SCIENCE AND SANITY - online book

An Introduction To Non-aristotelian Systems And General Semantics.

	540         VII. THE MECHANISM OF TIME-BINDING
	we cannot train mankind in identification by all available means, which must prevent adjustment, and then live by non-identification. Thus, when non-identity is pointed out, even a moron will 'agree', or wonder at the silliness of an author who fusses about it; yet, because all of us were trained in a linguistic and semantic system based on identity, that infantile identification will unconsciously play havoc with all our s.r the rest of our lives, unless this semantic blockage is counteracted. Naturally, the 'simpler' a principle appears, to which we may pay lip service, but which we never fully apply, the more I became convinced that the discovery of new methods for the application of this simple yet neglected principle must be considered most important. Any reader may verify by himself to what extent identification introduces difficulties in his own life. In fact, the main difficulties we have can always be traced to some identification somewhere. 2)   The experimental data of Doctor Philip S. Graven with the 'mentally' ill and those cases of semantic disturbances which, in the orthodox way, were not supposed to be un-sane, showed that a change from the A standards of evaluations involving identification to the A standards without identification often either brought about a complete semantic reconstruction of an individual, or semantic, expedient, and lasting 'cures'. This fact again impressed me with the genuine workability and so human importance of a -system. If the old 'impossible to change', 'human nature' can be 'changed' by the new simple psychophysiological methods, this again suggests that this new system, no matter how imperfect, may be useful. 3)   I was also very much impressed by the far-reaching power of the A methods. As a rule, only mathematicians and epistemologists fully appreciate what the power of a method means. Thus, the differential methods were invented, and later we found that these methods were structurally applicable to all processes. A tensor calculus was invented, and we found that it gave us absolute, invariant formulations applicable to all physics. Many other methodological innovations could be cited, and always the generality of the applications gave the value to those new formulations. The present -system was formulated in a way independent of other diciplines, as it was the direct result of structural semantic researches free from identification. This led to the formulation of fundamental general principles which underlie all human 'knowledge', such as non-identity, requiring the recognition of structure as the only possible content of 'knowledge' and so leading to the formulation of 'similarity of structure'; non-elementalism as a general principle; the general principle of uncertainty; oo-valued general semantics,. It is