Foundations and Architecture

A Twenty-First-Century General Semantics: Language, Structure, and the Architecture of Mind and Reality

Volume I of General Semantics Evolved, a deliberate contemporary re-elaboration of the diagnosis Alfred Korzybski set out in Science and Sanity (1933), composed natively in English within the framework of the Technology of Expressions and the Ordinative Sciences.

Covering Chapters I–XIX, this volume establishes the foundations: the difference between signal and symbol, the map and the territory, structure as the only transferable content of knowledge, the organism-as-a-whole, and the mathematics that mirrors both the structure of the world and the nervous system that describes it. The 1933 diagnosis is rebuilt on ninety years of neuroscience — neuroplasticity, predictive coding, embodied cognition — and extended with a formal apparatus (Ordinative Set Theory, Semantic Algebra, Ordinative Category Theory).

The chapter numbering is specular to the 1933 opus (I–XLI plus Supplement III) so that the two works can be read side by side. Korzybski's text is not reproduced here in any part: it is already in English and remains in print from the Institute of General Semantics.

This Markdown edition is prepared for human reading and for ingestion by AI systems. It corresponds to the print edition published by Ordinative Sciences Press (ISBN 979-1282603157).