IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE MEANING OF THE WORD "IS" IS, WHAT DO YOU REALLY KNOW?

Why General Semantics Matters Today (TOWARDS AN ANARCHIST LINGUISTICS)

I am a semanticist. If you tell people at a party you’re a semanticist, it is really unlikely to impress anyone. Most people barely even know the word semantics even means, other than that it has something to do with definitions of words.

Semantics gets a bad rap these days, but I am truly convinced that semantics are extremely important. Indeed, one might even say that semantics are quite literally a matter of life and death. In a mass casualty event such as a natural disaster, in which patients needed to be triaged according to the urgency of their medical need. But if a patient was pronounced dead, they would instantly fall to the bottom of the list of the paramedics’ priorities, meaning that someone else’s life might be saved instead.

To me, semantics is not just about the definitions of words. Rather, it is the study of meaning itself. When I say semantics, I am speaking about what some call “semiology” or “semiotics”. I define semantics as “the logical study of meaning” or “the logical study of meaning as facilitated by language”.

As you can see from the dictionary definition, semantics is very broad:

Yet semantics is often viewed with the attitude implicit in the phrase “such quibbling over semantics may seem petty stuff”.

I blame lawyers for this. After all, Monsanto’s lawyers were famously able to patent a living organism by confusing a judge about whether said life-form was a living organism or a chemical.

That case is instructive because it shows how consequential definitions can be. Semantics matter because definitions matter.

Chat GPT explains:

The case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty in 1980 is often cited as the watershed moment for the patenting of life forms. In this landmark case, Ananda Chakrabarty, a scientist working for General Electric, developed a genetically modified bacterium capable of breaking down crude oil. The United States Supreme Court ruled that a "live, human-made microorganism is patentable subject matter," thereby setting a precedent that living organisms could indeed be patented if they were modified by humans. This ruling opened the floodgates for biotechnology companies, including Monsanto, to patent genetically modified plants and seeds.

Monsanto’s lawyers played a crucial role in leveraging the Chakrabarty decision to their advantage. By framing genetically modified seeds as inventions rather than naturally occurring life forms, they were able to secure patents that granted Monsanto exclusive rights to their GMOs. This legal strategy hinged on the ability to persuade judges and patent offices that these organisms were distinct from their natural counterparts due to human intervention.

Critics argue that this success was not merely a matter of sound legal reasoning but also of strategic manipulation of legal definitions. The complexity of biotechnology and the nuances of genetic modification allowed lawyers to present GMOs in a way that fit within existing legal frameworks for patents, which were originally designed for mechanical inventions and chemical compounds, not living organisms.

This is the kind of thing that gives semantics a bad name. We can safely assume that Monsanto’s lawyers knew exactly what they were trying to do. They succeeded in convincing a judge that an organism fulfilled the legal criteria to be patentable, even though the relevant legal definitions weren’t written with living organisms in mind.

I call this “semantic gerrymandering” because it’s akin to the kind of gerrymandering that politicians do when they redraw boundaries of electoral districts.

After the American Civil War, the legal status of previously enslaved Afro-Americans was elevated to that of “person”, lawyers then began to argue that corporations are persons too. They succeeded in doing so, by the way.

If you’ve watched the classic documentary The Corporation, you already know that corporations have the same legal rights as human beings do, which is insane.

If you don’t understand why this matters, consider the right to free speech. One of the most significant aspects of corporate personhood is the recognition of free speech rights. In a 2010 court case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the right to engage in political speech and spend money on political campaigns.

As you can imagine, this led to significant changes in the landscape of political funding. After all, the right to free speech includes the right to lie. Should corporations be allowed to lie to the public? That’s what this is really about.

I also find it extremely grating that the Supreme Court accepted the new definition of the word person. How in the fuck did that happen? It is ridiculous to say that Monsanto “is” a person. Can you imagine the person whose job it was to stand up and say “if we’re going to start calling black people persons now, that means that the corporation I’m working for is a person too.”? It’s such a ridiculous non-argument that the proper response isn’t even refutation, but mockery. Whoever made that argument should have been laughed out of court, but they weren’t. The legal definition of “person” changed, and the end result was an insane system of legalized bribery in which corporations are leading America to ruin. Hopefully, this goes to show the importance of semantics. Definitions matter.

