General Semantics

The opposition to reality

In Mind versus reality it was shown that a major part of the development of western civilization is the battle for primacy between mind and reality. This battle has several battlefields, science versus religion, emotionality versus rationality, form versus content, authority versus power, science versus the humanities, subjectivity versus objectivity, are some of them. Most of these battles have been fought over the entire period, but the relative importance of them has shifted with time. Here we describe some of the battlefields shortly to get an oversight over the entire battle, leaving more detailed descriptions to separate articles.

Science versus religion is the most open and in certain ways most honest battle, when one takes the professionals on both sides. It has been going on since the advent of modern science, around the 16th century, so the length of the battle has given a certain maturity to it. Both sides are generally ready to accept that the other has an area of its own. This is helped by the fact that scientists usually don’t care too much about the judgements of religion, and religious people have learned not to meddle in scientific matters, because when they do, they almost invariably lose.

For the followers of religion this picture is less rosy, because firstly the influence of irrationality in their mind is much more implicit, and secondly because there are so much of them. Their irrational behaviour leads to many problems for society, problems that are described on this site extensively. So in this respect the battle is still in full flow, and in some regions of the world it is a bloody battle.

Emotionality versus rationality is the most abstract form of the battle in our brain. It is probably also one with one of the clearest borders. Rationality is generally thought to house in the working of the neurons of the cortex, while emotions are associated with harmonic and chemical activity in the lower parts of the brain (that is why drugs influence emotion and not rationality). The importance of the battle may be gauged from the fact that where there is very little observable difference between the brains of men and women, most people would agree to the statement that there considerable differences in balance of rationality versus emotionality in both their thinking an behaviour (in one of the expressions from popular psychology: women are from Venus, men are from Mars).

Form versus content is one of the more general forms of the battle, meaning that one can see it in many aspects of human interaction, politics being one of the more important. But also in general human conversation, the standard attitude is that the manner of saying something is more important then what is said. Many tests have been done showing that people are more influenced by who says what, then by what is actually said. Any observant person can think of countless other examples.

In authority versus power, authority is what one person gets if he has shown to do a certain thing better then other persons, and power is what one has for some other reason, like birth. So this can also be seen as one of the examples of form versus content, since authority is based on the content of what one does, while power is based on, literally, more formal matters. Of course, the fact that this battle exists, also meaning that in many (of most) cases power wins, is one of the major problems of our world.

Science versus the humanities (the sciences of human affairs) is the form of the battle in the academic world. Science (physics, chemistry, medicine) is heavily focussed on going back to reality: Is the stone really falling?, Is the patient really getting better?, while the humanities focus on what humans think about their results, not whether these results are correct. For a long time it was a certain route to becoming a scientific outcast if one asserted that intelligence was mainly governed by birth, or genetics. It didn’t matter if the assertion was true, what mattered is that one considered it to be undesirable. This example is merely an extreme one of a general difference in attitude, an attitude that has led to the fact that the results of the humanities are quit limited, even if one takes their extra difficulties into account.

Subjectivity versus objectivity is also a more abstract form, illustrated by the fact that one can put many of the earlier mentioned forms under this one. Subjectivity is the attitude that a person first and firstly looks at internal effects and aspects, while objectivity is the attitude to look at outside effects and confirmations. The colloquial meaning of the two words shows that in principle one knows that in practical matters objectivity is the more desirable attitude. The common practice of our society shows that people seldom live upon this knowledge.

In conclusion, one can say that these summaries illustrate in abundance what the problems of our society are: they are the problems of the attitudes in our mind. The way these problems are addressed is first to look at the way we discuss all of these things: by uttering words, by the use of language with a meaning, by semantics - starting with the relation between Word and object.


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