CAN LANGUAGE TRANSFORM MAN? —“The sourcebook for general semantics, Science an

CAN LANGUAGE TRANSFORM MAN?

—“The sourcebook for general semantics, Science and Sanity, presents general semantics as both a theoretical and a practical system whose adoption can reliably alter human behavior in the direction of greater sanity. Its author asserted that general semantics training could eventually unify people and nations. In the 1947 preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity, Korzybski wrote, “We need not blind ourselves with the old dogma that ‘human nature cannot be changed,’ for we find that it can be changed.”—

While I agree that we can transform man, I would caution that we can transform him to the common language of science, which corresponds to reality, or we can transform him in a hundred other ways, which conflict with reality. At least most physical scientists seek to transform man’s thinking such that it corresponds to reality. Economics, as we have seen of late, transforms man to think in terms not correspondent with reality. The remaining social sciences transform him to correspond with reality even less so.

The language of science appears to be universal and transformative for all.

My question is why we cannot use operational language to transform ethics, economics and politics into a universal language that corresponds to reality as does that of the physical sciences.

Korzybski, Alfred (1994). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (5th ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics.