Information Research Weblog

I don't know how many of you may have read 'The Liar', by Stephen Fry, but towards the end there's a statement that Frank Miller might enjoy (or at least be prepared to argue with):

Trefusis took in a deep lungful of Gold Leaf.

'We can be fairly certain,' he said, 'that animals do not lie. It has been both their salvation and their downfall. Lies, fictions and untrue suppositions can create new human truths which build technology, art, language, everything that is distinctly of Man. The word "stone" for instance is not a stone, it is an oral pattern of vocal, dental and labial sounds or a scriptive arrangement of ink on a white surface, but man pretends that it is actually the thing it refers to. Every time he wishes to tell another man about a stone he can use the word instead of the thing itself. The word bodies forth the object in the mind of the listener and both speaker and listener are able to imagine a stone without seeing one. All the qualities of stone can be metaphorically and metonymically expressed. "I was stoned, stoney broke, stone blind, stone cold sober, stonily silent," oh, whatever occurs. More than that, a man can look at a stone and call it a weapon, a paperweight, a doorstep, a jewel, an idol. He can give it function, he can possess it.'

A very helpful site for finding definitions is http://www.onelook.com/ which has links to a vast number of dictionaries and is fairly well laid out and reasonably easy to use (ie, I've had an amount of success using it). :-) Of course, if you want to search the web, including for defintions, http://www.google.com is a site I highly recommend - no better web browser (in my opinion). I'm sure many of you are aware of this, but there may be a newbie or two out there. (And it adds to the blogs ...)

Frank Miller has drawn my attention to a Web site with some interesting content relevant for the discussion on IR-DISCUSS about information-meaning-knowledge. It is a short paper on 'General Semantics' - a school of thought developed by Alfred Korzybski and can be found at http://www.general-semantics.org/Institute/GD_AKGS.shtml.

In a nutshell: "For a ‘general semanticist’, communication is not merely words in proper order properly inflected (as for the grammarian) or assertions in proper relation to each other (as for the logician) or assertions in proper relation to referents (as for the semanticist), but all these, together with the reactions of the nervous systems of the human beings involved in the communication."

General Semantics has been described as a fad, and a cult and, taken into gestalt psychology it seems to have some of those characteristics. However, the essence of Korzybski's ideas was developed by S.I. Hayakawa in his 'Language in action' (later, 'Language in thought and action'), which, again, Frank recommended to me.

Anatol Rapoport noted of the relationships between the two: "It [Hayakawa's book] clarified the basic ideas in Korzybski's magnum opus, Science and Sanity, retaining their full strength but trimming away the author's narcissistic posturing and obscure verbiage. I read Science and Sanity in Alaska in 1943 and at the time dismissed it as pompous nonsense. But soon afterward I stumbled on Hayakawa's miniature masterpiece and changed my mind." (Source: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6760/still.htm - the author of this site appears to wish to remain anonymous, so how much trust can be placed in his writing is open to question.)

It seems that Hayakawa was able to distil from Korzybski the useful essence of his ideas, while the 'fashion-makers' went for the more outlandish applications.

Tom