I was recently recommended this book : **People in quandaries; the semantics of personal adjustment**
The description of this book reads: “This is a book about the problems we have in trying to live with ourselves and with each other. These problems, together with ways of dealing with them, are discussed from the point of view of general semantics. This point of view emphasizes those aspects of the scientific method that are useful in daily living.”
But I could not make much sense of it.
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Yep words used in lots of fields that go together are syntax and semantics. Syntax is how you arrange things together (sentences, computer code, processes). Semantics is what that arrangement means.
Semantics is the process of deriving/attributing meaning from/to language.
In the passage you cite, it feels like semantics is kind of a buzzword. But if I were to take a stab at what the author intends, he might spend time parsing meaning from existing literature on the subject.
I would define semantics as the different ways that we can say the same thing. One man called his wife “wife”. The next man calls his wife his “significant other” or “partner”. It’s just semantics.
We don’t have philosophers anymore because of semantics. Or as Stephen Fry puts it, “until we can agree what the word “God” means, we cannot have productive argument on whether or not he exists”.
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