Which brings us to something which I consider to be a very, very interesting topic - the meaning of the word “is”.

THE MEANING OF THE WORD “IS”

When Bill Clinton was being impeached, he famously answered a question about whether a previous statement that he had made was truthful or not by saying “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

This went down in history because it was the ultimate example of the type of semantic chicanery that lawyers and politicians are so notorious for. When you’re quibbling about what the definition of the word “is” is, it’s a pretty good sign you’re lying.

Basically, Clinton was saying that when he had previously denied having sex with Monica Lewinsky, what he said was true at the time he said it, because the sexual relationship he had been having with her had already ended.

This is confusing, so it will be clearer if I use a simplified example. Let’s say I’m talking about a soap opera in which a wife confronting her husband, who I’ll call Jake. She asks him: “Are you having an affair with Sandra?”

Let’s say that Jake had indeed been sleeping with a woman named Sandra until the previous month, when she had decided to put an end to it because she realized that he wasn’t going to leave his wife for her.

If Jake answered his wife’s question by saying “No, I’m not having an affair with Sandra,” is he lying?

Well, that depends on how you look at it. If the definition of “having an affair” is “participating in an ongoing surreptitious sexual relationship behind his wife’s back”, then Jake didn’t technically lie. Because the affair in question had already ended, his relationship with Sandra no longer fulfilled all the criteria of the definition of the word “affair”.

This is the kind of thing that gives semantics a bad name, because Jake knows what his wife actually means. When she asks him “Are you having an affair?”, she is actually asking him whether he has betrayed her trust, which he has. But by wilfully misinterpreting her question, he is able to mislead his wife without technically lying to her.

Often enough, whether a statement is technically true or false depends on the definition of terms. Let’s say that Jake’s wife asks him “Are you cheating on me?” Well, that depends on the definition of the word “cheating”, doesn’t it? If Jake uses a strategy of convenient semantic gerrymandering, he will interpret “cheating” as “having an affair”, but is that the “correct” definition of “cheating”? Doesn’t the true meaning of “cheating” have more to do with deception than it does with specific sexual acts? If Jake hasn’t come clean with his wife about his relationship with Sandra, then arguably he’s still cheating on her, even though the affair is over.

The last refuge of people who don’t want to admit that they’re lying is “it depends what you mean by (X)”. In Jake’s case, he might say “it depends what your definition of the word “cheating” is.” And often enough, people will have some kind of valid little point, hence the expression “semantic quibbling”.

Bill Clinton took things to a whole new level by literally saying “it depends on what your definition of the word “is” is.” That’s the kind of thing that a lawyer would come up if they knew they didn’t have a leg to stand on and just wants to say something for the sake of having something to say. This is the kind thought that comes to a person who’s scraping the bottom of the intellectual barrel.

If your best argument is that your client isn’t guilty of fraud because the legal definition of fraud doesn’t specifically refer to the specific type of fraud he committed, you know what you’re doing. You’re focusing on the words, rather than what those words mean. This is what people are getting at when they talk about the difference between “the letter of the law” and “the spirit of the law”.

When I talk about semantics, I am not talking merely about the definition of words, but the meaning that those words convey. The way I think of it, words are media of communication which act act as vehicles for meaning, which is something quite subtle. What language allows us to do is actually quite amazing. It allows us to make the contents of our inner world accessible to others, and to know something of their mind, their perceptions, and their thoughts. And it depends upon something called intersubjectivity, which is the process by which language functions. If you really think about it, you’ll realize that language is a means of transferring perceptions between minds. This requires a mutual desire to engage in a mutual act of trying to understand what the other person is thinking. After all, that is is what language is for. And in English, we assign meaning by using the word is. But what is the meaning of the word “is”?

