Language in Thought and Action

This nonfiction work by S. I. Hayakawa presents a systematic introduction to general semantics, the study of how language shapes human thought, behavior, and social interaction. Drawing on the work of Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, as well as on linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, the book advances a central thesis: Cooperative human interaction through language is the fundamental mechanism of human survival, and understanding how language works is essential to both personal well-being and responsible citizenship.

The book is divided into two parts. Book One, "The Functions of Language," examines what language does; Book Two, "Language and Thought," examines how language influences the way people think and behave.

Hayakawa begins by challenging the popular philosophy of "survival of the fittest" as a model for human behavior. He argues that cooperation, not competition, is the deeper principle of human life. Communication by means of noises is the fundamental cooperative act: when someone shouts "Look out!" and another person jumps to safety, that person has gained the advantage of an extra nervous system. Human language, uniquely flexible compared to animal cries, can make statements about statements, enabling the pooling of knowledge across generations. Writing extends this process further, allowing the accumulation of information no single individual could generate alone.

From this foundation, Hayakawa moves to the symbolic process, the uniquely human ability to make anything stand for anything by agreement. He distinguishes between signal reactions, which are automatic and invariable, and symbol reactions, which are delayed and conditional upon circumstances. Language is the most highly developed form of symbolism, consisting of socially agreed-upon noises with no necessary connection between a symbol and the thing symbolized. Hayakawa warns against confusing symbols with the things they represent, citing examples such as Americans going into debt to display shiny new automobiles as symbols of prosperity. Drawing on Korzybski's metaphor, he argues that the verbal world should relate to the extensional world (what we know through direct experience) as a map relates to the territory it represents. The first governing principle of symbols is: The symbol is not the thing symbolized; the word is not the thing; the map is not the territory.

Hayakawa then distinguishes among three kinds of utterances. Reports are verifiable statements that exclude inferences and judgments; at their highest development, reports constitute science. Inferences are statements about the unknown based on the known. Judgments are expressions of the speaker's approval or disapproval. Many statements people regard as facts actually involve both an inference and a judgment simultaneously. Hayakawa introduces "snarl-words" (verbal equivalents of growling) and "purr-words" (verbal equivalents of purring), arguing that these reveal the speaker's internal state rather than facts about the external world. He also explains "slanting," the selection of favorable or unfavorable details to make certain judgments inescapable without stating them outright.

Turning to meaning, Hayakawa argues that no word ever has exactly the same meaning twice because no two contexts are identical. He distinguishes between extensional meaning (what a word points to in the physical world) and intensional meaning (what is suggested inside one's head). When utterances have extensional meanings, disputes can be settled; when they have only intensional meanings, arguments may continue indefinitely. Language also performs a double task: conveying information while simultaneously evoking feeling. Hayakawa examines verbal taboos, words with "built-in judgments," and the changing connotations of racial terms, tracing shifts from "Negro" to "black" to "African-American" through his own experience as a columnist for the Chicago Defender, a prominent Black newspaper, in 1942.

Hayakawa then examines language's presymbolic functions, the ways language establishes social bonds rather than conveying information. Greetings and small talk serve to create communion, and people select subjects about which agreement is immediately possible because togetherness matters more than content. He also analyzes directive language, which seeks to make things happen through commands, advertisements, and speeches. Society itself, Hayakawa contends, is a vast network of mutual agreements, and without such agreements life would be, as Thomas Hobbes put it, "nasty, brutish, and short" (68). Directives with collective sanction, meaning the social or institutional backing that enforces agreements, such as constitutions and marriage vows, are reinforced through ritual, repetition, and appeals to authority.

Book Two opens with the parable of A-Town and B-Ville, two communities facing identical unemployment that distribute the same amount of money but frame the payments differently. A-Town labels them "welfare" and accompanies them with humiliation, producing resentment, crime, and social division. B-Ville reframes them as "social insurance claims," producing honor and cohesion. The parable illustrates how different verbal frameworks applied to the same situation produce radically different outcomes.

Hayakawa then introduces the process of abstracting, the way the human nervous system selects certain features of reality while ignoring others. Using "Bessie the cow" as an example, he presents the abstraction ladder, adapted from Korzybski's Structural Differential, a diagram for visualizing levels of abstraction. The ladder maps levels from atoms and electrons through the perceived object to the name "Bessie," then to increasingly abstract terms: "cow," "livestock," "farm asset," "wealth." He recommends operational definitions, which specify what to do and observe to bring the thing defined within the range of experience, and warns against "dead-level abstracting," or remaining stuck at either low levels of endless detail or high levels of vague generalization.

Confusing levels of abstraction, Hayakawa argues, leads to prejudice and delusional thinking. The prejudiced person who meets "Mr. Miller," identified as Jewish, sees only the abstraction "Jew" and reacts to a stereotype built from associated words rather than to the actual individual. Rumor escalates through the same confusion, as factual reports become inferences, then judgments. Classification itself is a human act shaped by interests and purposes, not a discovery of inherent essences. When an act of killing is classified as "murder" rather than "heroism," entirely different social responses follow. Hayakawa applies this insight to the abortion debate, showing that whether society calls the unborn entity a "baby" or a "fetus" determines the conclusions it draws.

Two chapters examine opposing orientations. The two-valued orientation divides the world into absolutes of "good" and "bad," ignoring any middle ground. Hayakawa provides examples from Nazi Germany, where the regime classified everything Hitler approved as "Aryan" and everything he disapproved as "non-Aryan," and analyzes Marxist-Leninist ideology. He draws on scholar Anatol Rapoport's account of Lenin's compulsion to view every disagreement as irreconcilable, and on writer Maurice Hindus's interview with a Soviet philosophy professor who insists no student can question dialectical materialism, the official Marxist philosophical doctrine. The multi-valued orientation, by contrast, recognizes scales and degrees. Democratic processes, from trial by jury to legislative compromise, presuppose this orientation. Hayakawa proposes assigning statements a tentative truth value between 0 and 100 percent rather than categorizing them as simply true or false.

Hayakawa also addresses language and commercial culture. He draws parallels between poetry and advertising, calling advertising "sponsored poetry" and ordinary poetry "unsponsored poetry." He introduces intensional orientation as the habit of guiding oneself by words alone rather than by the facts words should point to, arguing that advertising systematically promotes this habit by investing brand names with desirable connotations and encouraging impulse buying. A chapter on television examines the medium's power to suggest that viewers are experiencing depicted events firsthand, its tendency to reduce complex issues to brief visual snippets, and its reshaping of politics around personality and image rather than substance.

The final chapter draws an analogy between laboratory rats given insoluble problems, who develop fixed responses and eventually break down, and human societies trapped in failed patterns of behavior. The underlying cause is cultural lag, the continued existence of obsolete institutional habits after the conditions that created them have changed. The remedy is an extensional approach: instead of debating whether a change is "right" or "wrong," asking what the concrete results will be. A brief postscript cautions that the book's principles should be used to establish agreement, not as rhetorical weapons.