J Samuel Bois

Bois was a French Canadian Jesuit priest who in agreement with the Holy See left the Church in the 1920's because of his radical and unorthodox views. It is interesting that another significant figure of the 20th century, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, did not have to leave the Catholic priesthood, yet, at the time, his views were considered radical by his superiors.

As he was born in Quebec, French was his first language. After Bois left the Church he got a degree in psychology from McGill University in Canada. In the late 1930's, he read Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity and was shaken by it. The foundation of his primary normative assumptions was rocked, so he went and studied with Korzybski and became his most adventurous student. Korzybski had started the Institute of General Semantics (IGS), first in Chicago, and later in Lakeland, Connecticut. After he died, Bois became the chief lecturer. Bois took seriously Korzybski’s statement in Science and Sanity: "In the present work, each statement is merely the best the author can make in 1933. (So) we ought not to be surprised if such a pioneering enquiry proves to need many corrections and elaborations in the future."

After a successful career as a management consultant using general semantics, Bois and Ethel Longstreet started an institute called Viewpoints in Los Angeles. There, Bois developed his work into a discipline he called epistemics. He saw it as a further elaboration of what Korzybski started, and as a new development that introduced factors which warranted giving it a new name.

Some of key concepts introduced by Bois were:
*Human beings as semantic transactors
*New views of Korzybski's abstracting process
*The development of Bachelard's Epistemological Profile
*Participating as a way of life
*The affective order being the source of "meanings." (Bois was one of the first to recognize the innovative work of Silvan S. Tomkins in the field of Affect/Script theory)

Gary David met Bois at UCLS in 1964. In 1974, Bois headed the committee which gave Gary his PhD in epistemics from the Union Institute and University in 1975. It was the first such degree given by an accredited college.

Bois' books are listed below, and his selected writings can be read by following the link.

The books:

The Art of Awareness
Explorations in Awareness
Communication as Creative Experience
Breeds of Men: Toward the Adulthood of Humankind
Epistemics: the Science-Art of Innovating