No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Introduction I delivered piece below on June 22, 1951, at opening session of University of Chicago conference on general semantics cosponsored by International Society for General Francis P. Chisholm, author of Introductory Lectures on General Semantics, chaired session. Nicolas Rashevsky, head of University of Chicago Committee on Mathematical Biology, gave welcoming address. Erwin Reifler delivered first paper, Some Problems of Comparative Semantics. Then came mine, followed by Charles Morris, author of Signs, Language, and Behavior. Other notables on program who might be known to today's general semanticists included S. I. Hayakawa, Wendell Johnson, John Kessler, Martin Maloney, Irving Lee, Russell Meyers, and Anatol Rapoport. Just that May I'd received an MA degree from University of Chicago Social Sciences Division Program of Education and Research in Planning, a program I'd entered in part to further my interest in decision making. Unfortunately, my teachers had already decided that decision making was best carried out as a purposive activity, what I called goal-directed, whereas I felt other patterns of decision making, especially one I called originative, had much to offer. The goal-directed approach has become almost universally touted since that time. However, I've not changed my mind. In editing piece for publication from my 1951 draft for oral presentation I've done usual tightening, but I've also reflected 46-year delay by eliminating masculine pronouns used in old inclusive sense and by substituting term responsive for my earlier resultive. I've modified no substantive point, however, and, except as noted in footnotes 7 and 10, feel today no particular need to revise substance. General semantics has been defined in short as the study and improvement of human evaluative processes with special emphasis on their relation to signs and symbols including language. (1) Those of us who call ourselves general semanticists have a particular way of studying human evaluations that we feel makes sense. But I believe a little reflection will show that we've overlooked some areas of human evaluation while concentrating on others. We've attended mostly to evaluations of matters of fact. We've focused on whether evaluations make sense or not, whether they can be used as reliable maps, and whether they do or don't provide predictability. Indeed, criteria that we general semanticists offer for better evaluational behavior are almost all included in general criterion of greater predictability. This forms a most important part of our task and one on which we've progressed rapidly. Consider, however, someone who with due concern for predictability has gathered as much reliable and pertinent information as practical about two potential courses of action. Is a choice between these two courses given by that information? Obviously not, for to choose between two courses requires something more, a value judgment. No amount of factual material, no matter how reliable, can by itself dictate a choice. In an extreme case, even estimating that one action involves a 100% probability of personal death does not by itself dictate choice of other action. Neither facts nor criteria that we general semanticists offer will by themselves allow us to deduce choice. This points up area we've neglected, realm of decision making. I assume you agree that general semantics shouldn't omit an evaluational behavior as important as decision making. Therefore, we need to ask: How should we go about studying this field? At present only one book by a general semanticist attempts to deal with field of decision making (more implicitly for most part than explicitly) and that is Science and Goals of Man by Anatol Rapoport. (2) He holds that scientific behavior can be viewed as guided by or directed toward certain goals and that these goals are general enough in their application to provide realistic criteria for making choices whether by individuals or groups. …
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.