Foreword to Thinking Creatically (2001)

ABOUT 1960, I began receiving letters congratulating me on being a general semanticist. Since I had no idea what a general semanticist was, I began some casual reading in the field by consulting the works of Alfred Korzybski, S. I. Hayakawa, and others. Ken Johnson recently reminded me that in 1961, at a general semantics seminar, I observed that although I was a newcomer to such company I had an odd sense of being at home in it. The reason was that, without ever having consciously thought the matter through, I had accidentally stumbled over a few modest sandgrains of the sort that constitute the great edifice of general semantics thought. To be specific, at quite an early age it occurred to me that no two things on earth were identical. Possibly this insight flowed out of having been told that no two snowflakes were ever the same. In any event it was clear to the senses that no two physical objects I had ever encountered were truly identical. Even those objects formally modified by the adjective identical - such as identical twins or identical machine parts - were, if inspected closely, not really so. Also some experience, much of it frustrating, with members of my mother's family, among whom I was reared, had dramatized the sharp contrast between even half-way clear thinking on the one hand and emotion-laden, disorganized, biased and narrowminded thought on the other. None of this is remarkable or perceptive enough to have shaken the foundations of the reputations of Aristotle, Aquinas, or Santayana but it was nevertheless such modest first steps that turned out to harmonize smoothly with the more formalized arguments constructed by Alfred Korzybski and his followers. Another aspect of personal experience which forced me to perceive certain aspects of inadequate thinking, at least on the part of others, came about simply because I know more about myself than other people do and consequently recognize errors in certain of their observations about me, even in instances where such comments were highly complimentary. A good part of this involved nothing more than identifying the good old Unwarranted Assumption. To construct an example to illustrate the point, consider a sentence that starts, As a Catholic, Allen naturally feels that ... Although I was a member of the Catholic church for the first three decades of life, I was automatically excommunicated at the moment of my second marriage. Any such inference about my conduct or beliefs after that date, therefore, would stand a good chance of incorporating error. Mistakes in reporting both my activities and views have been so common over the years, even in articles written by fervent admirers, that I have accumulated an enormous number of them. While this is only a secondary rather than primary application of general semantics, it is nevertheless important to be aware that unless I am the only public figure about whom so much error is transmitted, we must always maintain a degree of skepticism about supposedly factual reporting on any personage, institution or event. Over the years I collected hundreds of experiences, personal testimonials, clippings of news stories, reports of polls and statistical studies that convinced me that American people are suffering from a new and perhaps unprecedented form of mental incapacitation for which I have coined the word dumbth. I certainly was not the first to notice the disastrous state of intelligence in America. But my frustration with incompetence and inefficiency and my concern about the growing problem of ignorance and stupidity led me to write 'Dumbth' And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter (Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1989). More than I realized at the time, general semantic principles were woven into several of my Rules for improving the thinking process. (Rule 81, incidentally, suggests Become familiar with the general semantics movement. …