Off the Map

I don’t know about you, but when I think about sanity, especially as promoted within general semantics, I tend to think about it in the individual sense.

That is, I think about sanity as a personal thing.  That general semantics is for you, in order for you to get sane.

But last night while lying in bed before sleeping, it struck me that general semantics didn’t actually seem to be about something so individual and personal.  Sanity, I was thinking, was a bit more social as  treated in general semantics.  Specifically, I was thinking about sane interactions.  What they might be.  What they look like.  And how general semantics seems to be talking more about those than just personal sanity …

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I think the notion of sane interactions evolved a bit from thinking about life as a negotiation, which I’d been thinking about recently.  Or, perhaps separately I was thinking about how some interactions I have can be just plain insane, and thinking about insane interactions just got me thinking about sane interactions.  I don’t remember the train of thought.  But I remember that the idea of sane intereactions was really interesting.

War, from a korzybskian perspective, probably fits the bill as an insane interaction.  Coordinating schedules with friends and family is probably a bit more on the sane interaction plane.  That is, it probably is sane interaction insofar as you, your friends, and family aren’t trying to sabotage plans at the same time.  Does that mean that sanity is a quality of interaction wherein the participants don’t sabotage each other’s pursuits toward particular goals?  And insanity is a quality of interaction wherein the participants do sabotage their goals?

If so, that would mean that many sports are probably insane interactions.  Well, at least on the surface.  Digging a little deeper, competition is intentional in many sports, so if you don’t compete, and instead cooperate with the opposing team, you’ve probably created an insane interaction.  But let’s say that at your job, you require cooperation, so any competition you are unnecessarily faced with may make it seem that you are in an insane interaction.

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As far as what general semantics is talking about when it talks of sanity, it is talking to you.  But maybe it’s talking to you and that other person you’re interacting with.  Maybe it’s looking at time-binding (the passing on of constructive information from generation to generation, a term coined by Alfred Korzybski) not as done by individuals but as done in interactions.  That is, if God were in a helicopter, maybe he’s not looking at you, but instead looking at the interaction you and that other person happen to be in.  And his advice is not to make you better, but to make your interaction better.  Hm?

Probably more later.

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See also: alfred-korzybski, competition, cooperation, insane, insane-interactions, insanity, interaction, negotiation, sane-interactions, sanity, time-binding

Perhaps there is an answer to this question; if so, I hope you’ll post it in the comments for this post.  The question is with respect to the Wikileaks controversy:

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If Wikileaks would be considered for the felony offense of receipt of and possession of stolen classified documents, and forced to return what classified documents it has, would everyone else who has downloaded these documents from Wikileaks–including news agencies–be felony offenders?

I don’t know the legal implications, but look to music as a parallel: Napstering and Kazaaing and Limewiring were illegal (as I understand it).  Users of those software performed illegal music downloads.  Doing so has suscepted some users to terrible fines and dramatic court cases.

Is there a difference that makes a difference with respect to downloading illegal information from Wikileaks?  If I provided on my webspace the same music for download (as opposed to using the illegal file-sharing software for you to download it from), and you downloaded the music, would(n’t) that be just as illegal?

If it would, how is not your download of the classified cables also illegal?

Furthermore, harboring the classified information on your computer: Wouldn’t that be possessing stolen classified documents?

The general semantics parallels are hard to understand here.  With respect to the map-territory analogy, it’s hard for me to understand whether your download of the cables from Wikileaks is the download of a map or, instead, a map of a map.  If you download the cables, are those the cables, or a likeness of the cables?

Furthermore, aren’t the cables available on Wikileaks just likenesses of the cables to begin with?  So if you download the cables, aren’t you downloading a likeness of a likeness?

I would imagine the legal issue isn’t so much likeness as it is the information contained in the maps.  It would seem to me that it’s not so much illegal to have the maps as it is to have the information contained in the maps.  (It would seem, but … I’m uncertain that’s the case.)

My concern is that Wikileaks, therefore, would be inappropriately targeted for some sort of legal issue with respect to having these cables, but news agencies and Joe User wouldn’t be targeted should Wikileaks comply and hand over the information.  The information has already been set free in many ways.

Or at least I think it has.  To date, I haven’t downloaded the cables.  But I’m reading stories from news agencies that presumably have, and have read the cables, and have used the cables to create their stories.  News agencies, it would seem to me, are thus circulating classified information.  I suppose that happens, but news agencies are also possessing classified information.  If I were a criminal by being Joe User and downloading the cables from Wikileaks, then got a temp job at a newspaper that also had them, do I go from criminal to protected member of the media by sheer means of walking through a revolving door at my day’s job?  Do I go back to being a criminal when I get my timesheet signed?

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See also: classified-documents, difference, file-sharing-software, illegal, law, likeness, map-territory-analogy, maps, maps-of-maps, similarity, software, wikileaks

About the time I took to reading Thomas Schelling’s famous book, The Strategy of Conflict, I started to see life as a negotiation.

In the book, Schelling sees conflicts as “essentially bargaining situations.”  While I can’t remember my exact evolution of thought, it seems that somewhere around that sentence in the book I started to interpret “bargaining” as “negotiation,” and from there, conflicts as negotiations, and from there, nearly every interaction as a negotiation of some sort.

