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Alfred Korzybski

mathematician, linguist, engineer, philosopher

1879  – 1950

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American philosopher and independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory". Many of his ideas were presented in his book Science and Sanity (1933).

All Quotes by Alfred Korzybski

“If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.”
— Alfred Korzybski
“God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.”
— Alfred Korzybski
“God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.”
— Alfred Korzybski
“To regard human beings as tools — as instruments — for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker — they have not man's time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement.”
— Alfred Korzybski
“There is a fundamental confusion between the notion of the older 'semantics' as connected with a theory of verbal 'meaning' and words defined by words, and the present theory of 'general semantics' where we deal only with neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic living reactions of Smith, Smith, etc., as their reactions to neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic environments as environments.”
— Alfred Korzybski
“The map is not the territory … The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map...”
— Alfred Korzybski
“Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language...”
— Alfred Korzybski
“The main thesis of this non-Aristotelian system is that as yet we all (with extremely few exceptions) copy animals in our nervous processes, and that practically all human difficulties, mental ills … have this … component.”
— Alfred Korzybski
“Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.”
— Alfred Korzybski
“The word is not the thing.”
— Alfred Korzybski
“God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.”
— Alfred Korzybski
“If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.”
— Alfred Korzybski