Off the Map

I’ve been noticing for the last several months a particular usefulness for my personal definitions of comedic terms.  I thought I’d take a moment to share with you my definitions for the words “funny” and “joke” for what those definitions might benefit you.

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I work a lot of time in background on film and TV productions.  There can be a lot of downtime, which for me can mean social time and silly time with other background actors.  Frankly, I like to make people laugh.  I get a huge joy out of it and it can come pretty easily for me.  Over a short time, my humor can turn more and more outrageous, and it can test the boundaries of what some people find acceptable or even polite.  These people might object to some of my humor or find it even rude.

When I’ve hit a boundary in a particular person, I might hear that person say, “That’s not funny.”  Usually, though, there is someone laughing at what I said or did.  Sometimes even the person saying “That’s not funny” is laughing!  It is around this time that I present my definition of the term “funny.”

For me, “funny” means “something that makes a person laugh.”  If I trip and fall and you laugh, it was funny.  Well, at least to you.  If I trip and fall and you don’t laugh but instead you are shocked and run to my help, it wasn’t funny.  Why?  Because it didn’t make you laugh.  If you were alarmed but I laughed, it was funny.

“Joke” is another comedy term.  People have a hard time putting into words what a joke is.  For me, “a joke” is simply “something designed to make a person laugh.”  While a joke could be a story or a pun, it could also be an object, an action, or a stunt.  If it was designed, and if that design was intended to make a person laugh, then I would call it “a joke.”

The rebuilding of the World Trade Center is not a joke.  It wasn’t designed to make people laugh.  Carrot Top’s props are jokes–they’re designed to make people laugh.  So is his routine a joke–designed to make people laugh.  It makes no difference if the joke is funny (i.e., “makes someone laugh”); a joke requires design and intent.

Both of these definitions share a key word, and that word is “something.”  In neither definition do I try to give a replacement word for the definiendum.  I don’t define “funny” as “hysterical.”  I don’t define “joke” as “a sentence.”  By using the word “something,” I leave a lot of important leeway for the use of the words “funny” and “joke.”  I also arrive at an extremely practical way to talk about comedy and humor, not getting caught up in overanalysis about the essence of funny or the nature of jokes.  What’s funny and what’s a joke becomes actually measureable.  Did someone laugh at it?  Then it was that much funny.  Was it designed to get someone to laugh?  Then it was a joke.

The overlap with general semantics is not just in the careful attention to definition of undefined terms.  The overlap is also with the lecture I presented in the 2006 Making Sense Conference in Ft. Worth, Texas.  In that lecture (which kicked off the conference!), I presented an analysis of my own sense of humor.  I explain that much of my humor is simply the provision of nonsense when people are expecting sense.  Sense and nonsense are relative to people’s theories, definitions, and, in general, expectations.  Sense is expected, nonsense is surprising.  Since that presentation and the raised awareness about my own sense of humor, I’ve been able to develop and tweak my humor more and actually get better and being funny and joking.  General semantics helped me to improve my comedy.  (Watch the essay and/or read the published lecture here.)

So there you have it: Alfred Korzybski and his general semantics, influencing comedy.  In truth, it’s no joke!

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Considering my recent post addressing the question of what “aristotelian system” means in general semantics, my answer has a number of implications for the design of a general semantics curriculum. Here is one preliminary thought for the teacher of general semantics …

The study of general semantics is comparative. That is, it is best taught when its teachings are taught in comparison with the teachings that were generally taught prior to its founding. As implied in the recent post, general semantics is to be thought of as modernism (i.e., modern scientific thinking and orientation). Its contrast is classicalism, that antiquated form of scientific orientation and thinking associated with Aristotle but attributable to Aristotle, Newton, Euclid, et al. But there’s more to classicalism than just Aristotle and those dead guys!

