Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski , was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist most remembered for developing the theory of general semantics.
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(23 quotes found)
“It is now no mystery that some quite influential ‘philosophers’ were ‘mentally’ ill.”
Alfred Korzybski
“Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.”
“Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.”
“We should not be surprised that we find meaningless noises in the foundation of many old ‘philosophies’, and that from them arise most of the old ‘philosophical’ fights and arguments.”
“Whatever you say it is, it isn't.”
“In the rough, a symbol is a sign that stands for something… Before a noise, etc., may become a symbol, something must exist for the symbol to symbolize.”
“If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.”
“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 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 only usefulness of a map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map-languages.”