Alfred Korzybski
Full Name and Common Aliases
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American philosopher, logician, and scientist best known as the founder of General Semantics.
Birth and Death Dates
Korzybski was born on July 22, 1879, in Warsaw, Poland. He passed away on March 1, 1950, in New York City, USA.
Nationality and Profession(s)
Alfred Korzybski's nationality was Polish-American. His professions included philosopher, logician, scientist, engineer, and educator.
Early Life and Background
Korzybski was born into a Polish aristocratic family. He studied mathematics, engineering, and philosophy at the University of Bologna, the École des Hautes Études in Paris, and later at the Polytechnic Institute in Warsaw. Korzybski's early life laid the groundwork for his future work in science and philosophy.
During World War I, Korzybski served as a lieutenant colonel in the Polish Army and was involved in several military operations. He was also wounded three times during the war. This experience greatly influenced his later philosophical thoughts on the nature of reality and perception.
Major Accomplishments
Korzybski is best known for developing General Semantics, an interdisciplinary field that explores the relationship between language, thought, and human behavior. His work emphasizes the importance of understanding how our words and symbols shape our perceptions of the world. He argued that people's thoughts, feelings, and actions are often distorted by linguistic mistakes, which can lead to confusion, conflict, and suffering.
One of Korzybski's most notable contributions was his development of the "map-territory relation," a concept central to General Semantics. This idea posits that our words and symbols (the "map") are not identical with reality itself (the "territory"). Instead, they serve as imperfect representations or approximations of it.
Notable Works or Actions
Korzybski wrote several influential books on General Semantics, including:
"Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics" (1933)
"Manhood of Humanity" (1921)
* "Collected Papers, 1950-1965" (published posthumously)
He also founded the Institute of General Semantics in New York City, which remains a leading center for research and education on this subject.
Impact and Legacy
Korzybski's work has had a lasting impact on various fields, including linguistics, philosophy, psychology, computer science, and education. His ideas have influenced thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and Gregory Bateson.
General Semantics continues to be applied in diverse areas, from communication skills training and conflict resolution to artificial intelligence development and linguistic analysis. Korzybski's emphasis on the importance of clear thinking, accurate language use, and self-awareness remains a valuable contribution to human understanding.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
Alfred Korzybski is widely quoted and remembered for his profound insights into the nature of language, thought, and reality. His work has inspired countless individuals to reexamine their assumptions about the world and to strive for greater clarity in communication and perception.
Quotes by Alfred Korzybski
No reflecting reader can deny that the passing off, on an unsuspecting listener, of noises for words, or symbols, must be classified as a fraud, or that we pass to the other fellow contagious semantic disturbances.
Say wharever you choose about the object, and wharever you might say it is not. Or, in other words: wharever you might say the object is, well it is not.
Law was always made by the few and in general for the purpose of preserving the “existing order,” or for the reestablishment of the old order and the punishment of the offenders against it.
We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist.
One would have to say “in the end everything is a gag, etc” because everything is infinitely more than just a gag. The same applies to other “is”-statements such as “Laughter is an instant vacation”
The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of ‘identity.’
Whatever we may say will not be the objective level, which remains fundamentally un-speakable. Thus, we can sit on the object called ‘a chair’, but we cannot sit on the noise we made or the name we applied to that object.
Indeed neither life nor science bothers about “essences”-they leave “essences” to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science.
There is every reason why the standards in our civilization are so low, because we have “poisoned,” in a literal sense of the word, our minds with the physico-chemical effects of wrong ideas.