Many people see negotiations as verbal exchanges.  I say what I want, you say what you want, and we bicker and dicker to reach an agreement.  However, (obviously?), not all negotiations are verbal.  “Negotiation” has to do in general with any kind of manuveuring.  You negotiate pedestrians on a busy New York City sidewalk.  You negotiate cars and tractor trailers on the highway.  You negotiate for age as you make health choices.

Some of the archetypal games outlined in game theory–like Chicken, Prisoner’s Dilemma, and others not coming to mind at the moment–outline common negotiations.  I had forgotten that.  I had struggled for a long time with forgetting that bargaining meant (to me) negotiation, and as a result, I forgot the meaning of “game” and the meaning of “bargaining” that I used in my teaching.  “What’s a game?  What’s bargaining?  Well, it’s (essentially a) negotiation.”

I’m hoping I’ve arrived back at understanding.  Stay tuned: I hope to write more on negotiation in the near future.

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See also: bargaining-situation, chicken, game, game-theory, negotiation, prisoners-dilemma, the-strategy-of-conflict, thomas-schelling

In an article today about the title of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, should her husband become King of England, the word “semantic” appeared in a way that got me thinking about its meaning.

I usually define the word “semantics” as “the historical study of words and their meanings.”  What comes to mind usually is definitions of words (especially at different time periods), and that semanticists trace the definitions of words as they change over the years.  Words constant, definitions variable.

But in the article, I got to thinking that “semantics” might have a more backward definition than what I’d come to know.  I wondered if the word “semantics” might be better defined as “the historical study of words and how they’re applied.”

Think of semantics not as the study of words and their meanings, but instead as the study of meanings and their words!  In this context, a meaning could be a number of things: it could be a phrase, but it could also be an object.  In this sense, “meanings” are the same thing as “referents,” and semantics in this newfound sense looks at the different words that get applied to referents.  Essentially, it is assumed that the meanings stay the same over time, it’s just that the words change.  Definitions constant, words variable.

The passage that brought about this thinking was this one (bolding mine):

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Camilla legally will be queen if Charles takes the throne, but when the couple married in 2005 officials said she planned to adopt the title Princess Consort rather than the more traditional Queen Consort.

NBC’s Brian Williams asked the 62-year-old heir to the throne if Camilla would become “Queen of England, if and when you become the monarch.” Charles hesitated as he replied “That’s, well … We’ll see won’t we? That could be.”

The difference is purely semantic — the role of consort carries no constitutional power. But polls have suggested there is hostility to Charles’ divorced second wife, whom he married eight years after the death of Princess Diana, being called Queen Camilla.

How I read “semantic” here, it means “having to do with a label.”  Changing the title from “Queen Consort” to “Princess Consort” is merely a label swap.  And since the referent stays the same but the word changes, the semanticist takes note.

And perhaps the general semanticist takes note, too!  The field of semantics is different from the field of general semantics.  If semantics studies referents and the words historically applied to them, what does the term “general semantics” mean?  Perhaps general semantics is more open to looking at things (actual objects, events, etc.) over verbal definitions.  So maybe “general semantics” means “the study of the referents and the words historically applied to them” but “semantics” contents itself with verbal definitions (and not actual objects)?

That is, say that general semantics studies that pleasant feelings you’re experiencing inside your skin and what you call it (“happy”).  And say that semantics studies the phrase “feeling good” and what you call it (“happy”).  General semantics pays attention to the names of the non-verbal; semantics pays attention to the verbal.  But if general semantics is truly a general kind of semantics, maybe it’s that general semantics studies both the non-verbal and the verbal, while semantics just concerns itself with the verbal.

But here is where I’m led to confusion.  Isn’t linguistics what studies labels and how they’re applied?  That is, linguistics is the study of language, and word choice seems to fall under that heading.  Doesn’t linguistics pay attention to how we code our experience into language?

I turned to Wikipedia to see how it defined “semantics.”  The entry led me to yet another consideration: Maybe the meaning of the term “semantics” is relative to the specific context it comes up in?  For example, if you’re talking about linguistics, maybe linguistic semantics has a special meaning that is different from, say, when you’re talking about semantics in the context of physics?  Linguistic semantics is “the study of interpretation of signs or symbols […]”, and maybe physical semantics would be the study of interpretation of nature?  Would “semantics” mean usually “the historical interpretation of words”? Would “general semantics” means thus “the interpretation of objects, events, etc.”?

I love that interpretation comes up at this point.  In my high school and college years, I had a lot of joy in the practice of interpretation, and a number of my papers were essentially interpretations of what I was reading and experiencing.  In general semantics, we pay a lot of attention to how people bottle up the reality they witness and experience.  And then they talk about what they bottle up.  Sometimes what they bottle up doesn’t gel with what scientifically is known about reality.  Therein general semantics likes to pipe up and teach.

Ultimately, this blog post shouldn’t be read for understanding.  It is a fairly live processing of the appearance of the word “semantics” in an article and how its presumed meaning may relate to the defining of the terms “semantics” and “general semantics.”  If you enjoy the pursuit of defining “general semantics” as I do, I hope you appreciated this little stopover.

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See also: camilla-duchess-of-cornwall, definition, interpretation, meaning, queen, queen-consort, referent, semantics