Page "Alfred Korzybski" Paragraph 11

He thought that certain uses of the verb " to be ", called the " is of identity " and the " is of predication ", were faulty in structure, e. g., a statement such as, " Elizabeth is a fool " ( said of a person named " Elizabeth " who has done something that we regard as foolish ).

In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Elizabeth belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Elizabeth herself.

Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity ; in this example, to be aware continually that " Elizabeth " is not what we call her.

We find Elizabeth not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain ( the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction ).

This was expressed by Korzybski's most famous premise, " the map is not the territory ".

Note that this premise uses the phrase " is not ", a form of " to be "; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to abandon " to be " as such.

In fact, he said explicitly that there were no structural problems with the verb " to be " when used as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location.