From the Institute of General Semantics

....By using general semantics, we can learn to understand ourselves and others better. We can also learn to react-evaluate differently, if we so desire. In developing a general semantic orientation we thus can improve our functioning.

In the material on the following pages, I summarize some of my formulating on how to approach these goals. The format of presentation is:

1. A GENERAL SEMANTICS FORMULATION

Some reactions that relate to using this formulation:
- Some questions to ask yourself, and answer, that will help you to use this formulation in your day-to-day life.

etc.

The 15 formulations which follow are:

Semantic reactions
Time-binding (Personal)
Organism-as-a-whole-in-environments
Map-territory relations
Non-identity
Non-absolutism
Self-reflexiveness
Consciousness of abstracting
Multiordinality
Question formulating
Dating
Indexing
Quotes
Hyphen
Etc.

SEMANTIC REACTIONS
- note total organismic reacting; my and your sensing-thinking-feeling-acting-etc.:
  - What was going on in and around me as I reacted?
  - What was I sensing?
  - What was I ‘thinking’?
  - What was I ‘feeling’?
  - What was I doing?
  - How was I moving?
- Develop an orientation of delaying reactions:
  - How can I delay my reaction?
  - When I wait to react, what happens?
- Increase response options:
  - How did I choose to react that way?
  - Can I make other choices?
  - What?
  - How?
TIME-BINDING (Personal)
- Note developmental life processes; changes over time:
  - How did I get this way?
  - What led to my reacting in the ways that I do?
  - What kinds of response habits have I learned and developed?
  - How can I learn to “date” myself? (See “Dating” below)
  - What habits do I like?
  - What habits might I like to change?
  - How will I do this?
  - What are the first steps to changing?
  - When will I take them?
- Accept present, including myself.
  - How can I best build on my personal experiences?
  - How do I help and hurt myself and others by demanding that events, including myself,
  - should happen differently right at this moment?
  - When I don’t accept events as they happen at the moment, does that cause them to change?
  - How does this hinder my growth?
  - What problems are created?
  - Should a flower not happen as it does?
  - Then how come I shouldn’t happen as I do?
  - How will accepting myself help me to move on?
ORGANISM-AS-A-WHOLE-IN-ENVIRONMENTS
- Broaden awareness of what is going on, ‘inside’ and ‘out’:
  - What do I sense ‘inside’ and ‘out’?
  - What do I smell, hear, see, touch, taste, etc.?
  - What else can I become aware of?
- Cope with uncertainty:
  - How will having greater awareness help me to deal with whatever happens?
  - How can this help me to experience more security, even when I can’t feel ‘certain’ about anything?
  - How can I learn to “index” better? (See “Indexing” below)
MAP-TERRITORY RELATIONS
- Assume non-identity of orders of abstraction:
  - Is the way I evaluate something the way it ‘really is’?
  - Are my words the same as my non-verbal experience?
  - Am I referring to a ‘fact’ or an inference?
  - How can I tell the difference?
  - What happens when I avoid the word ‘same’?
  - Can I ever know the way something ‘really is’?
  - If not, how might I better evaluate?
- Assume non-allness of abstracting:
  - What might I have left out?
  - What else?
  - What effect does this have? (See “Etc.” below)
- Recognize that semantic reactions refer to the particular person reacting:
  - What about me contributes to my reacting in a certain way?
  - What about ‘I’ gets in my ‘eyes’ as I develop my view of events?
  - What effects does this have?
NON-IDENTITY
- Remember that my conclusions are not the same as my inferences are not the same as ‘facts’ are not the same as non-verbal experiencing are not the same as “what-is-inferred-to-be-going-on”:
  - Can I ever know what some event ‘is’, apart from even my non-verbal evaluating?
  - What happens when I don’t use the “is of identity”?
  - Does what I do equal what I ‘am’, as a totality?
  - Does what others do equal what they ‘are’, as totalities?
  - How could I ever know what I and others ‘are’, as totalities?
  - What differences will I experience when I focus on what I do rather than on what I ‘am’?
  - What differences will I experience when I focus on what others do rather than on what they ‘are’?
  - What happens when I don’t put over-generalized, over-restrictive labels, like good/bad and smart/stupid, on myself and others?
  - Can I ever describe anything apart from my evaluating?
  - What happens when I don't use the “is of predication”?
  - Can I ever know that something ‘is’ pretty in and of itself.
  - Where are the sights I see, the sounds I hear, the aromas I smell, the flavors I taste, the sensations I experience located?
  - What happens when I say that something looks pretty to me?
NON-ABSOLUTISM
- View formulations as hypotheses to be tested:
  - How can I test this out?
  - How will I know to what extent I’ve evaluated this accurately?
  - Can I ever feel absolutely ‘sure’ of my evaluations?
  - What does this suggest?
- Use quantifiers and qualifiers to express tentativeness:
  - How does this seem to me?
  - What happens when I use the word “Perhaps”?
  - To what degree does this apply?
  - What happens when I avoid the word “same”?
  - What happens when I use “a” or “an” instead of “the”?
  - What happens when I use plurals in place of singular forms?
SELF-REFLEXIVENESS
- Take responsibility for my own reactions:
  - What happens when I say “I” instead of the rhetorical “you”?
  - When I say “you” is it you I’m talking about or myself
  - How can I rephrase this using “I”?
  - How can I acknowledge the “to-me-ness” of my evaluations?
- Recognize multi-meanings:
  - How did I develop my idiosyncratic definitions?
  - Can there be other ways of defining/describing events?
  - How can I remember that we all have personal meanings for words and non-verbal experiences?
