Alfred Korzybski Quotes
It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification - the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life.
Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Science Press Printing Company, 1933.
He was referring to the 2016 Presidential Campaign Politifact showed that Hillary Clinton’s facts were not valid and truthful 25 percent of the time and Donald Trump’s were false more than 70 percent of the time. Never before have there been so many falsehoods exchanged in a Presidential Campaign.
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was 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. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory".
