Editing Linguistic determinism (section)

=== General semantics ===
[[General Semantics|General semantics]] was a therapy program created by Polish-American scholar [[Alfred Korzybski]] in the 1920s for the purpose of altering behavior.<ref name="Korzybski, Alfred 2005">Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity: an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Institute of General Semantics, 2005.</ref> It has been regarded as a reliable method and produced effective results concerning altering behavior.

Language acts as the basis for behavioral therapy; the methods used are based on the idea that language influences human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Korzybski's program assumes that people misappropriate language, creating damaging effects. By clarifying language, participants create a more accurate mental representation, which in turn creates an emotional response.

As such, the general idea behind general semantics is to alter your language to change the feelings created within the mind-space, so as to elicit the desired response. According to Korzybski, the mind consists of different silent and verbal levels. On the nonverbal level, there exist feelings, thought, and nervous system responses, and on the verbal level there are language systems.<ref>{{Cite web|title=General semantics {{!}} philosophy|url=https://www.britannica.com/science/general-semantics|access-date=2021-05-12|website=Encyclopedia Britannica|language=en|archive-date=2021-05-12|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210512022330/https://www.britannica.com/science/general-semantics|url-status=live}}</ref> He instructs people to understand any given word as just a lexical representation and nothing more and to react accordingly. This is to avoid misappropriation of thoughts and feelings attached to any one thing. Because this program has been shown to produce effective results, this has large implications that language determines thought, supporting linguistic determinism.