Institute of General Semantics

I'd like to get some input on how action and agency relate to semantic reaction. Usually I only find mention of the intellectual, emotional, and physiological response to stimuli in discussions of s.r. but I don't see how action cannot be part of this organism-in-its-environment-as-a-whole response. Does GS consider our acting as part of our semantic reactions? Does GS discuss whether action ever outside the domain of a semantic reaction. How does the notion of volition fit? Can you please site references if possible.

Thanks
StevieRayD

Hi StevieRayD,

I've moved your thread to The Agora as I think it better fits this forum.

Cheers,
Ben
Moderator

To try to break this down a little, let me ask this question: Would you say that "action" and "reaction" are elementalistic terms, that this is part of the elementalism that "semantic reaction" intends to avoid? I ask this because of the word "reacton" in the term. Is is thought that "action" is an elementalistic term, that this becomes evident in the context of a "semantic reaction" where drawing a distinction between reaction and action is difficult?

I don't recall ever seeing Korzybski cite the word "action" as an elementalistic term. What constitutes an elementalistic term, from what I can tell, depends upon how people generally use the term. By definition, an elementalistic term divides verbally what we cannot divide in the territory.

If you can provide examples (sentences) of how people use the words "action" and "reaction," you may make a good case for referring to it as elementalistic. Why not give it a try!

Ben

First let me try to keep active in this discuss, my primary request for comments on how "action" and "agency" are modelled in GS, maybe in s.r.

A friend's question got me thinking of how action fits the GS theory of evaluating. It occured to me that s.r. seems to stop short of explicitly discussing phenomena beyond "reaction". But then, I thought action is something we do as part of our reaction. Isn't all action situated in s.r? So the distinction between action and reaction becomes blurred - when does reaction end and action begin. In other words action and reaction are elementalistic terms, the distinction isn't REALLY there, you can't really draw a clean line that says reaction stops here and action begins here. I wondered if the discussion of symbol reaction covers for "action". This is reaction that is conditional, delayed, evaluative. How else would we define action? Once we have considered, evaluated and then ACT, is it reaction or Action?

Myself, I see action as falling under the umbrella of the term "semantic reaction," though I don't believe (or at least know of a place where) Korzybski says this.

I see general semantics as the study of semantic reactions. By this, I mean I see general semantics as the study of reactions to language.

If you read something controversial, you likely have neural reactions, emotional reactions, intellectual reactions, and other "internal" reactions. You likely have physiological reactions (muscular contractions, etc.), linguistic reactions (you exclaim, etc.), and other general, explicit, "outward" behavioral reactions. Other people may react to your reactions. So, when you read something controversial, social reactions may also follow.

All of these for me constitute "semantic reactions." The term "semantic reaction" aims to eliminate elementalism in the consideration of reactions a person has to language. It aims to keep tied together that which we cannot divide in reality. So, in embracing all of these reactions as "semantic reactions," I concede that I cannot truly talk about them independently but must think of them as so intertwined that I cannot ever separate them.

In theater, I define the term "action" as "a motivated effort." Insofar as an action comes as the result of exposure to some language (like a controversial passage), I regard action as a semantic reaction.

For example, I might see a sign on which it says "STOP." I have particular internal reactions to it (I listed some above). I have particular outward physiological reactions as well. Most actions probably fall under this category (though some actions, like thinking, could fall under the more internal category). My action? I stop my car. "STOP" constitutes language, and my action related to that language. Presumably if you removed the language, I wouldn't have stopped and instead I would have continued driving.

All in all, if you change the structure of language, you may change how we (semantically) react. Similarly, if you simply change just the language, you may change how we (semantically) react. So you may effect our actions by changing language.

(I don't see action in terms of symbol reactions, which have more to do with a delay in reaction as opposed to an immediacy in reaction. Of course you may take delayed action, and you could consider that the result of a symbol rather than signal reaction, but I don't think that relates really to your general question.)

Ben

Action and agency.

Recall that general semantict 1950 had not significantly updated from 1933, partly, I surmise, becuse, as a theory of human knowing it had been formulated at such an abstract level of overly simplified description, that it could be interpreted by those so biased as "covering" new, more detailed, developments in science, psychology, etc.. In my opinon it has show little upgrading since 1950 also. My website is devoted to the continued analysis of the "theory", particularly in the light of updated science discoveries and philosophical developments.

