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The harlot meets the general.

Article Excerpt
ONE DAY, a close friend of mine began speaking of general semantics, a discipline with which I was not acquainted. The arguments of its proponents sounded very familiar to me, even though I hadn't heard them expressed in quite that way before. "The map is not the territory." Yes, yes, quite true. "The word is not the thing." Yes, true again. "Language depicts the world as static, but this depiction is an illusion." Yes, indeed this is the case. I wondered if any of these people had heard of rhetoric or rhetorical theory. I wondered if any of them had read Aristotle.

Apparently, some of them had read Aristotle. In fact, Alfred Korzybski, one of their most prominent theorists, had created an explicitly non-Aristotelian theory in response to what he identified as the Aristotelian understanding of language. I was surprised. I wanted to argue. I asked for books. I now offer these observations.

The concerns of general semanticists seem to me quite similar to those of rhetorical theorists. By rhetorical theorists I do not mean those people who analyze public speeches in order to assess effectiveness or style. I mean those scholars who contemplate the nature and processes of language and language-users, especially language with suasory impact. This similarity is not only noticeable in content. For example, what Postman said about the scope and status of general semantics, also could be easily said about rhetoric:

It is simply too broad in its scope to be contained within a single discipline, for it is part philosophy, part epistemology, part psychology, part linguistics, and several other 'parts,' all of which taken together comprise the university curriculum. In a world of specialists, general semantics appears too...

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