Listening as Abstracting: A General Semantics Perspective
Lance Strate, Ph.D.
President (Academia) Global Listening Centre.
Professor of Communication and Media Studies
Fordham University in New York City, US.
President of the Institute of General Semantics
and Author of eleven books.
The discipline of general semantics is sometimes referred to as a form of applied epistemology, and as such is concerned with the question of, how do we know what we know? And without a doubt one of the primary practical means by which we obtain knowledge is through listening. Listening is the counterpart to speaking, and it is particularly through speech, which is to say language, that our species is able to relay ideas and information from one individual to another, to share practical experience and knowhow, and maintain culture and tradition in collective memory. Language, as our main form of symbolic communication, enables us to pass on knowledge over time, so that each new generation does not have to start from scratch, having to figure everything out for themselves over and over again. Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, referred to this ability as time-binding, and identified it as the defining trait of the human species (Korzybski, 1921, 1950, 1933/2023). Through speaking and listening, we are able to maintain continuity over time, and potentially to make progress over time. Progress depends upon the accumulation of knowledge over time, but also on our ability to evaluate that knowledge, and discard whatever is found to be erroneous or ineffective.
Speech and listening constitute the essential foundation of the human activity of time-binding. Progress was gradual, and mostly in service of the continuity and conservation of knowledge, and the goal of homeostasis, as long as we were solely dependent on collective memory, however much enhanced by the development of a variety of mnemonic devices (Ong, 1982). The invention of writing was revolutionary in vastly increasing the storage capacity of societies, overcoming the limitations of human memory (Havelock, 1963, 1986), and enabling progress to occur on an exponential scale, especially after the amplification of literacy via the printing revolution (Eisenstein, 1979). This resulted in the illusion that knowledge is a “thing” that can be found in books and other documents, so that we tend to forget that there is no knowledge without a knower, and that what we are really referring to as an act of knowing, not an object that can be owned, controlled, manipulated, bought and sold, etc. (Strate, 2024a). Along similar lines, literacy and typography give rise to modern science and the empirical method, which privilege the sense of sight, and with it the ideal of objectivity. And while general semantics draws on scientific method and applies it to everyday life, it also represents a departure from the mechanistic views of the world that coalesced during the print era and were eclipsed with the advent of the electronic media (McLuhan, 1964; Strate, 2024b).
Korzybski was very much motivated by the discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries which indicate that energy rather than matter is the stuff that the universe is made of, that species are not permanent and stable but subject to change and evolution, that apart from the speed of light all phenomena in the universe are relative and there are no absolutes, that everything is moving, everything is in flux, part of a dynamic process, from the subatomic quantum level to the galaxies that surround us, that all phenomena are events in spacetime. With this understanding of the nature of reality, speaking and listening as modes of communication better reflect the actual environment we inhabit than reading and writing. As Walter Ong (1982) explains, sound is ephemeral, a fleeting phenomenon that only exists in time, coming into existence and going out of existence, as a form of action or event. My intent here is to differentiate speaking and listening from reading and writing, and to recognize the unique qualities of sonic communication and its importance and relevance; it is not to in any way discount the importance of reading and writing, which forms the basis of our civilization.
As I have previously noted, listening is grounded in the phenomenology of hearing, of sense perception specifically attuned to the ear (Strate, 2019, 2021, 2022). And to state the obvious, every act of listening presupposes a listener. In fact, there may be one or more listeners, and in aggregate a group of listeners becomes an audience. Interestingly, we do not have a term or notion equivalent to listening to distinguish the social form the solitary activity, a term such as audiencing. Experientially, an audience listens together as a group, a collective entity with a sense of shared identity based on the unifying phenomenon of acoustic space, which is reflected in the fact that audience is a singular noun, as opposed to readers or observers. Contrast this with the isolating effect of silent reading, as even when asked to read the exact same text at the exact time, readers read to themselves as individuals. As Ong (1982) puts it, “sight isolates, sound incorporates” (p. 72). Hearing is inherently relational, and intimate in contrast to the distancing effect of vision. Hearing is also inherently subjective, as it places the hearer at the center of the soundscape, whereas vision allows for the illusion of being on the outside looking in, standing outside of the world, which is a fundamentally objective position. The subjective sensibility of sound can serve as a reminder that when we listen, we listen not only to words and messages and sounds; we listen to subjects rather than gazing at objects. We listen to other subjectivities. We listen to other minds and consciousnesses. We listen to other living things. To other persons. To others.
