Mr. Doris wrote his piece for an English-reading European audience whose knowledge of general semantics was assumed to be nil. An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics . The coincidence of these dates has precipitated much reflection on the important influence for good that general semantics has had on my personal and professional life. The term 'semantics' is somewhat misleading in this context and I want just briefly to relate general semantics to the other 'language' disciplines. It embodies rules about how to put words together into sentences, and it is not concerned with how sentences are related to each other or how sentences are related to facts.
Logic goes further.
But for the logician words need not have any meaning except as defined by other words, and the assertion need not have any relations to the world of fact. The two 'wizards' they cite by name, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls, have acknowledged a debt to Korzybski. Indeed it is in the field of 'gestalt' that the influence of Korzybski's work will be most familiar to participants in the human potential movement, although they will be mostly unaware of it. It is impossible to give here more than a few 'inklings' into the scope and power of general semantics as a way of evaluating personal experience. A useful starting point might be Korzybski's emphasis on the human process of abstracting, i.e., we abstract from our experience only a fraction of the totality, and that fraction is not 'random', but depends on our particular nervous system, our physical state at the time, our needs and objectives, etc.