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
Whatever you say about something, it is not.
Whatever you may say something is, 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.
Mathematics and logic have been proved to be one; a fact from which it seems to follow that mathematics may successfully deal with non-quantitative problems in a much broader sense than was suspected to be possible.
Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not.
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.
Second order effects, such as belief in belief, makes fanaticism.
Identification makes general sanity and complete adjustment impossible. Training in non-identity plays a therapeutic role with adults.