative ways of organizing human thought and behavior. One is just as valid as the other." To this, the reply of the general semanticist must be that he cannot be indifferent about closed systems because such systems imply that on certain important topics all the time-binding necessary has already been done and further time-binding is unnecessary. Indeed, it is hard to see how even the most dispassionate anthropologist can remain thoroughly neutral with respect to open and closed systems. When beliefs are frozen into immutable dogmas -- and it is usually beliefs about human nature and conduct that are so frozen -- such a condition is not only inimical to science, it is especially inimical to the science of cultural anthropology itself. As Anatol Rapoport says in his Science and the Goals of Man, a scientist "cannot be impartial in his judgments about forms of social organization or about patterns of culture, if it is clear that one form tends to encourage scientific behavior and another to inhibit it." In short, the general semanticist is not satisfied with just any old culture. The definition of man as a time-binding or co-operative class of life gives him a theoretical ground upon which all cultures, including our own, may be criticized and evaluated.

Co-operative Map-Making

Another way of looking at general semantics is to say that it is a methodological discipline to enable individuals and groups to apply scientific ways of thinking to everyday life, to problems of social interaction, to problems of decision in practical affairs, as well as to problems of a scholarly and theoretical nature in those areas where scientific attitudes are not yet general. As George Taylor once put it, general semantics is a science of the ways of science. Let me try to explain what this means.

Let us, using Korzybski's metaphor, speak of the world of sub-verbal reality as the territory, and of our words and ideas about reality as maps of the territory. All problem solving requires some kind of more or less accurate map-making. If we wish to bake a cake, we have to know something about the characteristics of the flour we intend to use; if we wish to build a bridge, we have to know something about the properties of steel and concrete, the strength of the current and the width of the river to be bridged, and so on; if we wish to rule a nation, we have to know something about the people in it, their habits and desires, their state of economic well-being, the resources available for meeting their needs. Whether we successfully bake the cake, build the bridge, or rule the nation depends on how well we have mapped the territory we are dealing with.

Science may be regarded as the systematization of two things: first, it is the systematization of certain habits common to at least a part of the problem-solving behavior of all people in all cultures, namely, observing, checking, making hypotheses, and testing them; secondly, it is the systematization of the means whereby the making and checking of observations and hypotheses may be done co-operatively through comparing observations, repeating experiments, pooling information, and, prior to all this, establishing linguistic conventions, systems of nomenclature, systems of weights and measures, methods of recording, so that any number of observers may exchange reports with each other and thereby refine them both for increased accuracy and increased generality. In short, science is a huge co-operative enterprise of human beings jointly trying to make better and better maps of reality. It is so co-operative that in principle anyone may help himself freely to the information so collected. (I say in principle ra ther than in fact, because when scientific discoveries are made for the specific purpose of advantaging oneself at the expense of others, as in business competition or in war, advantageous findings are concealed from competitors or enemies.) In those fields of science in which commercial or military advantage is not apparent, no concealment takes place; scientists take pleasure in exchanging information and journals with each other all over the world. Many scientific journals make an explicit point of not copyrighting their material. Science is so co-operative, too, that anyone may contribute to the pool of scientific knowledge. No matter how venerated or hoary a scientific principle, there is nothing inherent in science to prevent its being overthrown by a part-time laboratory assistant if he can produce observable and verifiable data or calculations to the contrary.

Science, then, is the outstanding example -- perhaps the only thoroughgoing example -- of the institutionalizing of time-binding habits and the institutionalizing of the avoidance of cultural or private habits of evaluation that hinder or limit time-binding. The culture-pattern of the scientific world is therefore not just another culture pattern to be evaluated as no better and no worse than the kinship system of Australian aborigines, the potlatch of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the gambling practices in connection with the races at Arlington Park. The culture-pattern of the scientific world is rather the systematic selection from prevailing cultural-patterns of those specific ways of abstracting and those specific forms of linguistic behavior that ensure the maximum rate of increase in knowledge through ensuring the maximum of human agreement.

