The Institute, whose ideas on increasing the preciseness of language were incorporated into Robert A. Heinlein’s novels, has made news recently.
From the July 23, 2003, Dallas Business Journal:
Founded on the principal that the language of science is more precise — and less prone to misunderstanding and chaos — than everyday communication, the nonprofit has attracted as trustees, teachers and students the likes of Buckminster Fuller, a world-famous architect who conceived the geodesic dome; comedian and former talk show host Steve Allen; botanist David Fairchild, the son-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell; science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein; and Dave Garroway, an original host on NBC Today.
Wikipedia has an article about general semantics. Here are exerpts:
General Semantics is a school of thought founded by Alfred Korzybski in about 1933 in response to his observations that most people had difficulty defining human and social discussions and problems and could almost never predictably resolve them into elements that were responsive to successful intervention or correction.
In contrast, he noted that engineers could almost always successfully analyze a structural problem prospectively or a failure of structure retrospectively, and arrive at a solution which the engineers first of all could predict to work and secondly could observe to work. He found especially significant the fact that engineers had a language which helped them to do this, in mathematics. Mathematics has such properties that it appears to mimic its referents and thereby simulate or emulate the behavior of the observed physical universe with some precision. This gives physical scientists and engineers a valuable tool.
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These ideas, retold in more accessible form by Samuel Hayakawa’s Language In Thought And Action (1941), Stuart P. Chase’s The Tyranny of Words, and other secondary sources, achieved considerable initial success in the 1940s and early 1950s. During that period they entered the idiom of science fiction, notably through the works of A.E. van Vogt and Robert A. Heinlein. After 1955 they became popularly (and unfairly) associated with scientology but continued to exert considerable influence in psychology, anthropology and linguistics (notably, the development of Neuro-Linguistic Programming shows very obvious debts to General Semantics).
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