One problem with an overly abstract simplified skeleton theory, it seems to me, is that it can be fleshed out in many ways, and few of these are capable of "refuting" the abstract theory, thus making it "unscientific" (in principle not testable). One of the claims of general semantics is that in provides a basis for an ethical system. Philosophy shows that to be a fallacy, but general semanticists of today continue to advocat and try to assert an ethic which promotes cooperation as human and eschews competition as "animalistic". Values represnt choices by an agent in the manner depicted in my "Think-Feel and Know-Act". Individual choices that regularly and routinely are made in what can be evauated as the "same way", become at a higher level of abstraction a value. You choose white chocolate over black most all the time predicts that you will do so in the future, and identifies the white chocolate as something you value. Externalizing this verb become the noun a value. We forget that money is only worth what people will give you for it. Its "value" gets determined by a statistical evaluation of the results of transactions between agents.

What do we natually value? Survival (built in), reproduction (built in). Implemented in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

We have to put together the philosophy of mobile organisms < xenodochy.org/pomlife.html>, Maslow's need hierarchy < xenodochy.org/ex/lists/maslow.html > and Think-Feel and Know-Act < xenodochy.org/gs/tfka.html > looking at the organism as an agent acting on stimuli (inculding internal).

We also have to look at the way our brains work and learn. Our neural circuits process all our inputs in parallel effecting "abstraction" along the way. To describe things simply, our brains record a total picture of all inputs, external and internal, in sequence with an adaptive resonance mechanism that allows each action to stimulate the next in a more or less continuous series. Along the way the neurological circuits doing this habituate to many signals that do not appear to change in response to actions or other signals. (That's why ticking clocks "become invisible", if you'll pardon my mixed metaphor.) See < xenodochy.org/ex/abstract/meditate.html >. But mostly our bains keep a record of our entire environment experience along with the actions we were taking at the time, what we were feeling, what our body's hormone and chemical balance situation was. I've notices that when I teach a male student a dance step in a room, the orientation in the room becomes part of how he knows what to do. Turn him around and he often cannot repeat the step. I have to show it to him on different compass headings if I want him to get the figure. That, it seems to me, is because we men almost instinctively "know" that going hunting and going home are not the same. Women do not exhibit this characteristic nearly as much. In our evolution the relative relationship of gestures between women of different status does not change with the physical orientation. The subordinate had better defer no matter what direction the senior is coming from. Similar arguments apply for all manner of social relationships, which women better learn and perform. Some studies have shown more connectivity in the corpus collosum of women, and brain scans show more bi-latteral activity whereas more men show more single hemisphere activity. This minor diversion illustrates some differences, but in principle, we learn without distinguishing the irrelevant from the relevant, until we have learned to habituate some inputs as irrelevant.

Now for the "semantic" part.

A semantic reaction is the response in terms of the meaning of the stimulus to the individual.

The brain is continually creating and revising its "map" of the environment. This "map" is not a static picture of what's around us. It is more like a whole sequence of directions and recipes with lots of conditions.

If you are thirsty and you do not see water, then you move around until you do.
In doing so you remember all the times you were thirsty and the circumstances of those contexts and you choose one or two that most closely match your current circumstances. Baring any experience you simply flail about randomly - just like babies do. Eventually neurological connections are weakened and lost and the corresponding actions are extinguished resulting in habituation of irrelevant actions. It takes years for this to happen. Eventually we learn to utter sounds and associate heard sounds with actions. These connect to our needs and our experiences allowing us to act when needed (pun intended). When we see something, our brain is flooded with the associations of past experiences, but most of these get weeded out as not matching the current circumstances. We are left with a reaction of the brain recalling with adaptive resonance similar experiences incuding the actions taken previously in similar experiences.

An inclination to act becomes part of the semantic reaction, because what the stimulus mean to us is not only what we think about it, but what we did before, and what the consequences were. Look at the Think-Feel and Know-Act diagram. We have learned values that evoke "orientation" the precursor of action.
Simply put, the second you decide that something is good, you begin to act towards it. Conversly, the second you decide that something is bad, you begin to act away (against) it. And, when you delay this action, you begin to experience a build of emotional pressure to carry out the action. It persists until it is either discharged, distracted by another stimuli, or the decision is questioned. It's why runners have false starts when the starting gun is delayed too long. This emotional capacitance buildup has survival value as it insures follow-through. We feel our values whenever we fail to act upon them promptly. And this feeling builds until we do act or until we change our orientation. (This is the Attitude Theory of Emotion part.) Although adopted by general semantics between the '50s to the '90s (as long a Charlotte was active), it seems never to have been incorporated as part of the theory.

All of the foregoing works even without language.

So now we have to look at a hierarchy of evolved and learned responses that adds language originating in a social hierarchy of dominance, submission, and competition for resources and status. First verbal cultures. Then written cultures. Then more complex and evolved cultures, now philosophy, now mathematics, now physics, now empiricism, now logical positivism, now fallabilism in sience, now evolutionary epistemology, now empirical rational cognitive science (Lakoff).

