ABSTRACT
Founded by the Polish mathematician A.Korzybski in the United States, a semantic conceptualization of language, more ideological than linguistic. General semantics investigates the relationship between speaker, language, and reality, with the notion of freeing humans from the ‘tyranny’ of language (see Chase 1938). In contrast to the materialistically oriented reflection theory, general semantics assumes that, due to the present structure of language, human beings are not able to conceive of reality objectively, since the linguistic transmission of experience is always already determined by certain abstractions and symbolizations ( Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). For pedagogical reasons, therefore, it is necessary to see through the manipulations and distortions of language, i.e. to unmask language as a deceptive likeness of reality.
