placerhymes:

thoughtexploratorium:

I’ve mentioned General Semantics a few times now, and if you were curious enough to look it up it’s possible you still don’t have a clear idea of what it is. This video probably doesn’t help. But it does describe one part of it, a model called the Structural Differential. The point of this model is to show you that:

• The things we experience or know about are never total. We never have the full story.
• The objects we perceive through our nervous system have less fidelity than actual reality. 
• The language we use to talk about those objects has even less fidelity.
• When we talk about things that were said, you lose fidelity even further.
• The higher you go in these abstractions, the more important it is to realize they are abstractions, not reality.

There’s more to General Semantics, but the core is about this concept of being aware of these abstractions, primarily in language and communication. It gets into how saying “I don’t like you right now” is very different from “I don’t like what you’re doing right now,” and how saying “Sally is mean” says more about you than Sally. 

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the map is not the territory,” general semantics is where it came from. The full phrase is “the map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined.”