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
A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it.
We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.
Who rules our symbols, rules us.
Words don't mean, people mean.
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.
If all people learned to think in the non Aristotelian manner of quantum mechanics, the world would change so radically that most of what we call "stupidity" and even a great deal of what we consider "insanity" might disappear, and the "intractable" problems of war, poverty and injustice would suddenly seem a great deal closer to solution.
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 map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map...
The map is not the territory.
If the map shows a different structure from the territory represented -- for instance, shows the cities in a wrong order. . . . then the map is worse than useless, as it misinforms and leads astray.
The map is not the territory. The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map