According to David Graeber, the word for “meaning” is one of the most difficult to define in any language. That’s because the word “meaning” means what it means. It describes the action that words do, which is the only thing that words do. The word “moon” means the celestial object which lights up the sky. In French, “la lune” means the same thing. And the meaning of “la luna” in Spanish is identical.

Although there is some degree of arbitrariness in applying semantic labels, in practice we use the words “moon” or “lune” or “luna” to describe something that we all have an experience of perceiving - the Moon. If someone were to claim that the Moon is a social construct, I would emphatically disagree. I would argue that the word “Moon” is just a name for “the thing itself”, which is to say the real-world celestial object.

And this leads us to semantic binaries.

IN DEFENCE OF SEMANTIC BINARIES

Although it may be arbitrary that in English we say “the moon”, as opposed to “la lune” or “la luna”, but the arbitrariness is far from unlimited.

In all three languages, the word for “the moon” is different from the words for “sun”, “star”, “planet”, “comet”, “meteor”, “asteroid” and “Earth”. Whether we say “moon”, “lune”, or “luna”, we are still talking about the same object, which is clearly demarcated from other types of celestial objects.

And this is how language works. When something is given a name, a semantic binary is created between “that which possesses the essence of Moon-ness” and everything else. It is only by knowing that the essence of Moon-ness implicitly implies the qualities of “non-Sun-ness” and “non-star-ness”. We cannot define the Moon is without simultaneously defining what it is not.

So although Bill Clinton was just being a typical weasel of a politician, a lot does depend on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

All philosophy is based on semantic binaries - language works because they allow people to differentiate between things. And all words depend on the verb “to be”.

Let’s say that there’s a guy whose name is Joe Bleau from Bumblefuck, Saskatchewan. What does it mean to say that this person “is” Joe Bleau?

Well, linguists actually have a good answer to this question. Joe Bleau is everything that’s left when a binary is created between two concepts, which I’ll call “that which is Joe Bleau” and “that which is not Joe Bleau”.

Let’s say that Joe has an identical twin brother named Moe who looks just like him. Let’s say that their parents are named Flo and Elmo.

For all intents and purposes, people will define “Joe” as “the son of Flo and Elmo who isn’t Moe” and Moe as “the of son Flo and Elmo who isn’t Joe.” This is how language works. Our minds work is by differentiating objects from what they are not. And this is done through a process of comparison. Our minds recognize both similarity and difference as part of the same cognitive process. Although Joe and Moe might look and even act nearly identical, you cannot call either of them by their proper name without recognizing the key difference between them, which in this case is the fact that they are in fact different people.

Philosophers have known that language works this way since at least Aristotle, which is why they make such a big deal about the difference between “A” and “not-A”, which is a cornerstone of Aristotelian logic.

To say that the Moon is not the Sun is unlikely to be controversial, but the quality of “non-Sun-ness” really is a defining characteristic of “the Moon”.

Need I even follow this argument through to its natural conclusion?

WHAT IS GENERAL SEMANTICS?

One of my favourite philosophers is Robert Anton Wilson, and one of the things that I am grateful to him for teaching me about General Semantics.

If you haven’t heard of General Semantics, I highly recommend watching the following lectures, which will change your life forever if you really take their message to heart.

If you’re pressed for time, I recommend this 10-minute video, which provides an invaluable introduction to General Semantics.

Basically, Generals Semantics is a field of research which studies language with the goal of eliminating miscommunication. It was started by a brilliant Polish philosopher by the name of Alfred Korzybski, who published a book called Science and Sanity in 1933 which proposed a revolutionary new understanding of semantics.

Part of the reason that a paradigm shift in semantics was necessary was due to certain scientific discoveries that were very difficult or even impossible to describe in English.

For example, it was not possible to say that light “is” a wave or that light “is” a particle. To Korzybski, the logical question to ask was whether the problem that scientists were having interpreting the results of their experiments might exist in the structure of our language. Could it be that there was a point at which human language can no longer to accurately describe reality? If our language is currently unable to describe what we are observing, then how might we improve it? And so he delved into a deep study of the relationship between consciousness and language, which is a question that has fascinated philosophers since the beginning of time.