Classicalism may also be associated and should be associated with language, especially language of a time earlier than ours, language whose developers are largely anonymous to us. As Alfred Korzybski points out, within the languages we inherit as children and as a culture, there are particular metaphysics espoused unconsciously, programmed into the language. For example, our language usually dices up reality into more or less discrete entities (words represent those reality nuggets), which leads us to believe that reality is just as discrete and partitioned. However, modern scientific thinking is quite contrary to this belief programmed into language, and the classicalism programmed into language makes conversion to modern scientific thinking sometimes an uphill battle, though a winnable one.

A lesson in general semantics not only teaches the thinking that came from Aristotle and others and how that thinking is not scientifically modern, but also teaches the thinking that comes programmed with language and how that thinking is not scientifically modern.

The general encouragement in general semantics, then, is to get students to slowly update their thinking from the old, easy, outmoded, antiquated ways taught and espoused by Aristotle, et al., as well as the antiquated thinking embedded in much of our language, to thinking that is more modern. We’re largely talking about thinking related to the material world. That is, when we’re talking about everyday things, everyday events, scientific thinking is in play, and antiquated thinking will probably fail the accounting of the material world. Accounting the material world requires much more modern thinking than what most people’s language and juvenile thinking will allow.

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See also: alfred-korzbyski, aristotelianism, aristotle, classicalism, comparison, euclid, metaphysics, modernism, newton, non-aristotelianism, teaching-general-semantics

The title of Alfred Korzbyski’s 1933 work that introduces the field of general semantics is Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.  The term “non-aristotelian” is of interest in this blog post.  It is an important term within general semantics, and one which I feel is both obtuse and generally misinterpreted.  Herein I aim to clarify its meaning by recommending a different, more relatable term in place of “non-aristotelian,” as well as clean up some of the misinterpretation of the term that has happened for countless years.

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In Science and Sanity, Korzybski prides what he dubs “an extensional orientation.”  By this phrase he means an orientation to reality that is fed by facts and the material world as opposed to simply fed by words.

Korzybski sees many people operating under an “intensional orientation”–being informed by words over facts and material findings.  For example, take the person who fears “The Axis of Evil”–the label U.S. President George W. Bush gave three countries.  Were this person to actually commune with the citizens of these countries, she would probably find people much less diabolical than the bushian label describes.  This is to say that her fear is brought about  unnecessarily by words (i.e., her intensional orientation), and reality would likely not be as generic and menacing as the label portends.

If that example of an intensional orientation doesn’t suffice, just imagine that situation from your life when you were victimized by another person that one time; perhaps you were told (words) that you could trust that person, leading you directly to trusting the person, with reality proving otherwise.  An extensional orientation, the one championed by Korzybski, would have directed you to be led by the facts and by reality, so suspicious behavior would potentially have led you to distrust the other person, and to squirrel out of your victimization.

Korzybski borrows the terms “intension” and “extension” from logic.  Both intension and extension have something to do with defining terms.  First, intension: Intension is like defining a human being with a list of properties.  Korzybski cites the “man is a featherless biped” as one example of an intension for a man, as well as “man is a rational animal.”  Intension basically shows all of the characteristics that meet the criterion for use of the word.  (“Featherless? And a biped?  Then we can call it ‘man.'”)

Contrast intension with extension: Extension is like defining a human being with a list of all the different things that qualify as “a human being.”  Unless you’re a computer reading this entry, you’re a human being, so am I (the writer of this post), and so are your friends, family, et al.  So for the extension of a human being, we have Ben Hauck, you (not your name, but you), that friend of yours, that friend, that friend also, your father, your mother, and many, many others.

To summarize the difference between the two terms, when you want to define any word, to give the intension you describe the characteristics of the thing the word represents, and to give the extension you point to all of the things the word represents.  Both have their places and benefits, but Korzybski sees a primitive need for use of extension by everyday people.  People in his time (c.1933, and arguably today, too) got caught up in words and the reality they construct while forgetting to look at the things they represented to see if reality agreed with verbal reality.  That is, people were eating up propaganda (which is suggested to be a road map) but failing to look at what was really going on (the territory the road map was allegedly representing).  Extensionalization–i.e., developing an extensional orientation–is simply training oneself in the habit of downplaying words, accounts, stories, etc., and instead looking at and revering the reality, the actuality, what-is-going-on, etc.

