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matter how scrupulously observed and checked, "seem to warrant" our
adopting their assumptions about the need to cooperate with each other
and make the w6>rld better. As a philosopher might say, they can't get
us from
is
to
ought.
Of course nobody could in the crude terms they
propose, but then why not give up the effort?
Hayakawa's good qualities are also hard to keep in mind when one
recalls the educational influence I mentioned earlier, not only because of
some hair-raising things he has to say about the teaching of English,
but also, and more importantly, because of his general lack of intellectual
curiosity. It would be odd if anyone so interested in language and its
relation to science had read none of the recent philosophy and psychology
concerned with language, and no philosophy of science since Bridgman's
The Logic of Modern Physics
(1927). But if Hayakawa has, he keeps
it to himself. In fact, much like the sort of person general semantics is
most aimed at, he seems not to feel that he must take seriously writers
who don't confirm what he already believes, and the sad conclusion is
that Korzybski, not Plato, was the one who hit on a formula at last
for discouraging curiosity and intelligence.
That formula is simply the doctrine I mentioned earlier that all our
knowledge enters through our nervous systems and that language, when
it is not positively getting between us and the world, exists merely to
classify and categorize, and thus
to
facilitate the "sharing of perceptions."
The central paradox of general semantics is that it seems to say that lan–
guage and thought are intimately and inevitably bound up with one
another, but then turns out to be saying just the opposite. Korzybski, like
all evangelists, gives with one hand and takes away with the other: he
paints a dire picture of men at the mercy of words, of thought enslaved
by language; then, with a flourish, he provides a battery of theories and
techniques that miraculously loose the knot and insure salvation. The
only real influence of language on thought turns out to be the bad
influence it had before we saw the light and returned to a state of
passive and uncritical contact with the extensional world. Korzybski and
his followers don't see that facts, judgments, standards and inferences are
not simply absorbed through our nervous systems but must be recognized
or arrived at by creative argument, by critical thought shaped by and
actualizing itself in language. And, as Hayakawa's essays show, to dis–
courage such thought and argument is to make it impossible to attain the
freedom and flexibility of mind that general semantics seeks. The great
danger for the general semanticist is not, as Hayakawa modestly says
it is, that he will be tempted "to carry his speculations into fields in
which he is no expert"; it is, rather, that his theories,
by
simplifying the