Along the way, he became aware of the extent to which most people misunderstand the relationship between language and reality, and began believing that many of the world’s problems resulted from bad communication caused by the structure of our languages.

Korzybski came to believe that a major cause of conflict was plain old miscommunication, and that his ideas could could help cure humanity of its millennia-old habit of going on periodic binges of mass murder (wars). At times, his work took on a somewhat messianic character as he came to believe that the principles of General Semantics could help usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.

IS WAR CAUSED BY BAD COMMUNICATION?

To me, this is a fascinating proposition. It may be not be responsible for all the world’s ills, but there’s no doubt in my mind that miscommunication is a major source of conflict, and it makes sense to me that the languages we speak condition our minds to have certain types of perceptions about other people more likely, which in turn might make conflict more likely. Arguably, the key to peace in the Middle East is undoing people’s obsession with identity, and the key to understanding people’s obsession with identity is to understanding the “is” of identity.

For instance, in English we say “I am a Christian”. What is a Christian? Well, because of the way that language works, it’s pretty much what’s left when you take away everything a Christian isn’t. In practical terms, for most of human history, a Christian would have been, practically by definition, someone who isn’t a pagan, Muslim, or a Jew.

Because the category of Christian derives its meaning by means of comparison to pagans, Jews, and Muslims, that means that the words for “Christian”, “Jew”, “Muslim”, and “pagan” must always be distinct. And the “is” of identity will simultaneously cause adherents of the different faiths to see each other as fundamentally different from one another. Can you see how this would lead to conflict?

Now let’s imagine that the phrase “I am Christian” didn’t exist in our language, and followers of Jesus instead said something like “I do Christianity”. Would that make a difference is how people saw the relationship between religion and identity?

Think about it. Say the words: “I am Christian.” What associations come to mind? Do you feel pride? Do you feel a connection to a certain history?

Now try saying “I do Christianity”. It lands differently, doesn’t it?

To my ears, the latter statement much more humble. It sounds to me like “I believe in Jesus Christ and do my best to live my life in accordance with his teachings,” as opposed to the former, which sounds more like a boast that “I am Christ-like and belong to the company of the elect who will saved on Judgement Day.” But maybe that’s just me. What do you think?

Anyway, Korzybski believed that he had made major scientific discoveries. In a 1935 lecture, he said:

General semantics formulates a new experimental branch of natural science, underlying an empirical theory of human evaluations and orientations and involving a definite neurological mechanism, present in all humans.

Although General Semantics was taken up by others, including Alan Watts and Robert Anton Wilson, Korzybski’s message for the world mostly fell on deaf ears.

Part of the reason was that most people simply couldn’t understand General Semantics. Marjorie Kendig, probably Korzybski's closest co-worker, wrote in 1968:

I would guess that I have known about 30 individuals who have in some degree adequately, by my standards, mastered this highly general, very simple, very difficult system of orientation and method of evaluating—reversing as it must all our cultural conditioning, neurological canalization, etc.... To me the great error Korzybski made—and I carried on, financial necessity—and for which we pay the price today in many criticisms, consisted in not restricting ourselves to training very thoroughly a very few people who would be competent to utilize the discipline in various fields and to train others.

In other words, Korzybski did not succeed in his mission to save the world through semantics, but he has always had a small number of devotees who are convinced that he was fundamentally correct. I am one of them, though I won’t claim to understand all of the finer points of General Semantics. As far as I can tell, it’s stood the test of time.

I learned about Korzybski’s ideas from Robert Anton Wilson, and I’ll again encourage you to check out the following lecture if you’re interested in learning more about General Semantics.

Later in life, Robert Anton Wilson became an advocate of something called E-Prime, which is a restricted of English in which authors consciously avoid using all forms of the verb to be.

For example, E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as ain't.

So, if a Christian wanted to describe their religious practice, they would need to refer to actions. They could say “I go to Church every Sunday” or “I read my Bible every day” or “I teach Sunday School” or “I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal saviour when I was thirteen years old”, but you couldn’t say “I am a Christian”.