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Having now clarified what “extensionalization” means within Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, we can apply his regard for the orientation to his use of the term “non-aristotelian” in general semantics.  Korzbyski provides in the “Introduction to the Second Edition” of Science and Sanity the extension of his term “non-aristotelian.”  Even better, at the same time he provides the extension of his term “aristotelian”!  Both definitions come in the form of a chart found on pages lii-liv.  (Click here to view the pages within Google Books.)  In the chart, Korzybski clearly and explicitly lists what kinds of orientations, attitudes, etc., are associated with the term “aristotelian,” and what kinds of orientations, attitudes, etc., are associated with the term “non-aristotelian.”

Korzybski sums up each side of the chart with two different terms, which I just found in composing this post, and which correlate almost exactly to the recommendation I want to make herein.  Korzybski sums up “aristotelian” as “antiquated.”  And he sums up “non-aristotelian” as “modern.”  Basically, “aristotelian” means “antiquated,” and so “an aristotelian orientation” means “having an antiquated orientation.”  “Non-aristotelian” means “modern,” so “a non-aristotelian orientation” means “having a modern orientation.”  Why are these equations helpful?  Because both “aristotelian” and “non-aristotelian” are obtuse words (not to mention varying in meaning from the contexts of logic to ethics to tragedy).  “Antiquated” and “modern” are also words everyday people can better relate to.  Furthermore, “antiquated” and “modern” are time words, and the terms “aristotelian” and “non-aristotelian” generally lack any time sense except implying the time of and after the famed Greek philosopher.  The time words suggest what’s outmoded and old, and what’s current and relevant, at least in terms of the different orientations.

The extension of the term “non-aristotelian” is given by the chart.  To characterize the items in that list, most of them are simply ways of thinking.  That is what is meant by the term “orientation”: a way of thinking.  To shift from an aristotelian orientation to a non-aristotelian orientation–or an aristotelian system to a non-aristotelian system–is to shift from thinking in one way to another way.  That shift specifically is the shift from the ways outlined in the left column of the chart to the ways outlined in the right column.

Given the extension of the term “non-aristotelian,” it should become rapidly clear that those writing about general semantics who equate aristotelianism with aristotelian logic are misguided.  “Aristotelian logic” tends to refer to the Laws of Thought attributed to Aristotle: The Law of Identity, the Law of Non-Contradiction, and the Law of the Excluded Middle.  While Korzybski does take on those laws, Korzybski targets many, many more old ways of thinking.  Furthermore, he groups at least one old way of thinking  under the term “aristotelian” even though that way of thinking wasn’t around when Aristotle was alive.  To that point, note that Korzybski refers to the Newtonian system as “aristotelian”–it was developed in the time of Sir Isaac Newton, not in the time of Aristotle.

This is to say that the term “aristotelian” is much broader than those people who equate it with aristotelian logic would imply.  As further support, take Korzybski’s own characterization on page 43 of Science and Sanity.  In this passage, Korzybski drives home not that he’s talking about aristotelian logic but instead about aristotelian science.

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In the days of Aristotle, we knew extremely little of science in the 1933 sense.  Aristotle, in his writings, formulated for us a whole scientific program, which we followed until very lately.  […] Obviously, in 1933, with the overwhelming number of most diversified facts known to science, the question is no more to sketch a scientific program for the future, but to build a system which, at least in structure, is similar to the structure of the known facts from all branches of knowledge.

Feeding this insight back into the chart, “aristotelianism” refers to Aristotle’s program for knowing the world, and probably to ways of thinking that were born directly from Aristotle’s program.  “Non-aristotelianism” is any departure from Aristotle’s program.  Such departures aren’t necessarily against (“anti-“) aristotelianism; instead, they are simply just not (“non-“) aristotelian.

But a lot of the current scientific program (what you learned about the Scientfic Method in school, for example) presumably would take issue with Aristotle’s scientific program.  Therefore, non-aristotelian science is modern, and aristotelian science is antiquated.

