General semantics – Outline

GENERAL SEMANTICS: An Outline Survey
by Kenneth G. Johnson 3rd Edition Revised

A very interesting Outline! This is by the same guy who I quoted earlier.

11.4 “ ‘You’d be interested to know,’ he (the psychiatrist) said, ‘how many people come to me with troubles that are largely a matter of nomenclature. They suffer the tortures of the damned at the idea that a particular label may fit them or may not fit them. ‘Am I a man? Am I a coward? Am I a failure? Am I an invert? Sometimes, simply, am I a lunatic?’ If you could only get it through your head that it’s you, only you, who’s pinning the label on or taking it off, you’d have your problem half licked.’ ”
– Louis Auchincloss [14]

Thinking creātically – By Kenneth G. Johnson

Thinking creātically: a systematic, interdisciplinary approach to creative … By Kenneth G. Johnson

That is the Amazon link to the used books at a huge price.

As part of my link journey on the General Semantic theme I found it on Google and took a snap off the screen with the iphone of some references I wanted.

More details of my process and the book follows.

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A generally semantic journey

I have enjoyed some of the writing and audio from Al Turtle a relationship therapist. I get an RSS feed of his updates and today found a link to his favourite books. Great idea!

I found an ebook of A. E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A, non-Aristotelian logic in SF form. I see that this is not a one-off in Al’s list! He is into General Semantics – intrigued I went off on a search trail.

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“The use of space has a profound effect on the audience”

I am reflecting on the use of space and how it influences dialogue, and more broadly communication (though they are essentially the same thing… flow of meaning.) Found an interesting article:

UNDERSTANDING THEATRE SPACE
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (2002)

I have been wondering how courts and juries fir into the history of all of this… and there is a clue here!

How might a restorative justice space look?

The biggest question on my mind though is how we use space in cyberspace – and how we can create more intentional dialogue.

Quote follows

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Phronesis – knowing through performance, action

A few years ago I printed out this article to read!  Today I began reading it.  Wonderful.

Art as action or art as object? the embodiment of knowledge in practice as research
Dr Anna Pakes, Roehampton University of Surrey, England
<A.Pakes@roehampton.ac.uk>

If I can make a short summary: Through action we know stuff.

This is right on the topic of my science & Psychodrama paper, and goes back again to Aristotle:  Phronesis (see earlier post of mine) I have highlighted a bit in the quote below that may as well describe a Psychodrama session.  She relates the knowing to dance, but and I am sure it applies equally if not more so to Psychodrama which is a conscious form of experimentation in addition to all that she describes.

Quote follows.

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Psychotherapy… following the psyche

Following the client is the essence.

Letting go of all ideas about a solution to a problem.

The pattern of behaviour or situation what we draw attention to, not the particular behaviour.

The pattern is something that can be transformed at any instance of it. Status Nascendi is the most potent instance, but only if the person is ready to go, trust their pace.

The situation the client chooses to work on for that pattern is up to them, that is where we follow them, to that place where they are most ready to go.

This way the person is less likely to blame or place the experience onto another person.

And if they do…

“Focus on your experience, in this moment, your pain, your anger, your sense of injustice. Stay with that.”

Systems thinking, Gaia and the Hot Age

I am reading James Lovelock’s The Vanishing Face of Gaia. I like his phrase the “Hot Age”. It may or may not come but it is more evocative than “global warming”. But that is not really what I want to raise here. His main thesis, that the earth is a living thing, an organism, that has self regulatory systems is not so much a mystical idea and a metaphor, but the basis of ecology, of systems, a science. The failure to see systemically is at the core of so much reductive scientific inability to see clearly. I see it in mental health, but here he puts it all beautifully as it relates to the planet, and science as a whole, the problem is that …

as the consequence of most American scientists, in their straightforward successful and reductionist way, seeing the Earth as something that they could improve or manage; they seemed to see it as no more than a ball of rock moistened by the oceans and sitting within a tenuous sphere of air… They do not yet see the Earth as a live planet that regulates itself.

They tail to see that because the Earth was colonized by life at least three and a half billion years ago, its temperature and surface composition have been set by the preferences of whatever organisms
made up the biosphere. This was true in the cold of the ice ages, it is true now, and will be true in the heat of the hot age soon due. Of course the physics and chemistry of the air are important in the
understanding of climate, but the manager of climates is and has always been Gaia, the Earth system of which the biosphere is a part. The disastrous mistake of twentieth century science was to assume
that all we need to know about the climate can come from modelling the physics and chemistry ofthe air in ever more powerful computers, and then assuming that the biosphere merely responds passively to
change instead of realizing it was in the driving seat. Because we acknowledged the leadership of America in science, most of the world took its mistaken view as true.

Page 14 in the 2009 penguin edition.

It is interesting that he sees computer modeling as a problem as well. It has led to us not trusting scientists. The small bits of data they can “prove” has impact means forfeiting seeing the whole.

He is thinking Earth, Gaia, but I am much more familiar with looking at systems such as groups and the psyche. Being able to see repeating patterns in the various holons is an art that is not easily proved, but the basis for the science from the inside.