CRITICAL THINKING A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

I’ve been reading Korzybski, again. Originally I read Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non- Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933/ 1995) to understand the background of NLP. Later I reread to find linguistic distinctions that were not included in the Meta-Model, and that reading led to identifying several new distinctions (1991-1992) which I wrote up as articles on that subject. Years later (1997) Richard Bandler himself urged me to put that into the book which we were going to title, Magic Revisited. In the end, however, it was titled Communication Magic. Another time I reread Korzybski to discover if there were any “patterns” in his original work. I discovered that there were. So I wrote about those patterns in various articles.

Today I’m at it again, rereading Korzybski and this time for yet another reason. I’m reading to identify more precisely what he wrote about the process of thinking, and especially critical thinking. And given what I’ve found already, some articles about that will be coming with regard to that. And that’s because, to my surprise, he actually wrote about critical thinking (although he did not call it that)—many decades before critical thinking even became a subject.

Yet even before I began this particular re-reading of Korzybski, I looked for something about critical thinking by opening the 830-pages of Science and Sanity. And lo and behold— right in the beginning, I found a list of cognitive fallacies. In “Preliminaries” he has a list of fallacies in thinking (quoted from H.S. Jennings)— “the fallacies of non-experimental judgments ... the fallacy of attributing to one cause what is due to many causes...” etc. (1933, p. 5). In that list he focused primarily on false attributions of cause. So I noted that in Executive Thinking (2018) and at the same time realized that I need to read Korzybski again. So after publishing the book and finishing another project, I have now begun re-reading.

While the theme of General Semantics and Science and Sanity is not “thinking,” at least not directly, and not as we typically think of it, yet it is about the process of bringing information or data into ourselves from the outside world to construct a map about it that we can use to navigate our way in the world. Yet given the structure of the human nervous system and the structure of the primitive Aristotelian language forms that we have inherited, the kind of “thinking” that we mostly do is primitive and Aristotelian. That’s because our language and the way we use our nervous system does not fit with the structure of the world outside.

We “abstract” from the data outside with our nervous system, summarize that data, process it and then send it from the sense receptors to the lower parts of the brain, the thalamus, to the sub-cortical layers, to the higher level cortexes, then to the pre-frontal lobes and the neo-cortex, etc. In this

construct of information and the processing of data in the human system— our ‘thinking’ often goes wrong.

The critical thinking in Science and Sanity begins with recognizing that the information “out there” is abstracted again and again via our sense-receptors and our neurology before it ever reaches the levels of our neurology (in our brain anatomy) where we become conscious of it. Then, our conscious “map” of the “territory” out there is only a map and if our language does not have the same structure as what is “out there,” we have a problem. General Semantics arose as Korzybski worked to provide a way of languaging things so we can think and speak more accurate and precisely. Then, because he noted that we have inherited primitive forms of thinking and languaging — which he labeled as “Aristotelian,” he proposed a new Non-Aristotelian system—General Semantics.

Then, noticing that the extensional nature of mathematics has a structure that corresponds to the structure of the world “out there,” and how mathematizing enables science to be precise, he worked to develop an extensionalizing language. The opposite is intensional meanings (note the “s,” it is not “intention” as John Grinder misquoted Korzybski in The Structure of Magic). Intensional refers to using words according to their definitions without referent to the facts. To be intension is to orient oneself by verbal concepts and abstractions rather than to external facts. This is essentially the structure of fantasy, imagination, and hypnosis.

Given that, the problem with thinking and languaging is that most words are over-intensional and simultaneously under-extensional. For an extensional orientation and language, we need a way to extensionalize “meanings” into specific referents. In NLP, we extensionalize by detailing specifics so that we describe things in sensory-based terms. This was and is the effect of the Meta-Model of Language of NLP— encoding our meaning in specific representational language. And that makes the Meta-Model a great critical thinking tool.

Now Korzybski invented several devices for extensionalizing— indexing co-ordinates, dating, using “etc.,” quotes, and hyphens. From that he then recommended several new linguistic distinctions— Delusional Verbal Splits, Over/Under defined terms, Pseudo-Words, Multi-Ordinal terms, Identification, etc. These were the distinctions that I found in his work and I wrote about as possible additions to the Meta-Model in 1992 and later became part of the Extended Meta-Model (1997). What he called for was more “critical verbal rigor” (p. 55) in the way we use language. So, in General Semantics, this was at the heart of the state of the art of critical thinking — a hundred years ago. And one of the key original sources of the NLP Meta-Model. And now you know.