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Alfred Korzybski
Review by Dave Allaway

Target audience: Tortured and twisted minds that are happy to have the mental equivalent of a mugging on almost every other page of this almost 800-page tome.

Summary of content: A most useful preface, written in 1993, by Robert Pula which, if you read nothing else of this fifth edition of the book, is worthwhile.

There are a couple of introductions and prefaces to editions of this book from the first edition (1933). These also are useful, if a little too deeply intellectual to grasp easily.

The main text is broken into three "books".

Book I - A general survey of non-Aristotelian factors - this begins Korzybski's updating of ancient Greek logic and its historical effects upon mind, language, and behaviour.Book I consists of six parts with a total of twenty-three chapters. These take the committed (should be) reader from Aristotle's errors, through epistemological structure, language, organism-as-a-whole concepts, functions, orders, relations, mathematics, and psychophysiology (ending with psychiatry).

Book II - A general introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics - which details the role of abstracting processes and time-binding. Only one part in this "book", and does a thorough, if sticky job of understanding how our neurology necessarily deletes, generalises, and distorts data through our unconscious neurological processes. There is a section on the value of non-Aristotelian training (a practical bit), as well as the effects on sanity that can be gained through the adoption of General Semantic principles.

Book III - on the structure of mathematics - takes us from hard-core maths, through verbal structures, to concepts regarding "matter".

The first chapter on differential calculus, linearity and geometry was my favourite part of the whole book in the same way as a bad car crash would be my favourite part of my day. I actually only managed to understand the section on linearity which does have some useful concepts in it. I'm not saying that the other sections do not, but they were way beyond my grasp.

There are three "supplements" to this book, rather like appendices. Of these, "The Theory of Types" was the most useful, setting up some very useful boundaries for grappling with some often sloppily-used terminology within NLP, namely, logical types.

There are copious end notes that are complicatedly related to the extensive bibliography.

Finally, there is a very useful index. Useful, that is, for navigating the reader's way to small chunks of the book that may be pertinent to the study of NLP.

Recommended features: The index!

Actually, this book is worth wrestling with if only because it sets out the most fundamental epistemological aspect of NLP, that the map is not the territory (p.751) in several places, with various illustrations and descriptions that are really important for NLPers to understand in order to answer those curious students of ours who are not satisfied with our simple offering of that as an NLP presupposition.

Amongst the huge amount of information in this tome are some real gems that remain important to, for example, a deep understanding of the logical underpinnings of deletions, generalisations, and distortions; the need for linguistic accuracy; the dangers of mistaking our words for the thing that our words represent (basic underpinnings of the Meta-Model); and the concept of language as the human means, and perhaps unique means, of transmitting knowledge through time.

Personal impressions: I recommend reading a few pages, leaving the house and running some errands, if not some miles, and on your return, re-read the same pages. This method does make the reading of this book a year-long project, but it does help to extract the juice of it.

I truly recommend this book in order to gain a deep understanding of some NLP concepts that, as Practitioners, we take for granted and, therefore, can rarely explain coherently.

Dave Allaway
November 2004