And yet, even listening together as part of an audience, the messages and information that we receive, the stimuli that we are exposed to, is funneled and filtered through each person’s individual nervous system, received through each person’s sensory organs, processed and interpreted through each person’s brain and mind, and responded to according to each person’s individual capabilities and predilections. Listening is a form of meaning-making, which is a subjective activity, albeit one involving a certain degree of intersubjectivity based on cultural and other factors. It is commonplace in the field of communication to note that the message received is not the same as the message sent, and it is also the case that when the message is received by multiple individuals, they in effect are receiving different messages. This underscores the problem that we face both when listening and when speaking. The speech pathologist and general semanticist Wendell Johnson addresses this point in his 1956 book entitled, Your Most Enchanted Listener:
Any teacher, preacher, or lawyer has been repeatedly astounded and dismayed by the demonstrated inefficiency of the spoken word as a means of communication. This is to be accounted for in part by the fact… that a considerable portion of the population—especially the adult and elderly portion of the population—suffers significant impairment of hearing. There are, however, at least two other reasons, undoubtedly more important than this one, why speech is as inefficient as it usually appears to be. One of these reasons is that many speakers take too much for granted: they assume they are being heard—and understood—when they are not, and so do nothing to counteract the effects of the communicative failures and lapses, the blank moments and misheard phrases, of which they are so innocently unaware.
The other of these reasons for the inefficiency of speech as a means of conveying information from one person to another is doubtless the most impressive and probably the most important of all. It is that listeners with perfectly good hearing—or impaired hearing for that matter—just don’t always pay attention to the speaker at all. The most effective speakers, keenly aware of this, go to considerable pains to hold the listener’s attention, and, even so, whenever they have anything of unusual importance to say they repeat it, in one way or another, over and over again. They never say, “But I have already told you!” when asked questions they have fully answered in the course of the lecture. They know so very well that while they may be reasonably sure they have said something, they can practically never be sure they have told it to anyone. (pp. 87-88)
Johnson (1956) here cautions us, as communicators, not to overestimate the ability of listeners to accurately receive our messages, to faithfully understand our meanings, and to respond in such a way as to make clear how much has successfully been shared and how much of our communication has failed to get across. As scholars, educators, and promoters of the art of listening, as much as we strive to improve our listening skills, we must accept with humility our own imperfections on that score and accept with compassion those of our listeners and audiences. In doing so, it is also important to recognize that we not only listen to others, but we also and perhaps most fundamentally listen to ourselves. Here Johnson (1956) provides some insight:
Every speaker is his own most captive listener…. We had not often thought of speakers as their own listeners, and so we had not attended to them in a spirit of eavesdropping, as though listening in while they were talking to themselves. And now, in the spirit of eavesdropping, we can hardly help noticing that people talking about themselves and their private desperations are saying the most fantastic things to us, to themselves, that is. They are saying so much that is just not true, and much that is questionable at best, and they are saying it all as though it were to be taken for granted as wholly true, listening all the while quite unwonderingly to themselves saying these things. What is even more distressing, there is such a great deal that they might be saying to themselves that would be true and liberating, and we wait for them to say it, but they so seldom do, at least not in any very clear and self-informing fashion. So it is that, listening to themselves, there is so much they rarely hear that they should be hearing over and over again. (p. 23-24)
Johnson (1956) in this passage makes the important point that listening is not an absolute and unmitigated good. Consider, for example, eavesdropping and other ways in which individuals may overhear or listen to something they were not meant to hear, something that could cause them harm or put them in danger. Another example would be individuals with speech difficulties, whether stemming from insecurity and apprehension or a condition as stuttering, listening to themselves as they speak and, upon hearing some imperfection, stopping and starting over or otherwise stumbling over their words, as listening creates a negative feedback loop that interferes with communication. In the above passage, the problem stems from individuals listening to themselves as they engage in self-deception, reinforcing their erroneous beliefs about the world and themselves. In this instance, the client-centered therapy espoused by Carl Rogers (1951), with its emphasis on empathetic listening, would be helpful, at least as a specialized solution to a very specific type of problem. More broadly, however, Johnson offers a means of improving our listening based on the discipline of general semantics originally introduced by Alfred Korzybski (1933/2023). Following Johnson’s lead, Mary Lahman (2018) integrates research on different types of listening in her approach to teaching general semantics. What they both suggest is that scholarship regarding listening can benefit from incorporating a general semantics approach.
