Beauty, Joy and Other Impossible Things

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Language can trip you up.

We say one thing and mean another. We get trapped in meaningless arguments that leave everyone feeling worse off. In a million tiny ways, we abuse language and language abuses us.

General Semantics, the (science? philosophy?) started by Alfred Korzybski in the wake of the First World War, is an attempt to grapple with the many ways in which we misunderstand and misuse language - and the ways in which those misunderstandings cause very real harm in our lives.

One of the most illuminating concepts in General Semantics is the concept of intensional and extensional meanings. It's simple, easy to grasp, and once you understand it, you will see it everywhere.

Words have a variety of meanings. The same word can have multiple meanings, given the context.

For example, the word "girl" could refer to a specific girl, or to the general category of people we might refer to as "girls." The meaning of both of these examples may change over time, as well. "Girl" has acquired a wide range of meanings in the last 50 years that it did not have prior.

We can divide the meanings of words into two basic categories: extensional and intensional.

Extensional meanings refer to the physical world. They refer to the specific. The ultimate test of whether the word you're using has an extensional meaning or not is to use your finger and point. If you can't point to the exact referent of the word in question, the meaning is not extensional. "Cat" is an example of a word with an extensional meaning, as I can point to a cat and indicate to someone who does not speak my language what that word might mean.

Intensional meanings do not have a clear physical referent. Intensional meanings create images and feelings in people's heads, but they don't refer to any clear physical object or phenomena - simply to other words. When you look a word up in a dictionary, that dictionary simply supplies you with more words; often, with many possible words. Examples of words with intensional meanings would be justice, happiness, femininity or masculinity, etc.

What happens if we have a disagreement over something with an extensional meaning? Imagine that we are arguing over how tall the Eiffel Tower is. You say it's 2,000 feet tall; I say it's 2,500 feet tall. How do we resolve our differences?

This is a solvable problem. We can simply go and measure the thing we are talking about and see how tall it really is (approximately 1,083 feet tall). While neither of us may know the answer exactly, we do not doubt that there is an answer. Moreover, it would be nonsense to claim that the only way to resolve our differences would be to "accept that there are many different views" of how tall the Eiffel Tower is, or that the best solution would be to "compromise" and accept that the true height of the Eiffel Tower would be the "golden mean" between our two positions.

No such clarity is possible with intensional meanings, including when we agree. If I say to you that "true masculinity is rare nowadays," and you solemnly nod, we may feel that we are in agreement, but we are almost certainly not. For one, what do we mean by "masculinity"? What do we mean by "true masculinity" as a sub-category? Moreover, what does "rare" mean?

Imagine that we begin to define our terms and discover that we actually disagree. When I said "true masculinity is rare," I meant that more men needed to become fathers; you meant that more men should join the military. We don't even manage to get into who counts as "men," because at that point we're embroiled in an argument about the definition of masculinity.

What's more, there is no way to resolve our disagreement. How in the world would we do that? By what method can we define such a word? What evidence could someone possibly present that would change our minds?

The critical distinction between extensional and intensional meanings is that extensional meanings are those about which we can agree. Intensional meanings, not so much.

You will notice this everywhere: the vast majority of the poison in our society comes from arguing over intensional meanings as if they were extensional - and, perhaps, the even more foundational sin of believing that intensional meanings are actually extensional meanings. Chaos always ensues.

This understanding can directly improve your life in several ways (and probably many more):

Avoid arguments over intensional meanings. If you can, direct the conversation to something extensional - something measurable, in the real world. Rather than arguing over whether Trump or Biden were good presidents, focus the conversation on something measurable like commodity prices or the Dow Jones. Or, even better, don't have the argument in the first place.

Avoid "pathology-inducing questions." Robert Pula, an influential figure in General Semantics, divided questions into different categories. Operational/extensional questions ask answerable questions about the world of extensional meanings, such as "What's that man's name?", "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?", etc.

Speculative questions help us wonder: "What are the different ways I can improve my business?", "What are the odds intelligent life exists out in the universe?"

Fun questions are designed to be just that - questions like "Who was the greatest featherweight boxer of all time?" and "Who makes the best pizza in the U.S.?" These questions are unanswerable and intensional, but the argument that ensues is the point, because the argument itself is enjoyable for all involved. Sports talk shows are built around speculative questions and not extensional ones because "Who's the current Featherweight champ?" does not produce enough talking to fill a half-hour.

Finally, there are what Pula called "pathology-inducing" questions: intensional questions aimed at our own worth. "Why me?" "Why is the world against me?" "Why am I so terrible?" These questions are damaging specifically because they are unanswerable, and so loop around inside your head endlessly, directing your attention perpetually towards the negative.

When you spot these kinds of questions about intensional meanings inside your own thinking, name them, acknowledge them as what they are - a kind of software bug - and eliminate them without mercy.

Acknowledge the shortcomings of philosophy.

In school, my great love was philosophy, not science. I love thinking about BIG ideas, challenging my own biases and wrestling with the challenges and provocations of history's great thinkers.

Korzybski's magnum opus is called Science and Sanity. It's a difficult book, but Korzybski's dedication to rigorous thinking remains impressive. I read Korzybski as a philosopher - after all, he's talking about language and thought, not tachyons and and fluid mechanics. But Korzybski explicitly says General Semantics should be considered a science, and for a long time I didn't understand why.

There's a passage in Science and Sanity that I underlined that struck me while writing this essay:

“Historically, the mathematicians have a steady record of achievement, and ‘philosophers’ (excluding epistemologists) one of uselessness or failure. Has this record something to do with the extensional and intensional attitudes? In fact, it has. It is easy to show that the extensional attitude is the only one which is in accordance with the survival order and nervous structure, and that the intensional attitude is the reversal of the natural order, and, therefore, must involve non-survival or pathological (semantic reactions)...”

Korzybski's aim at creating a new science is rooted in his attempt to limit himself to extensional meanings. He wants to root his philosophy in the physical world, in things which are verified or verifiable. He does this because, as he points out, the story of science is ultimately a story of incremental knowledge growth. Each scientist is able to build on the work of those who went before, or to challenge them in terms which all will (eventually) accept. This dynamic leads to incredible progress over time.

Is there any such progress in philosophy? It doesn't seem so. While philosophies come and go, and they certainly both build upon and refute one another, one does not get the sense that we are headed anywhere - there is no equivalent accomplishment in philosophy to nuclear power or space travel or computers.

Korzybski explicitly points out that this is because philosophy is concerned with intensional meanings, while science is concerned with extensional meanings. That's why he calls General Semantics a science: he prefers physics to metaphysics.

Whatever your take on Korzybski's argument, his call to direct our focus to the extensional is profound. With the distinction between intensional and extensional meanings, you can start to see the vast majority of our cultural arguments for what they are: theater.

It's not that we shouldn't discuss words with intensional meanings, or that we shouldn't talk about justice, or joy, or beauty. It's simply that we should acknowledge, upfront, the limitations of our language in ever resolving our differences over these things.

Yours,

Dan

SOMETHING I'M READING:

The Bear case for AI? Hoel makes an interesting argument about the economic impacts of AI while also making the argument that just because AI might not help us much, doesn't mean it can't hurt.

All the existential risk, none of the economic impact. That’s a shitty trade

I offer “no economic boost,” you receive “P(doom)”

The Intrinsic PerspectiveErik Hoel