Alfred Korzybski

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, Winter, 2003 by Neil Postman

Korzybski began his quest to discover the roots of human achievement and failure by identifying a critical functional difference between humans and other forms of life. We are, to use his phrase, "time-binders," while plants are "chemistry-binders," and animals are "space-binders." Chemistry-binding is the capacity to transform sunlight into organic chemical energy; space-binding, the capacity to move about and control a physical environment. Humans have these capacities, too, but are unique in their ability to transport their experience through time. As time-binders, we can accumulate knowledge from the past and communicate what we know to the future. Science-fiction writers need not strain invention in their search for interesting time-transporting machinery: we are the universe's time machines.

Our principal means of accomplishing the binding of time is the symbol. But our capacity to symbolize is dependent upon and integral to another process, which Korzybski called "abstracting." Abstracting is the continuous activity of selecting, omitting, and organizing the details of reality so that we experience the world as patterned and coherent. Korzybski shared with Heraclitus the assumption that the world is undergoing continuous change and that no two events are identical. We give stability to our world only through our capacity to re-create it by ignoring differences and attending to similarities: although we know that we cannot step into the "same" river twice, abstracting allows us to act as if we can.

One of Korzybski's most interesting and fundamental creations was a model of the abstracting process. He actually built a comical, curious-looking mobile which he called the structural differential, whose purpose was to show how our abstracting activity proceeds from lower to higher orders. We abstract at the neurological level, at the physiological level, at the perceptual level, at the verbal level; all of our systems of interaction with the world are engaged in selecting data from the world, organizing data, generalizing data. An abstraction, to put it simply, is a kind of summary of what the world is like, a generalization about its structure.

Korzybski might explain the process in the following way: Let us suppose we are confronted by the phenomenon we call a "cup." We must understand, first of all, that a "cup" is not a thing but an event; modern physics tells us that a cup is made of billions of electrons in constant movement, undergoing continuous change. Although none of this activity is perceptible to us, it is important to acknowledge it because by so doing we may grasp the idea that the world is not the way we see it. What we see is a summary--an abstraction, if you will--of electronic activity. But even what we can see is not what we do see. No one has ever seen a cup in its entirety, all at once in space-time. We see only parts of wholes. But usually we see enough to allow us to reconstruct the whole and to act as if we know what we are dealing with. Sometimes, such a reconstruction betrays us, as when we lift a "cup" to sip our coffee and find that the coffee has settled in our lap rather than on our palate. But most of the time, our assumptions about a "cup" will work, and we carry those assumptions forward in a useful way by the act of naming. Thus we are assisted immeasurably in our evaluations of the world by our language, which provides us with names for the events that confront us, and by naming them tells us what to expect and how to prepare ourselves for action.