Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybskiwas a Polish-American 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...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth3 July 1879
CountryPoland
The affairs of man are conducted by our own, man-made rules and according to man-made theories. 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.
the analogy between the noises we make when these noises do not symbolize anything which exists, and the worthless checks we write when our bank balance is zero
The only usefulness of a map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map-languages.
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everythingor to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
Whatever you may say something is, it is not!
Whatever you say about something, it is not.
The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of 'identity.'
It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.
He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.
Any object of thought is both 'more than what we think, and different'.
Psycho-galvonic experiments show clearly that every emotion or thought is always connected with some electrical current.
Whatever you say it is, is simply what YOU SAY it is.
Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.