SCIENCE AND SANITY - online book

An Introduction To Non-aristotelian Systems And General Semantics.

	450          VII. THE MECHANISM OF TIME-BINDING
	The application of the term order, which involves physiological, as well as semantic, mechanisms of evaluation, to the analysis of human behaviour, has led me to the present -system and the investigation of the structure of language. The discovery that some of the most important terms we use appear multiordinal, a character concealed by the 'is' of identity, has disclosed to us a most vital and inherent psychological mechanism, responsible in humans for many most desirable, many undesirable, and many morbid human characteristics. It disclosed, also, the psycho-logical structure of these characteristics, and so we have obtained physiological means by which to enhance the development of desirable characteristics, and to prevent or transform the others. Further analysis has disclosed a natural survival order in evaluation: the event first, the object next; the object first, the label next; description first, inferences next., in inherent importance. We have also found that the majority of human difficulties, 'mental' ills included, involve semantic disturbances and exhibit, not the natural survival order, but the identification of different orders, resulting in a reversed (pathological) order. It is impossible in this book to review the data of psychiatry from the point of view, as this would require a separate large volume, which, I hope, will be written some day; but any one can verify the statements made above by himself from clinical literature, and also by analysing his own or other persons' life-difficulties, quarrels, disagreements ., which generally involve quite unnecessary sufferings. Psychotherapeutic literature shows abundantly that the success of the physicians depends mostly on reversing the pathological reversed order in a given field, and so restoring the natural order in the s.r. It is easily verified that, in most cases, when 'mental' illness originated through different life experiences, these would have affected very little, if at all, a child or an adult who was conscious of abstracting, and whose nervous processes and corresponding semantic states followed the natural order. With the aid of the Structural Differential and a A language of new structure, it is easy to train the s.r of an infant, a child, or a young person, and possible, although much more difficult, to train a grown-up in the natural order. Such a training becomes a potent preventive structural physiological method, as it eliminates the psycho-logical states of identification or reversed order, both of which represent the raw semantic material out of which future nervous disorders are produced. The non-el term 'order' is equally applicable in life and science; gives us, in 1933, the simplest structural common base, and allows us to