When you start thinking about it, you’ll realize that when someone says “I am Christian”, they are “I see myself as a Christian”. It is a statement someone is making about themself, which means that is a statement that one is making about one’s own ego.

Robert Anton Wilson believed that most of the world’s problems were caused by the word “is”, because when two people disagree about the meaning of the world “is”, it is generally not possible to reconcile their positions. At that point the only conceivable way forward is to convince people to loosen or relinquish their attachment to the “is” of identity.

Zionists believe that Jerusalem “is” rightfully theirs, because it “was” promised them to God in the Bible, which “is” the literal Word of God. Palestinians disagree, and believe that Jerusalem “is” in Palestine, which “is” their ancestral homeland, and that Zionist interpretations of Scripture “are” completely wrong. When you have a disagree between two people about the meaning of the word “is”, chances are high they’ll end up fighting with each in one way or another.

It should be noted that Korzybski himself did not oppose the use of the verb “to be”. After all, his most famous quote is “the map is not the territory”. Rather, he wanted us to become more aware of what are we are doing when we are saying “I am”, “he is”, “they are”, and so on.

What we are doing when we use the verb “to be” is applying a semantic label to something. We are assigning it an identity. If I say “I am Christian”, I am assigning an identity to myself. If I’m talking about someone else and I say “she is Jewish”, I am assigning an identity to someone else.

Korzybski did not believe that all forms of “to be” should be purged from English. In fact, he said explicitly that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location. It was even acceptable at times to use the faulty forms of the verb "to be," as long as one was aware of their structural limitations.

That said, Korzybski thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", which he called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, and were leading to problems not only with communication, but also with perception.

This is why General Semantics is so radical. It acknowledges that language is not merely a means of communication between individuals. It is also an organ of perception, in that individuals use language within their own minds to interpret their own experiences.

Korzybski believed that he had identified a problem within the structure of human language that was causing humanity major problems, and I definitely think he was onto something.

DOES THE VERB “TO BE” CREATE A “DEITY MODE OF SPEECH”?

The inventor of E-Prime was a man named David Bourland, who believed that E-Prime would lead to a less dogmatic style of language, thereby reducing potential misunderstanding and conflict.

Bourland went so far as to claim that misuse of the verb to be created a "deity mode of speech", allowing "even the most ignorant to transform their opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things".

This might seem like a big much, but I think he was onto something. Consider the phrase “Let there be light”, which according to the Bible was uttered by the creator at the beginning of time. Through the magic power of His words, God didn’t merely describe light. He actually created light. I think this is what Bourland meant by a “deity mode of speech”. Although it might seem obvious to point out that words don’t actually have the power to create something new out of nothing, it is clear that there are many people who do not understand how words work.

“TO BE” OR NOT “TO BE”

It’s actually quite interesting to consider the many use cases of the word “is” in the English language. It actually is used for at least eight distinct grammatical functions.

According to Wikipedia:

In English, the verb 'to be' (also known as the copula) has several distinct functions:

• identity: noun-phrase copula definite-noun

  • The cat is my only pet.

• class membership: definite-noun copula noun-phrase

  • Garfield is a cat.

• class inclusion: noun-phrase copula noun-phrase

  • A cat is an animal.

• predication: noun-phrase copula adjective

  • The cat is furry.

• ownership: noun-phrase copula possessive-noun

  • The cat is theirs.

• auxiliary: noun-phrase copula verb-phrase

  • The cat is sleeping. – with the copula being part of the progressive aspect with the present participle

  • The cat is being bitten by the dog. – with the copula being part of the passive with the past participle of a transitive verb

• existence: medial-proadverb-of-location copula noun-phrase

  • There is a cat.

• location: noun-phrase copula location-phrase

  • The cat is nowhere to be found.

I don’t expect people to understand what all these jargon terms mean, but my point is this: English massively over-uses the verb “to be”, using it to mean all kinds of different things.

