Editing General semantics (section)

=== Extensional devices ===
Satisfactory accounts of general semantics extensional devices can be found easily.<ref>For example, a source reference for "scare quotes" and other extensional devices not treated in this article is Postman, Neil. "Alfred Korzybski," ''ETC: A Review of General Semantics'', Winter 2003</ref><ref>{{cite conference |last=Hauck |first=Ben |contribution=Extensional Devices Revisited |date=October 10, 2020 |title=2020 AKML and General Semantics Symposium |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fhvqPkupXo&t=218s}}</ref> This article seeks to explain briefly only the "indexing" devices. Suppose you teach in a school or university. Students enter your classroom on the first day of a new term, and, if you identify these new students to a memory association retrieved by your brain, you under-engage your powers of observation and your cortex. Indexing makes explicit a differentiating of students<sub>this term</sub> from students<sub>prior terms</sub>. You survey the new students, and indexing explicitly differentiates student<sub>1</sub> from student<sub>2</sub> from student<sub>3</sub>, etc. Suppose you recognize one student—call her Anna—from a prior course in which Anna either excelled or did poorly. Again, you escape identification by your indexed awareness that Anna<sub>this term, this course</sub> is different from Anna<sub>that term, that course</sub>. Not identifying, you both expand and sharpen your apprehension of "students" with an awareness rooted in fresh silent-level observations.<ref>Encyclopædia Britannica (1947). ''10 Eventful Years: 1937 through 1946''. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica. Volume 4, pp. 29–32. "Semantics: General Semantics". The article, written by [[S.I. Hayakawa]], states, "Korzybski did not intend these extensional devices simply as things to say by rote or to sprinkle through one's writing. Each of them was intended to point beyond itself to subverbal levels—to observing and feeling and absorbing as directly perceived data the nonlinguistic actualities...." Explaining the name selection for the devices, Hayakawa wrote, "Appropriating from formal logic the term 'extension,' which means the aggregate of things denoted by a term (as opposed to 'intension,' the qualities of properties implied by the term), he [Korzybski] called his rules extensional devices."</ref>