General semantics does not explicity incude any theory of action, though it judges action as human or animalistic. Late genaral semantics adopted, for a while, the attitude theory of emotion - Charlotte Read had it on her bibliography. But it was not incorporated into the theory of general semantics. General semantics did not explain any mechanisms for semantic reaction, though they were influenced by Pavlov and speak of conditioned and conditional responses. Much beyond that the "official" theory does not go.

I note that you are using my "organism-in-the-environment-as-a-whole" instead of the "official" general semantics "organism-as-a-whole-in-the-environment". See < xenodochy.org/gs/organism.html >. Ben has called my revision "neo-general semantics".


I see "action" as initiated with the individual.
I see "re-action" as action initiated as a result of something preceeding.
I do not see any action as spontaneous without a cause.
Action is the organism's response to the total current situation.
Whether is will be called 'action' or 'reaction' depens on the point of view of the speaker; It's action when the speaker wants to start with the actor.; it's reaction when the speaker wants to start with something differentiated from the actor's current state and prior to it.

The "semantic" reaction can carry through to subsequent action, and that action is determined by the actors finding of relevance to his or her current state, not to the explicit physical properties of the stimulus (if physical). When I reach over and turn down the radio, I might be reacting to its physical characteristics (too loud for comfort), or I might be reacting to its information content (just static, no information in the signal - it "means" they are off the air to me at the time). The later is a semantic reaction carried through to behavior. When I cringe inwardly every time I hear "very fun", I'm hearing "bad English" because I grew up with adverbs not modifying nouns.

As a parting shot, see < xenodochy.org/gs/sr.html >

PS. general semantics does not deal with the nature of agents initiating action. It has no theory of such. My theory is that we orient automatically to what we value. This couples values to orienting, and action follows from orienting. It's this structure that differentiates mobile organisms from non-mobile ones. Mobile organisms "go for" stuff. Non-mobile ones allow stuff to come to them. The feeling of emotions couple orienting to consumatory action. Abstraction couples sensing to decisions.

The semantic reaction is overly abstract and overly ambigous with respect to what is subsumed under "reaction" from internal to long-term external.

'nuff said.

Ralph concluded with:
The semantic reaction is overly abstract and overly ambigous with respect to what is subsumed under "reaction" from internal to long-term external.Provided I understand what you mean by this statement, I find myself in a bit of disagreement with it.

When Korzybski introduces the term "semantic reaction" (somewhere toward the beginning of S&S), he describes it as a non-elementalistic term, seemingly aimed at resolving verbally the tendency people to have to think in terms of emotion AND intellect rather than emotion-intellect. In this respect, I see no ambiguity in what Korzybski means by "reaction": he refers to emotional reactions and intellectual reactions (also saying we cannot separate the two kinds of reactions).

As for abstract, again, I don't see it. I take from Koryzbski as well as the greater study of general semantics that a semantic reaction follows exposure to words, and the term refers to "the total mind-body response" that follows that exposure. Fleshing that out even more, the term refers to what goes on in the brain as well as what goes on in the rest of the body when exposed to words. The term means something concrete to me, rather than abstract.

I find Korzybski's term "semantic reaction" highly useful for bundling a bunch of seemingly separate reactions together into an interrelated whole. Rather than overly abstract or overly ambiguous, I find the term rather specific and rather clear.

Ralph, you and I appear to have similar takes on where action falls in the discussion of general semantics (action belongs to the domain of semantic reactions), so I might say that you have more clarity about the term than you give yourself credit.

Ben

Ben,
The term 'semantic reaction" is overly abstract and ambiguous precisely because it is not backed up with any model of mechanism other than the extremely vague and often misunderstood term "abstraction". Korzybski provides the term to label a general category of human response characterized as, in terms of map-territory, as indicating the output of the mapping process which maps (by abstraction) the characteristics in the stimulus to the associations the individual makes to those stimuli. Korzybski's defining is overly general to be restricted to words and reactions to them, because it provides no way to differentiate the process from similar responses to signals, signs, and general stimuli. "Semantic" has a strong connotation as relating to words, but when you look at the concise definition, "reaction in terms of the meaning (to the individual) of the words, signals, signs, (and by natural extension) all stimulation, inculding verbal and non-verbal, one must see that a "semantic" reaction, by virtue of its defining structure applies across the board to non-verbal and verbal responses.

Korzybsk had no way of knowing what we know understand about adaptive resonance and auto-responding brain circuits. He did not even try to explain a mechanism to inform the process of "having semantic reactions". Every organism that is sufficiently complex to build internal models of its environment, conscious or not, associates through conditioning and learning responses with stimuli. The sound of the bell "means" food is coming to Pavlov's dog. That conditioned response is a "semantic" (stimulus mapped to meaning) reaction, though non verbal; it is the simpest kind of semantic reaction.