One example should suffice. Many languages differentiate between “to be” and “to be at”, but in English, we use the same word to say “Jimmy is Korean” as we do to say “Jimmy is waiting for a cab at Broadway and Fifth Avenue”. These two types of “is-ness” are really quite substantially different from one another, aren’t they? Why do we use the word “is” to describe such different ways of being.

Bourland specifically saw the "identity" and "predication" functions of “to be” as pernicious but advocated the exclusion of all forms for the sake of simplicity. After all, a total taboo is much easier to enforce than a partial one.

In the case of the "existence" form or the "location" form, it was proposed that verb such as exist, sit or lie could substitute for the copula.

I’m not about to start writing in E-Prime, however. If you ask me, the problem isn’t to eliminate the “to be” from the English language. It’s to become more aware about different levels of certainty implied by different types of statements.

Robert Anton Wilson liked to say that thanks to General Semantics, he didn’t get into fights about people about whether Beethoven is better than Mozart. He would simply say something like “I prefer the music of Beethoven to that of Mozart”, “I enjoy Beethoven’s music more”, or “Beethoven’s music seems better than Mozart’s to me most of the time”. Note that these sentences contain verbs which contain information about the subjective experience of the speaker. The observer is being included in the equation, so to speak.

Now, you could say that all of those extra words are superfluous, because when a speaker says something that “Beethoven is better than Mozart”, their hearer should interpret what they are saying as “in my opinion, Beethoven is better than Mozart”.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t think that most people do that. I think that they take the statement as a statement of fact, because the structure of the sentence implies that that’s what they’re doing. Grammatically speaking, the statement “Beethoven is better than Mozart” is in the indicative mood, which means that it is a statement of fact, not a mere opinion.

In Spanish, opinions are expressed in the subjunctive mood, which means they are treated differently from factual statements. English doesn’t do this. Does this cause Spanish speakers and English speakers to perceive reality differently? Can anything be learned from this?

To me, it’s an open question how much any of this matters. Personally, I believe that the subconscious mind recognizes form, not content, meaning that it makes sense to my brain that treating opinions and facts as grammatically identical might have real world consequences.

After all, if I say “Beethoven is better than Mozart” and you take my statement as a declaration about a fact of the universe, then you can’t really disagree with me without calling me a liar, can you? Therefore, you probably will be less likely to directly contradict me.

Now let’s imagine that an adult tells a child “Beethoven is better than Mozart”. That child might thenceforth believe that the statement is literally true, meaning that people who believe otherwise are wrong. Now imagine that child meeting someone and realizing that they believe something other that what you thought that everybody believed.

Robert Anton Wilson recommended using the phrase “it appears to me that” before making declarative statements. This might seem somewhat redundant, but I am convinced that there is something to be said for including the observer in the equation when making statements about reality.

That belief has led me to take an interest in how different languages treat “is-ness”, which is a super-fascinating topic. In Spanish, for instance, there isn’t one verb for “to be”, but two, ser and estar. And why shouldn’t there be two different words? The former is used to refer to more permanent states of being, such as in the sentence “I am a man”, whereas the latter refers to more temporary states of being, such as in the sentence “I am hungry.”

But I feel like that’s enough for today. I will say this, by the way. I really do feel like I’m getting somewhere with this examination of first principles. I am thankful to the many great philosophers from whom I have learned, including Korzybski, Alan Watts, and Robert Anton Wilson. A lot of the heavy lifting has already been done. All we have to do is understand their message and apply it to our lives.

Even if General Semantics doesn’t bring world peace, it can at least succeed in bring more clarity to the minds of people who take the time to absorb its wisdom.

If you feel called to allow the spirit of General Semantics into your cognition, I suggest starting by learning a bit about extensional devices, which will help you learn to pin the tail on your semantic donkey like a pro.

What do you think? Are wars caused by bad communication? Is tribalism caused by the “is” of identity? Is the key to peace in the Middle East General Semantics? Would be better off without the word “is”? What do you think the meaning of the word “is” is?

Stayed tuned for future episodes of TOWARDS AN ANARCHIST LINGUISTICS!