Wednesday, February 23, 2005
"That all debunkers must add new boshes of their own to supply the vacua created by the annihilation of the old, is probably a law of nature." E. T. Bell The Principle of General Relativity
Korzybski uses this as one of the many epigrams found at the beginning of each book of Science and Sanity. I'm not absolutely sure he took this very wise bit of advice to heart: the book continues to be interesting, but the Count often seems more concerned with his legacy than the immediate goal of communicating his system. He reminds us that the Euclidian world gave way to Lobachevsky and others, that the Newtonian world gave way to Einstein and others, and now surely the Aristotelian world must give way to General Semantics. Let the system speak for itself please.
(BTW, Bell, a mathematician at Caltech, also wrote science fiction and adventure stories under the name John Taine. Seeds of Life is a quite good one about genetics that has some truly creepy images in it. Out-of-print, natch.)
Korzybski uses this as one of the many epigrams found at the beginning of each book of Science and Sanity. I'm not absolutely sure he took this very wise bit of advice to heart: the book continues to be interesting, but the Count often seems more concerned with his legacy than the immediate goal of communicating his system. He reminds us that the Euclidian world gave way to Lobachevsky and others, that the Newtonian world gave way to Einstein and others, and now surely the Aristotelian world must give way to General Semantics. Let the system speak for itself please.
(BTW, Bell, a mathematician at Caltech, also wrote science fiction and adventure stories under the name John Taine. Seeds of Life is a quite good one about genetics that has some truly creepy images in it. Out-of-print, natch.)
Comments:
Post a Comment
