When Does Consciousness of Abstracting Matter the Most
Nora Miller · 2006
Twenty Years Ago in ETC, Volume 43, Number 1 EDWARD MACNEAL, WHEN DOES CONSCIOUSNESS OF ABSTRACTING MATTER THE MOST? (excerpts) Years ago, one of our members ... invited me ... to his summer place in Wisconsin. The sink in first floor bathroom drained very slowly. Dave knew what to do. He got a pipe wrench, went under sink, and removed elbow pipe that served as a trap. He handed it up carefully to me, since it was filled with muck and slop. Where should dump it? said I. sink; said he. You have picture? [He] is on floor under sink with pipe removed. [I am] above sink with slop-filled trap. What did do? What else? emptied it into sink. Behold. Two sloppy general semanticists How could two general semanticists ... make such a dumb mistake? How could they deliberately disassemble territory, sink, and then deliberately act as if it were in working order? What happened to their vaunted consciousness of abstracting in this case? Acting with at least subliminal awareness ... is what constitutes consciousness of abstracting. Such subliminal awareness is supposed to permit general semanticists to sit down comfortably in a but catch themselves without falling if chair breaks. Shouldn't consciousness of abstracting, then, apply with even greater force to deliberately disassembled sinks? About this time, in late 1940s, began to explore those abstractions we call judgments as parts of decisions. defined a decision as the acceptance (or rejection) of a course of to be taken. ... The value judgment may ... include reasons. For example, I decided to empty pipe in sink because Dave said to; reports an act of deciding (I decided), a course of (to empty pipe in sink), and a reason, (because Dave said to). This led me to ask three structural questions. First: How does course of relate to reason? second: Do these relationships form regular patterns? Third: If so, what effect do these patterns have on abstracting practices of deciders? The common factor sensed in such experiences was something blocking an appreciation of consequences of actions being accepted. Dave and failed to anticipate sink slop splash. ... Something barred view. Fortunately for me, Korzybski fingered elementalism, our splitting verbally what cannot otherwise be split, as a serious structural flaw in language. He said: In a non-Aristotelian system we do not use elementalistic terminology to represent facts which are non-elementalistic. We use terms like semantic reaction; psychosomatic, space-time, etc., which eliminate verbally implied splits, and consequent misevaluations. Given this guidance, was startled to see that decisions reek of elementalisms. Take split between action and consequences: Does not that split imply, following Korzybski, that one can have an action without having its Of course it does. Doesn't every verb and every noun permit us to think about actions without considering their consequences? …