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Charles Eddington is the writer whose ideas got my wheels turning on this particular topic, and he inspired a different term than “antiquated.”  Recently I downloaded Eddington’s 1928 book titled The Nature of the Physical World, a collection of his 1927 Gifford Lectures.  (It is available for free download from the Internet Archive.)  I downloaded it for some reason I no longer recall, but it was likely because of some overlap with general semantics.

Early on, Eddington talks about “The Downfall of Classical Physics.”  He talks about old concepts of the atom and of space, and he talks about how new discoveries fed by scientific evidence were flipping some of the long-held assumptions about these topics.  “Classical” was the word that proved interesting to me.  In general semantics, might we use the word?  Might we use the word “classical” to refer to the old ways of thinking that no longer really work?  Might we call “aristotelianism,” “classicalism“?

The idea seemed great to me.  Dubbing the left column of the chart “classicalism” contrasted what I thought would be a constructive term for the right side of the chart: “modernism.”  That is, while Korzybski was talking about shifting our orientations from aristotelian to non-aristotelian, he was talking about shifting our orientations from classical to modern.  So many people are living in modern times using classical theories!  Square peg, round hole.

So there is my small recommendation to make general semantics a little easier to relate to: Refer to those ways of thinking associated with aristotelianism as “classicalism.”  Furthermore, refer to non-aristotelianism as “modernism.”  You can still use the terms “aristotelian” and “non-aristotelian” (and you probably will have to if you’re teaching Science and Sanity) but keep the terms “classicalism” and “modernism” close.  They may help your student understand you better, sooner, etc.  After all, it’s understandable why one would want to update from a classical way of thinking to a modern one!  It’s not necessarily understandable why one would want to update from an aristotelian way of thinking to a non-aristotelian one.

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I’ve recently begun reading the newest addition to my general semantics library, Paradox Lost: A Cross-Contextual Definition of Levels of Abstraction, which is available from the Institute of General Semantics and which I picked up at the recent symposium at Fordham University. It is the posthumously released dissertation of Linda G. Elson, who passed away in 2001, who willed her work, nearly complete, to be published.

Not but a page or two into the book, I was moved by her crisp distinction between paradox and contradiction, which from the outset distinguishes the two perhaps seemingly identical kinds of statements. She offers, rather agreeably, on page 2:

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[A] contradiction consists of two such incompatible statements wherein if one is true then the other must be false; a paradox, on the other hand, may comprise two equally incompatible statements, both of which are true.

She uses the statement “It is raining; it is not raining” as an example. In the typical sense, it is a contradiction: Both statements “It is raining” and “It is not raining,” “logically speaking,” can’t be true. However, say both statements are true. This would make “It is raining; it is not raining” a paradox.

And quickly Elson then solves this paradox, and provides for me what might prove the biggest lesson of the book: With a little bit of explanation, the paradox behind “It is raining; it is not raining” goes away. She resolves the paradox this way on page 2:

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If one were assured then, in the case of the example just given, that both statements represented true states of affairs, the paradox could easily be resolved by recourse to the qualifying information that it is raining in London and not raining in New York.

Elson goes on to say on page 2 that “Without information regarding position in space, the wordmap [i.e., the statement ‘It is raining; it is not raining’] was incomplete […]” From what I glean, the paradox comes primarily from a failure to communicate relevant information in a statement. The implication for me is that where there’s a paradoxical statement, there’s a statement that simply leaves out important information that creates the seeming paradox, such that when the information is invited back into the statement, the paradox goes away.

Elson calls the particular example she provides a “space paradox,” and she distinguishes it from a “time paradox,” in which the inclusion of a time component solves the paradox. She makes a further distinction mentioning a “levels paradox,” which appears at this point to be the paradox of interest in this book. An example of a levels paradox is the Liar Paradox, which could be summarized as this: “I am lying.”

It is soon after page 2 that I start to get a bit, I dunno, “paradox lost.” Elson seems to have set up a solution to the dreaded Liar Paradox, suggesting as with space and time paradoxes that the solution is in simply including missing relevant information. But instead, the dissertation seems to diverge from a practical treatment of the paradox onto a relatively tangential journey to cover Russell & Whitehead’s logical types and Korzybski’s “levels of abstractions.” This is to say, the book “starts to get all academic” when it starts off as practial, and I am sitting here reading wondering when I’m going to get to something I can use in everyday treatment of paradoxes that might come up in conversation or debate.

Of note, although my training is rather academic (I went to school for acting but came from a very studious, book-minded heritage), I have developed a particular disrespect for things academic. That disrespect is not global; instead, it comes when presentations deemed “academic” lack practical application and dance at high levels of abstraction, talking so generally, non-specifically, and vaguely that they can’t be refuted, much less followed. That is, I’ve heard a tireless amount of academic drivel that fails to communicate to its readers or audience, leaving the readers and audience scratching heads over what is meant. Compare these statements: “The falsification of the ungrasp communicates pseudodirectionally toward nowhere except one place, the ingestor of the medium” vs. “I put my spoon in my mouth.” Enough academia I have heard and read dance in the former verbiage and hardly in the latter. From my albeit dramatic perspective.

Elson’s academia is nothing too unusual, and so far it is something I am tolerant of being only about 20+ pages in. That is, I’ll sit with this a bit. But as her reader, I’m sitting here with only so much patience, and I want her to get right to telling me the resolution of the (levels) paradox, because the answer seems to sit before me: Just give a little more information. What’s my resolution to the Liar Paradox, given Elson’s early insights? “I am lying except now.” Or something like that. The inclusion of “except now” is a practical solution to the paradoxical statement.

Thinking along the lines of adding information to solve a paradox, it seems to me that paradoxes arise from subtracting too much information from some kinds of statements. We might say that the original statement was “I am lying except now.” Perfectly fine statement with no paradox. But if I go subtracting the last phrase, I get “I am lying,” which suddenly becomes a hullabaloo. Keep in mind, in normal conversation, if I said that, I would probably be implying that what I said prior to the statement was a lie, which is to say that it’s no problem at all that it sounds paradoxical.

Another objection I have so far to Elson’s dissertation is that she says that Korzybski’s levels of abstraction are heretofore undefined. To some degree, I suppose she has a point, but a study of his work and specifically Science and Sanity probably makes it clear what he means. Elson seems a bit wrong-footed early into her treatment of Korzybski’s notion dubbed “levels of abstraction.” First off, there aren’t that many mentions in Science and Sanity of levels of abstraction. Instead, from what I recall, he speaks more of a) orders of b) abstracting. And those orders are steps in a process. So Korzybski’s “levels of abstraction” are better phrased, in my opinion, “steps in the abstracting process,” and those steps could be summarized as objectification, description, inference, etc. That is, the steps of the abstracting process represented in Korzybski’s model called The Structural Differential equate to the “levels” to which Elson points. “Level” is a metaphor for “step in a process” and levels are made pictoral by Korzybski’s Structural Differential. “Confusion of levels of abstraction” is thinking that objects are the same as words or descriptions, descriptions are the same as inferences, or more basically, what-is-going-on at the event level is the same as the object my nervous system constructs.

It seems a bit unfair to provide such critical opening remarks to Linda Elson’s lifework (which took nearly 10 years to compose), for one because she can’t respond to my complaints, for two, because I’m not done with her book. But her so-far well written and thought-out book has provoked me to comment immediately both on ideas I found exciting (like her resolutions to paradoxes) and regretful (treating korzybskian notions academically). It’s hard to understand where she’ll go from where I am 20+ pages in, but I’m curious to see where. Pick up the book: Not too many books get you thinking so profoundly by the second page.

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See also: academia, alfred-korzybski, contradiction, levels-of-abstraction, liar-paradox, linda-g-elson, paradox, paradox-lost, science-and-sanity, structural-differential