CONSCIOUSNESS OF ABSTRACTING
- Separate ‘facts’ from inferences, uncover assumptions, etc.:
  - What do I ‘mean’?
  - How do I know?
  - Can I sense what I’m talking about?
  - What observations support or negate my inferences?
- Note assumption-conclusion-behavior links:
  - What assumptions do I make about this happening?
  - What conclusions am I reaching?
  - How am I behaving?
  - What changes in my assumptions and conclusions will be needed in order to behave differently?
- Become aware of different levels of internal processes:
  - What’s going on in me now?
  - What am I ‘thinking’?
  - What memories are triggered?
  - What assumptions am I making?
  - What do I believe?
  - What images do I have?
  - What rules for living do I follow?
- Note dead-level abstracting:
  - Am I getting stuck on either higher-order or lower-order abstractions?
  - What kinds of inferences and conclusions can I draw from what I observe?
  - What do I need to observe to test my inferences and conclusions?
  - What happens when I alternate among these levels?
MULTI-ORDINALITY
- Recognize semantic reactions to semantic reactions:
  - How am I reacting?
  - How am I reacting to these reactions?
  - What happens as this process continues?
  - What happens when I get upset about my semantic reactions?
  - What happens when I accept my semantic reactions?
  - What happens when I focus on my current experience, rather than my past experience or anticipated future?
QUESTION FORMULATING
- Note answerability of questions asked and usefulness of answers:
  - What kind of answers do I expect when I ask this question?
  - To what extent can I feel satisfied with any answer?
  - How can I rephrase this to find out more of what I want to know?
- Shift from “why” to “how” questions:
  - How can I know “why” something happened?
  - How far back do I have to go?
  - What will happen when I ask “how” something happened instead of “why”?
- Avoid complex questions:
  - Does my question include an opinion in disguise?
  - What do I ‘mean” e.g., when I ask, “How could I have done that?”
  - What happens when I separate this into three questions:
    1. What did I do?
    2. How did I come to do that?
    3. How do I evaluate what I did?
DATING
- Use dates to show how things change over time:
  - I₁₉₉₆ am not I₁₉₈₄.
- Separate past from present, look for changes over time:
  - When did something like this happen before?
  - How did I react then?
  - How old was I?
  - How have I changed since then?
  - How have other happenings changed since then?
  - How can these changes influence how I react now?
INDEXING
- Use indexes to show differences within classifications:
  - Seminar₁ is not seminar₂
- Look for differences:
  - How does this situation seem different from similar ones?
  - Do these differences make a difference?
  - How?
- Develop specific, detailed descriptions:
  - What do I see, hear, smell, taste, touch?
  - What happened?
    - And then?
      - And then?
  - How many semantic reactions can I list?
  - What physiological sensations occur?
- Develop a multi-valued orientation:
  - What happens when I give up a two-valued orientation and look for continuums instead?
  - For example, what happens if, instead of labeling my reaction as anxious or calm, I rate the degree of anxiety or calm I experience on a scale of 1-10?
  - How can I describe this?
- Focus on moment-to-moment experiencing:
  - What do I notice?
  - What is going on ‘inside’ of me?
  - How are others reacting?
- Label what is going on as accurately as possible:
  - How do I react to “whatever”?
  - How can I best describe my reaction?
  - How can I differentiate my reactions, e.g., distinguish anxiety from excitement?
  - How do I know what my reactions ‘mean’?
- Develop an orientation of minimum expectations:
  - Can I expect with certainty that someone will behave differently than usual?
  - How does having more-than-minimum expectations lead me to react?
  - What will happen when I have minimum expectations?
- Watch for overgeneralizations:
  - Does that apply all of the time?
  - When and when not?
QUOTES
- Use single quotes to note words that you consider elementalistic or otherwise questionable:
  - What happens to my reacting when I note ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘Mind’, ‘body’ etc., instead of think, feel, mind, body, etc.?
  - How does this alert me to possible problems in evaluating?
HYPHEN
- Connect with a hyphen words that suggest separation of what we best understand as unified processes:
  - What happens when I note my thinking-feeling instead of ‘thinking’ separate from ‘feeling’?
  - How about mind-body instead of my ‘Mind’ separate from my ‘body’?
  - Can these ever be separated other than verbally?
ETC.
- Use “etc.” to note non-allness:
  - Is that all?
  - What else?
  - What else?
  - Do I have it ‘all’ now?
  - What happens when I add “etc.” to the end of my communications?

ETC.     ETC.     ETC.    ETC.     ETC.     ETC.     ETC.

©1995 Susan Presby Kodish

Permission is hereby granted to share electronic and hard copy versions of this text with individuals under circumstances in which no direct payment is made by those to whom the text is given for the text itself, the volume or other medium or online service in which it is included, tuition or other payment for the course or seminar, and so forth. This notice must remain a part of the text. Any other use is reserved to the Institute of General Semantics and/or the author and requires prior permission. For further information, e-mail the Institute of General Semantics or write: Institute of General Semantics, 86 85^th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11209-4208, USA.

Critical Thinking Matters

Monday, January 23, 2006

Critical Thinking and Principles of General Semantics

From the Institute of General Semantics

1. A GENERAL SEMANTICS FORMULATION

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