Science as Technique of Agreement

Science then is a technique of agreement, perhaps the greatest we have, and certainly the only one which has been strongly enough institutionalized among enough people in enough different cultures and to have produced enough time-binding results to have acquired an almost universal prestige. Sometimes it is said by people hostile to science that "science isn't everything," that "science is arrogant," that "science has become a sacred cow." Such comments appear to me to show an almost wilful blindness to what is central to science, which is, above all things, a technique of agreement that systematically seeks to reach across cultural divisions of race, language, religion, and social status, in order to extend the possibilities of human co-operation.

It is the position of general semanticists that the orientation of science, central to which is the determination to find grounds for agreement so that investigators may go on together from there, need not, indeed, cannot be confined to scientists. Scientists themselves, to be sure, often fall to exhibit such an orientation outside the laboratory, nor are they uniformly successful in exhibiting it even within the laboratory. Nevertheless, the main features of this orientation are easily described. I have already mentioned, in addition to the desire for agreement, another feature of the scientific orientation, namely, its essential democracy, which resides in the fact that all may contribute to science what they can and take from it what they need. A related feature of science is the fact that all scientific statements are always open to challenge.

A scientific statement, capable of being verified by anybody making the same observation and using the same linguistic conventions to report them, is often said to be "objective," while private judgments and observations are said to be "subjective." This dichotomy between "objective" and "subjective" has long appeared to me a philosophical tragedy, needlessly dividing philosophers, both professional and amateur, into warring camps, and effectively obscuring for generations the important characteristics of scientific statements. What is called a "subjective" or "unscientific" statement is one that is supported by the evaluations of only one individual or a few, or the members of only one loyalty group. What is called an "objective fact," long regarded as a fact which "exists independently of the mind," is better regarded as one upon which any number of independent observers, Frenchmen and Germans, Arabs and Jews, Christians and Buddhists, Elks and Jehovah's Witnesses, can agree. The important point again is a greement.

Another characteristic of the scientific orientation is what is called open-mindedness, or the willingness to listen. In science, there is, as Wendell Johnson once said, never the last word, but the latest. This again is a recognition of the continuous character of time-binding; it cannot be stopped for the very simple reason that conditions change, the earth changes, the universe changes, and human needs change, so that even the most "established" of scientific truths inevitably need, sooner or later, modification or revision. But there is a deeper, psychological reason in human relations for scientific open-mindedness. It is that a scientist, insofar as he wishes to behave scientifically, must retain always the ability to listen, and so ensure the continuance of communications among human beings, the result of which ultimately is agreement. Nothing cuts off communication so completely as the knowledge that you are not being listened to. A political or religious leader can lose his ability to listen, and ma y retain unaltered his status as political or religious leader. But a scientist who has ceased to listen loses his status as scientist.

I have said that the basic aim of general semantics is to advance time-binding. Another way of stating this is, then, to say that the aim of general semantics is to make more widespread the orientation of the scientist. This is not to say that everybody should study physics, chemistry, and mathematics. It is entirely possible for people to spend a lifetime in the physical sciences without ever acquiring a scientific orientation about the generality of non-technical problems. No, the scientific orientation may be acquired with or without training in mathematics and the physical sciences, for that matter, with or without formal schooling at all. I am not, therefore, arguing for the special methods of one science or another. The emphasis is on the orientation institutionalized in science, which can be and is exhibited by many people other than scientists. This orientation might have been called the "political orientation" or the "philosophical orientation" if it had been first institutionalized in politics or i n philosophy. Calling it the scientific orientation is simply recognition of the historical fact that science is so far the only human activity in which this orientation has been institutionalized.

(*.) Presented as a University of Chicago Public Lecture, sponsored by the Committee on Mathematical Biology, July 19, 1950. First published half a century ago, S. I. Hayakawa's fullest statement on humanity's time-binding faculty may seem today overly optimistic in light of the history of the last fifty years, but his insights and the provocative quality of his exposition warrant the reprinting of his article at this time. To maintain the integrity of this text, we have not altered the then-standard usage of male nouns and pronouns, which here usually stand for both genders. From ETC vol. 8, no. 4.