The goal of general semantics that Korzybski (1933/2023) articulated is consciousness of abstracting. We refer to words as being abstract as opposed to concrete insofar as they strike us as vague or as being thoughts and ideas rather than physical objects, and art as being abstract when it is not realistic or representational. But the term abstract has a more concrete origin, as it refers to taking something out of something else, removing or extracting one substance out of another, for example to abstract salt out of ocean water. In similar fashion, we abstract information out of our environment through the process of sense perception. The dynamic and chaotic reality that exists out there is made up of events in spacetime, and through sense perception we abstract information out of that event level to produce our object level, a relatively stable and predictable world populated by things of various sorts (including living things). Applied to listening, then, we can recognize that whatever we are listening to is an event, and we can only abstract part of what is occurring out there, only take in a limited portion of all that that event entails. This corresponds to the general semantics principle of non-identity, often expressed through the metaphorical saying that the map is not the territory. What we hear or receive is not what identical to what was said or sounded or what happened out there.
The second general semantics principle of nonallness applies here as well, as what we take in can only be part of what is actually going on out there, what we listen to is only part of what is being said, or what has occurred. There are some aspects of the event that are not accessible to our sensory organs, and cannot be processed by our nervous systems. As for what we can potentially take in, we can only attend to and perceive part of what is out there. We select and filter all of that sensory data in order to make use of it. And that process will unavoidably be subjective, insofar as no two individuals will abstract the exact same information out of the exact same event.
In saying that the map is not the territory, this is not to imply that all maps are of equal value. Maps differ in their accuracy and their utility. In the same way, listening as abstracting is by nature a subjective process, but the information we abstract may be more or less faithful to the source that we are listening to, and it may be more or less useful depending on what we choose to abstract out of the event. In this regard, training and technologies that improve our ability to hear (or compensate for impairments) make a difference, as does learning how to be a better listener.
The object level, which is to say the first level of abstracting, which involves perception alone, is considered a non-verbal level, and far from the end of our abstracting, as it is followed by various verbal levels. As we move from hearing as the basic function of receiving sensory data to listening as the process of interpreting the sounds, vocalizations, and words that we have received, we move up in level of abstraction. This means that what we listen to is not what we hear, and it is not all that we hear, not all that we take in. Abstracting means leaving out details, as for example we might ignore differences in pronunciation and only attend to the words them selves or alternately be distracted by an accent and miss some of the words being said. Here too, abstracting is subjective, differing from one individual to another, and intersubjective, not the least because cultures are characterized by different languages and dialects.
As we continue to move up in level of abstraction, we leave out more and more details, use increasingly more general categories, and become increasingly more subjective as a result. For example, I might start with Wendell Johnson as an individual, emphasizing his unique qualities as a person, and then move up a level and categorize him as a speech pathologist, in which case I am only paying attention to what he has in common with all other speech pathologists and ignore what makes him different from anyone else. I could then place him in the more general category of academics, in which case I ignore the specific characteristics of his field and only attend to what all academics have in common. I could go up another level and label him an intellectual, in which case I ignore the distinctive qualities of educators and only pay attention to what all intellectuals have in common. Each time, I make a choice as to which category to invoke and which details to leave out. So, for example, instead of saying he is a speech pathologist, I could have said he is an American, and perhaps from there a native English speaker, or someone from a developed nation. Or I could have used the category of human being, moving up to primate, from there to mammal, vertebrate, animal, etc. Or put him in the category of male organisms, in which case I only attend to what male animals and plants have in common.
Applying consciousness of abstracting to listening, I would first of all acknowledge that whatever is happening out there on the event level is not identical to what I am taking in, and that what I am receiving will necessarily be incomplete, so I will need to be cautious in my interpretations and responses, and do as much reality-testing as I am able to. I would then be aware that on the object level, in addition to the language being used, there is also information and meaning present in the nonverbal expression of the communicator, e.g., tone of voice and other vocalics, demeanor, dress, gesture, facial expressions, etc., and in the situational context, the place and time, furniture, de cor, architecture, acoustics, etc. All of these factors may consciously or unconsciously influence how I interpret and respond to whatever I am listening to. Or perhaps, in ignoring those factors I am missing a vital component of the message.
