GENERAL SEMANTICS

   A quasiphilosophical movement founded in Chicago in 1938 by Count Alfred KORZYBSKI, whose Science and Sanity (1933) was the basic handbook of the movement. GS had a surprising success, peaking in the 1940s and 1950s. It teaches that first unsanity and later insanity are caused by adherence to an Aristotelian worldview, by which is meant the use of the two-valued either-or logic which Korzybski saw as being built into Indo-European language structures. From this simple beginning - with much of which linguistic philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), would be unlikely to differ very profoundly - was developed a confused and confusing psychotherapeutic system which, like L. Ron HUBBARD's DIANETICS, promised to focus the latent abilities of the mind. It may have seemed to its more naive adherents that GS held out the promise of turning Man into SUPERMAN by teaching non-Aristotelian (null-A or A) habits of thought. Themovement, whose critics saw it as a PSEUDO-SCIENCE, probably had some influence on the development of Dianetics, but its best-known repercussion in sf was the composition of two novels by A.E. VAN VOGT featuring a non-Aristotelian superman hero, Gilbert Gosseyn (often read as a pun on "go sane"): The World of A (1945 ASF; rev 1948; rev with intro 1970; vtThe World of Null-A) and The Pawns of Null-A (1948-9 ASF as "The Players of A"; 1956; vt The Players of Null-A UK).

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