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Plenum, issue 2, July 1946
Page 7
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PLENUM Page seven null-A". The training and the tests which are part of the story is this very nonaristotelian training. I will save for a later article or articles a description of the null-A system. For the present, a few remarks on the book, S&S, itself: It's quite a big book. The introduction to the second edition is about 50 pages, and then the body of the book is about 800 pages. Much of this is repetition. Korzybski believes in driving home information by repeating it again and again in various ways. However, this is apt to make the readier impatient. You read page after page of description of the wonderful things general semantics will do, and only little by little does he divulge the meat of the argument: describing just what the null-A system is. Furthermore, much of the writing is horribly obscure, and done in a specialized language which does not help matters. However, K himself admits that you must have read the end in order to understand the beginning, so it is a book that must be read twice in order to get everything in it. But it's most amusing to see K claim that this book is intended to be read by the average "intelligent layman." I was interested in seeing what other people had to say about this book, and so I looked it up in Book Review Digest. All of the reviews merely mentioned how difficult and obscure the book was, and none did more than mention null-A. However the review from the New York Times was quite clever, and I give it here: "If Sordello was the finest compliment ever paid the man-in-the- street, since Browning supposed him able to understand the recondite allusions to obscure medieval Italian politics and personalities, then surely 'Science and Sanity' with its calculus, its relativity, its biology and neurology, its anthropology, is the most glittering tribute to the intellectual energy of the 'intelligent layman' ever issued from a printing press." As a matter of fact, when you get right down to it, there's nothing in the book that a liberal-arts graduate shouldn't be able to handle if he's paid some attention to his education. He should have a good solid year of psychology, some philosophy, a smattering of calculus, and be able to understand some pretty big words and abstruse concepts. He also should have read "Mathematics and the Imagination" and "Men of Mathematics" in order to understand the mathematical allusions which you don't get in the ordinary math course. My big objection to the book is the propagandistic attitude throughout it. K is obsessed with his idea, and he tries desperately to get the reader to believe in it. I'm used to reading technical books which explain an idea, give the evidence, and let it go at that.
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PLENUM Page seven null-A". The training and the tests which are part of the story is this very nonaristotelian training. I will save for a later article or articles a description of the null-A system. For the present, a few remarks on the book, S&S, itself: It's quite a big book. The introduction to the second edition is about 50 pages, and then the body of the book is about 800 pages. Much of this is repetition. Korzybski believes in driving home information by repeating it again and again in various ways. However, this is apt to make the readier impatient. You read page after page of description of the wonderful things general semantics will do, and only little by little does he divulge the meat of the argument: describing just what the null-A system is. Furthermore, much of the writing is horribly obscure, and done in a specialized language which does not help matters. However, K himself admits that you must have read the end in order to understand the beginning, so it is a book that must be read twice in order to get everything in it. But it's most amusing to see K claim that this book is intended to be read by the average "intelligent layman." I was interested in seeing what other people had to say about this book, and so I looked it up in Book Review Digest. All of the reviews merely mentioned how difficult and obscure the book was, and none did more than mention null-A. However the review from the New York Times was quite clever, and I give it here: "If Sordello was the finest compliment ever paid the man-in-the- street, since Browning supposed him able to understand the recondite allusions to obscure medieval Italian politics and personalities, then surely 'Science and Sanity' with its calculus, its relativity, its biology and neurology, its anthropology, is the most glittering tribute to the intellectual energy of the 'intelligent layman' ever issued from a printing press." As a matter of fact, when you get right down to it, there's nothing in the book that a liberal-arts graduate shouldn't be able to handle if he's paid some attention to his education. He should have a good solid year of psychology, some philosophy, a smattering of calculus, and be able to understand some pretty big words and abstruse concepts. He also should have read "Mathematics and the Imagination" and "Men of Mathematics" in order to understand the mathematical allusions which you don't get in the ordinary math course. My big objection to the book is the propagandistic attitude throughout it. K is obsessed with his idea, and he tries desperately to get the reader to believe in it. I'm used to reading technical books which explain an idea, give the evidence, and let it go at that.
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