You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

MrMind comments on Open thread, August 5-11, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 05 August 2013 06:50AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (307)
Tags: open open_thread

Comments (307)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: MrMind 06 August 2013 07:41:06AM 2 points [-]

As a side comment, it's interesting to note that "The map is not the territory" is the first law of General Semantics, while the second law recites "The map is the territory", meaning that we cannot ever know the territory for what it really is: when we point to territory we are just basically pointing to another map.

Comment author: ChristianKl 06 August 2013 01:17:22PM *  3 points [-]

Could you provide some source? Putting "first law of General Semantics" into google returns your comment and one book written in 2000 long after Korbyskies death. Putting "second law of General Semantics" into google returns one paper about feminism written in 2010.

General Semantics is about getting rid of the is of identity and doesn't contain many sentences like "The map is the territory".

When it comes to "laws" about the relationship between maps and the territory Science and Sanity starts with:

A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory. (1)

B) Two similar structures have similar logical characteristics. Thus, if in a correct map, Dresden is given as between Paris and Warsaw, a similar relation is found in the actual territory. (2)

C) A map is not the territory. (3) (And Korbyski did write 'is not' in cursive in the original)

From there it goes till (40). General semantics isn't about making paradoxical statements and drawing meaning from dialectics, It basically about getting rid of speaking about things having the identity of other things but rather speaking about structural relationships between things.

Comment author: MrMind 06 August 2013 03:54:10PM 3 points [-]

Could you provide some source? Putting "first law of General Semantics" into google returns your comment and one book written in 2000 long after Korbyskies death. Putting "second law of General Semantics" into google returns one paper about feminism written in 2010.

Uhm, that's interesting. I was told such by a person I trusted many, many years ago. Since I've never been interested in GS I've never looked into that matter more closely. I'll try to see if I can dig up the original source, but I don't have much faith in that (but it might have been that "first" and "second" law were intended informally). If I can't find anything, I guess that that trusted source wasn't that much reliable, after all.

Putting "second law of General Semantics" into google returns one paper about feminism written in 2010.

LOL to that.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit