[Neurons] 2018 Neurons #46 CRITCAL THINKING A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2018 Neurons #46

October 22, 2018

 

CRITICAL THINKING

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

 

 

I've been reading Korzybski, again.  Originally I read Science and Sanity:
An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933/
1995) to understand the background of NLP.  Later I reread to find
linguistic distinctions that were not included in the Meta-Model, and that
reading led to identifying several new distinctions (1991-1992) which I
wrote up as articles on that subject.  Years later (1997) Richard Bandler
himself urged me to put that into the book which we were going to title,
Magic Revisited.  In the end, however, it was titled Communication Magic.
Another time I reread Korzybski to discover if there were any "patterns" in
his original work.  I discovered that there were.  So I wrote about those
patterns in various articles.

 

Today I'm at it again, rereading Korzybski and this time for yet another
reason.  I'm reading to identify more precisely what he wrote about the
process of thinking, and especially critical thinking.  And given what I've
found already, some articles about that will be coming with regard to that.
And that's because, to my surprise, he actually wrote about critical
thinking (although he did not call it that)-many decades before critical
thinking even became a subject.

 

Yet even before I began this particular re-reading of Korzybski, I looked
for something about critical thinking by opening the 830-pages of Science
and Sanity.  And lo and behold- right in the beginning, I found a list of
cognitive fallacies.  In "Preliminaries" he has a list of fallacies in
thinking (quoted from H.S. Jennings)- "the fallacies of non-experimental
judgments ... the fallacy of attributing to one cause what is due to many
causes..." etc. (1933, p. 5).  In that list he focused primarily on false
attributions of cause.  So I noted that in Executive Thinking (2018) and at
the same time realized that I need to read Korzybski again.  So fter
publishing the book and finishing another project, I have now begun
re-reading.

 

While the theme of General Semantics and Science and Sanity is not
"thinking," at least not directly, and not as we typically think of it, yet
it is about the process of bringing information or data into ourselves from
the outside world to construct a map about it that we can use to navigate
our way in the world.  Yet given the structure of the human nervous system
and the structure of the primitive Aristotelian language forms that we have
inherited, the kind of "thinking" that we mostly do is primitive and
Aristotelian.  That's because our language and the way we use our nervous
system does not fit with the structure of the world outside.

 

We "abstract" from the data outside with our nervous system, summarize that
data, process it and then send it from the sense receptors to the lower
parts of the brain, the thalamus, to the sub-cortical layers, to the higher
level cortexes, then to the pre-frontal lobes and the neo-cortex, etc.  In
this construct of information and the processing of data in the human
system- our 'thinking' often goes wrong.

 

The critical thinking in Science and Sanity begins with recognizing that the
information "out there"  is abstracted again and again via our
sense-receptors and our neurology before it ever reaches the levels of our
neurology (in our brain anatomy) where we become conscious of it.  Then, our
conscious "map" of the "territory" out there is only a map and if our
language does not have the same structure as what is "out there," we have a
problem.  General Semantics arose as Korzybski worked to provide a way of
languaging things so we can think and speak more accurate and precisely.
Then, because he noted that we have inherited primitive forms of thinking
and languaging - which he labeled as "Aristotelian," he proposed a new
Non-Aristotelian system-General Semantics.

 

Then, noticing that the extensional nature of mathematics has a structure
that corresponds to the structure of the world "out there," and how
mathematizing enables science to be precise, he worked to develop an
extensionalizing language.   The opposite is intensional meanings (note the
"s," it is not "intention" as John Grinder misquoted Korzybski in The
Structure of Magic).  Intensional refers to using words according to their
definitions without referent to the facts.  To be intension is to orient
oneself by verbal concepts and abstractions rather than to external facts.
This is essentially the structure of fantasy, imagination, and hypnosis.

 

Given that, the problem with thinking and languaging is that most words are
over-intensional and simultaneously under-extensional.  For an extensional
orientation and language, we need a way to extensionalize "meanings" into
specific referents.  In NLP, we extensionalize by detailing specifics so
that we describe things in sensory-based terms.  This was and is the effect
of the Meta-Model of Language of NLP- encoding our meaning in specific
representational language.  And that makes the Meta-Model a great critical
thinking tool.

 

Now Korzybski invented several devices for extensionalizing- indexing
co-ordinates, dating, using "etc.," quotes, and hyphens.  From that he then
recommended several new linguistic distinctions- Delusional Verbal Splits,
Over/Under defined terms, Pseudo-Words, Multi-Ordinal terms, Identification,
etc.  These were the distinctions that I found in his work and I wrote about
as possible additions to the Meta-Model in 1992 and later became part of the
Extended Meta-Model (1997).  What he called for was more "critical verbal
rigor" (p. 55) in the way we use language.  So, in General Semantics, this
was at the heart of the state of the art of critical thinking - a hundred
years ago.  And one of the key original sources of the NLP Meta-Model.  And
now you know. 

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., Executive Director 

Neuro-Semantics 

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

               1 970-523-7877 

                    Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net


    cid:261CED33-4408-4124-862B-B9A4B37A367A

    

 

Dr. L. Michael Hall writes a post on "Neurons" each Monday.  For a free
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"Products," there is also a catalog of books that you can download.   

 

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