Allegra Giovine, "Wrangling with words: General Semantics and the ideal of scientific living in the mid-20th century US"
Suffering from a sub-clinical personality disorder, or perhaps a full-blown psychiatric ailment? Wendell Johnson's 1946 book, People In Quandaries, deepened Alfred Korzybski's program of General Semantics (Science and Sanity, 1933) to show how errors of language and meaning contribute to the psychophysiological problems of our personal nervous systems. Informed by his work as a speech pathologist and influenced by insights of linguistic anthropology, Johnson's Quandaries was just one popular contribution among many to bring science into "everyday living" and fix the myriad social problems brought on by natural language. I'd like to explore the semantic angst that propelled the General Semantics (GS) enterprise and motivated other sometimes foolhardy projects to bring order and clarity to language, meaning, and knowledge in the mid-20th century US.
Notes on readings: Attached are a few excerpts from People In Quandaries as optional reading. Excerpt 1 (ToC and Intro) is for context. If you have just 10 minutes and want to have fun, you can: - check out Excerpt 5 for the semantic exercises in the back of the book, e.g. Exercise 14 ("Non-Allness: The Relativity of Abstracting," pp. 494-5). - skim Excerpt 4 (the final chapter, "The Urgency of Paradise," pp. 467-83) to get a sense of Johnson's overall architecture and stakes for human communication. If you want to get a better sense of how Johnson's General Semantics worked, you can check out Excerpt 2 (Chapter 6, "The World of Words," pp. 112-42). And if you want to learn more about Johnson's application of GS to speech pathologies, check out Excerpt 3 (Chapter 17, "The Indians have no word for it," pp. 439-66) Note: The full text of PIQ is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/peopleinquandari0000unse_s4e6