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GENERAL SEMANTICS

General Semantics is a science developed by Count Alfred Korzybski and many others that deals with the relationships between what goes on in your thoughts, and what goes on in the rest of the world. It is dedicated to helping the individual to be better able to operate in any given environment through the process of helping them have a map of the environment that is the best approximation of reality that their experience so far will let them have.

This is done by the individual internalising various modes of thought. These include the following ideas:

1. No matter how well you model something for the purpose of aiding decisions, there will ALWAYS be a gap between the model and the reality.

2. You can NEVER prove that something is like your model, but that you can prove what the limits of your model are.

3. No two situations are ever identical, nor any two people, so what is the right thing for one person to do in one situation may not be the right thing for another person to do in another seemingly identical situation.

Anyone who is even vaguely interested in this is recommended to go and visit the web pages of the and the International Society for General Semantics who have much better explanations of this than I have.

The best dramatisation of these ideas that I have found so far are to be found in the three "null-a" books of A E Van Vogt, starting with The world of null-a. These are where picked up on the ideas, and he had been using them for a number of years before he managed to find any info about the institute.

There seems to be a similar ethos between the people who use general semantics and various other communities.

There is a link between this science, and .