As for the linguistic content of the messages, I also need to ask, what am I attending to and what am I leaving out? No doubt, it will be based on my own personal interests and priorities, but could I be missing something important thereby, or perhaps even misinterpreting the message? What kinds of categories am I invoking in this situation? If I categorize the communicator as a political partisan, and the message as political persuasion or propaganda, am I perhaps dismissing factual evidence that I need to account for, or a perspective that I might learn from? Am I misrepresenting the communicator in my own mind, not to mention in the way that I might describe what was said to others?
In paying attention to the message, through consciousness of abstracting I would also engage in critical analysis, asking, what level of abstraction is being used here? Is the communicator only relying on glittering generalities? Or only invoking values, which are high level abstractions, when what really matters are policies, which are much more specific and concrete? What are the facts being discussed, and how can they be verified? Can I test them by direct observation? Is the communicator speaking from direct experience? Are they open to verification through empirical testing, even if that option is not available to me? Are the generalizations open to falsification, or are put forth as unassailable truths? What assumptions does the communicator begin with, and are they warranted? What evidence is offered for the claims being made? What universe of discourse, semantic environment, and/or situational context is the communication taking place in. And am I listening to myself and my own messages, and my messages about others’ messages?
Johnson (1946) cautions again dead-level abstracting. We need the lower level abstractions to establish the facts, the data, the evidence, but alone they do not provide an explanation or understanding of what is going on. We need generalizations, theories and hypotheses, inferences and categories, to tie together the facts and explain their significance, but alone they easily lead us astray based on our own wishful thinking, prejudices and fantasies. And when the two are in conflict, our generalizations must yield to the factual evidence. This also relates to the different and varying purposes we bring to the listening situation (Lahman, 2018).
In listening, we need to be aware that opinions and judgments represent a higher order of abstraction that concrete descriptions. We can compare and to some extent verify descriptions, and thereby achieve a measure of objectivity, and just because we cannot obtain perfect objectivity is no reason to abandon our best efforts at impartial assessments. We can thereby understand that opinions and judgments are even more abstract and more subjective than generalizations, because generalizations are still subject to some form of testing.
In listening, we can also be aware of how definitions are being used. Are key terms being clearly defined, or kept vague and ambiguous? If a definition is put forth, is it presented as the only possible definition, a propaganda technique known as persuasive definition, or does the communicator acknowledge that other definitions are possible? Is the definition presented as operational, meaning concrete and specifying procedures? Or is the definition itself made up of high-level abstractions? As listeners, we need to keep in mind that definitions can be rejected as well as accepted. And as Neil Postman (1995) explains, when we ought to avoid references to the definition of a term, as there can only be a definition of a term, because definitions are human inventions, and never absolute or uncontested.
References:
Eisenstein, E.L. (1979). The printing press as an agent of change (2 vols.). Cambridge University Press. Havelock, E.A. (1963). Preface to Plato. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Havelock, E.A. (1986). The muse learns to write: Reflections on orality and literacy from antiquity to the present. Yale University Press. Johnson, W. (1946). People in quandaries: The semantics of personal adjustment. Harper & Row. Johnson, W. (1956). Your most enchanted listener. International Society for General Semantics. Korzybski, A. (1921). Manhood of humanity: The science and art of human engineering. E.P. Dutton. Korzybski, A. (1950). Manhood of humanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics (2nd ed.). Institute of General Semantics, 1950. Korzybski, A. (2023). Science and sanity: An introduction to non -Aristotelian systems and general semantics (6th ed.). Institute of General Semantics. Original work published 1933 Lahman, Mary P. (2018). Awareness and action: A travel companion. Institute of General Semantics. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw Hill. Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy. Routledge. Postman, N. (1995). The end of education. Knopf. Rogers, C.R. (1951). Client-centered therapy. Houghton Mifflin. Strate, L. (2019). I hear you: Comments on the sound practice of listening. The Listening Connection, pp.1-18. https:// www.globallisteningcentre.org/i-hear-you Strate, L. (2021). ‘I hear you!’ Comments on the sound practice of hearing. ETC: A Review of General Semantics 78(1-2), pp. 57-68. Strate, L. (2022). Concerning communication: Epic quests and lyric excursions within the human lifeworld. Institute of General Semantics. Strate, L. (2024a). The future of knowledge, and the fate of wisdom, in the age of information. Philosophies 9(6), 160, 2024, [17 pp.]. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9060160 Strate, L. (2024b). Not A, Not Be, &c. Institute of General Semantics.