Call my view "neo-general semantics" again if you wish. But general semantics is supposed to be a self-updating system based on the acquisiton of modern scientific knowledge. The "meanings" of our technical terms must evolve with the times.

"Semantic reaction" as defined and explained by Korzybski lacks any structural mechanism related to the very neuro-semantic process it is intended to classify.

Again, with "abstract"; Korzybski provides no detailed structural model of the process. In my experience people tend to think of characteristics in the stimulus as being passed through while some are lost. This is simply wrong. The stimulus and the response, like a microphone, form a causal sequence of changes in one structure effecting through physical cause and effect changes in a different structure, for example molecular vibration causing electric voltage variation. Pressure waves stimulating electrochemical nerve processes. The description of the process in terms of map-territory - devoid of detailed physical structural models (understandibly in that the science was not known) makes the explanation both abstract and ambiguous. Listeners take away from the explanation the meaning they already have for the words much more often that changing their meanings.

Abstract -> pick out some and omit others - leave out details. Does not fit in general semantics for precise theory of the structural differential.

Abstract -> transduce from one medium to another by means of physical cause and effect, including multi-level transductions. Mapping between DIFFERENT structures made up of DIFFERENT things predominately (but may include "similar" structures in one medium as a special case).

We must NOT "identify" the characteristics at one level with those even corresponding ones at another level. Voltage is not air pressure. Light is not nerve discharges. Nerve discharges are not muscle contractions. Muscle contractions are not air pressure waves. Air pressure waves are not ear bone movements. Ear bone movements are not nerve impulses.

A "semantic" reaction, defined as the response of an organism in terms of the "meaning" (internal map) of a stimulus (external/internal sensory impact [incuding memory recall]), operates strictly at physical cause-effect levels, and it produces the reportable effect of responding to different.

Do you know what time it is?
It's 2:30.

Clearly the response does not answer the question literally.
A direct answer to the stimulus would be "yes", "no", "I don't know".

< xenodochy.org/ex/misc/fivefoc.html >

Recall the controversy (no, you're too young) over subliminal advertising?
It uses non-verbal semantic reaction "science".

If you choose to insist on sticking with the "master's" original definition and application, are you denying the principle of self-updating general semantics?

/s/ The so-called "neo-general semanticist"

Hi Ralph,

When you go about defining "semantic reaction," you define it in terms of the map-territory analogy. It seems to me by doing this, you complicate understanding the meaning (referents) for this term. Korzybski talks about semantic reactions in terms of words rather than maps.

Now, when he talks about words (and language in general), he invokes the map metaphor as an analogy for understanding, perceiving, and treating words (and language in general). But invoking the map metaphor or the map-territory analogy in defining "semantic reaction," well, made the formulation confusing to me, not to mention overly abstract. How does a definition of "semantic reaction" of "any reaction (neurological, emotional, intellectual, physiological, verbal, behavioral, social, etc.) a human has to words*" sound overly abstract or ambiguous?

As for a "concise" definition of the term you quote, I think you may have created that on your own rather than quoted that from a source. It sounds reminiscent of how Korzybski defined the term, but as far as I can tell, he never provided a "concise" definition. On pg. 9 of S&S, he refers to them as "psycho-logical responses to words and other stimuli in connection with their meanings" ), and on pg. 24, he refers to them as "psycho-logical reaction[s] of a given individual to words and language and other symbols and events in connection with their meanings [...]" Note no mention or use of the map metaphor. You use the word "meaning" in your definition of the term, but we know the difficulties and ambiguities around that term given its multi-meaning, so we (maybe just I) try to avoid using it in definitions. Although you do explicate what you mean by "meaning" (you say "(internal map)" ), I still get left in a bit of a fog about what Korzybski means by "semantic reaction." His definitions sound much more concise than the one you presumably quoted.

I agree that the term "semantic reaction" covers both verbal and non-verbal responses. I don't think I've communicated anything to the contrary, though I apologize if something I wrote led you to think I meant that.

You require Korzybski's formulation of semantic reactions to have some kind of "structural mechanism," but I have no idea what that means or would look like.

Here ...

Again, with "abstract"; Korzybski provides no detailed structural model of the process.
... you seem to say that Korzybski doesn't provide a detailed structural model of the abstracting process. I may have misread what you read, but if you meant what I read, of course he does. The Structural Differential represents the abstracting process. It models it. So I seem to think I've misread what you wrote.

I suppose I then diverge this discussion from StevieRayD's original interests of discussion. Ralph, perhaps you can relate the above back to action and agency in your reply. If not, perhaps we can discuss how abstractly or ambiguously Korzybski formulated "semantic reaction" in a new thread in The Agora.

Ben

* I rephrased because I actually made it ambiguous what I meant in how I originally phrased it in my post! Ha!