Another in a series of posts of notes from a book by a college professor of mine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I took the class “General Semantics” from Kenneth G. Johnson in the early 1980s, and found it to be the most enlightening class I ever took. I hope you get something out of it, too.
XII.
When we talk or write, we tend to do so in a manner that suggests we know “all” about a subject. Just as a map cannot say “all” about a territory, we cannot say or know “all” about any particular subject.
Our sense organs select from our environment, so we select what we pay attention to. The words we select to describe an object or event tell about only some of the characteristics.
“Etc.” can be used to remind us that more could be said.
Many people are unhappy because they don’t know “all” about this or that and wish that they did.
The surest way to to lose truth is to pretend that one already wholly possesses it.
One of the most tantalizing truths we know is that there is so much we may never know.
XIII.
Language tends to be static (not changing); the world dynamic (changing). Much of our trouble in using words comes about because we forget that the world changes much faster than words do. We are often using verbal maps that are somewhat out of date and that no longer accurately describe the territory.
The same word may stand for the same person or thing day after day, even though that person or thing may change, grow and transform. We do not name the process, the originality, the development, the flux.
Man’s world has changed more in the past 150 years than in all the time before. The survival of a civilization or an individual depends upon its ability to adapt to change.
“One cannot step in the same river twice.” The water that flows past will never again flow past.
What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. They have changed since then. In a sense, every meeting is a meeting of strangers.
Facts as we see them are quick glimpses of an ever-changing world. It’s as if we view separate frames of a moving picture without realizing that what we are viewing is, in fact, a moving picture.
Failure to recognize changes in time leads to statements such as:
“If Joe said it, it’s a lie. He’s lied to me before.”
“You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Once a failure, always a failure.”
If we accept other people as fixed, already classified and shaped by their past, we confirm this limited hypothesis. But if we accept him as a process of becoming, then we are confirming or making real his potentialities.
Dating is a reminder that things are constantly changing. For example, John1973 is not the same as John2008. Or Boss(9 a.m.) is not the same as Boss (10 p.m.).
