STUART CHASE'S The Tyranny of Words, pub- lished fifteen years
ago, was some sort of seminal book, although it may not have been profound. This new book cannot be expected to be profound, as it is a survey of the semantic development in all the branches of communi- cation, from cybernetics to 'gobbledygook' or bureaucratic language (which might also be described as wilful failure to communicate). The fact that it is disappointing may be partly ascribed to the enormous amount of com- munication about communication which has gone on since Mr. Chase's earlier book, much of which has necessarily dealt with the same popular and political abuses at a more scholarly level : Professor Susan Stebbing was one example.
The most valuable part of the book is probably the chapter on the late Count Alfred Korzybski who seems largely neglected in this country, but whose enormous book Science and Sanity, in spite of its cranky attempt to be, as Mr. Chase says, 'a one-man philosophy' really was a one-man revolution in 'thinking and talking about human thinking and talking. Korzybski was trying to undo the bad effects of Aristotelian formal logic and to show that it was verbal and analytic and not strictly applicable to the world of nature and experi- ence: for a crude example, the Law of Identity, that A is always A, which takes no account of a rotting apple and other incorporations of time. Korzybski was greatly influenced by modern physics, partidularly no doubt its `operational' idea, expressed by Bridgman as 'The concept of length is fixed when the opera- tions by which length is measured are fixed,' which, incidentally, had much earlier, in the nineteenth century, been applied by the American philosopher Charles Peirce, to notions of meaning and value. According to Korzybski 'The only possible link between the objective world and the verbal world is structural' He enjoined us in all our discourse to be aware of the different levels of abstrac- tion and with engaging Central European solemnity produced a toy called 'The Struc- tural Differential' which, for the semantic learner, is a parallel to a rosary, concentrating his attention and permanently reminding him of this problem. I have seen it manufactured for the nursery in aluminium and it looked like one of Reg Butler's sculptures.
KATHLEEN NOTT
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