Many devotees and critics of Korzybski reduced his rather complex system to a simple matter of what he said about the verb " to be.

" It is often said that Korzybski opposed the use of the verb " to be ," which is an exaggeration ( see " Criticisms " below ).

" Nice biscuit, don't you think ," said Korzybski, while he took a second one.

He said that Dianetics " forms a bridge between " cybernetics and General Semantics ( a set of ideas about education originated by Alfred Korzybski, which received much attention in the science fiction world in the 1940s ) — a claim denied by scholars of General Semantics, including S. I. Hayakawa, who expressed strong criticism of Dianetics as early as 1951.

In introductory remarks to the participants, Korzybski said: General semantics formulates a new experimental branch of natural science, underlying an empirical theory of human evaluations and orientations and involving a definite neurological mechanism, present in all humans.

Frederick Perls and Paul Goodman, founders of Gestalt therapy are said to have been influenced by Korzybski Wendell Johnson wrote " People in Quandries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment " in 1946, which stands as the first attempt to form a therapy from general semantics.

The story invokes the notions of the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski and the work of Samuel Renshaw to explain the nature of thought and how people could be trained to think more rapidly and accurately ; critics have said that both systems are misrepresented and never claimed the kinds of results shown in the story.

Korzybski ( 1879 – 1950 ) had determined that two forms of the verb ' to be '— the ' is ' of identity and the ' is ' of predication — had structural problems.

Alfred Korzybski criticized the use of the verb " to be ", and stated that, " Any proposition containing the word ' is ' its other forms ' are ,' ' be ', etc.

While teaching at the University of Florida, Alfred Korzybski counseled his students to eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of " to be " from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use " I am ," " You are ," " They are " statements as usual.

In the 1947 preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity, Korzybski wrote, " We need not blind ourselves with the old dogma that ' human nature cannot be changed ,' for we find that it can be changed.

Korzybski wrote in the preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity ( 1947 ) that general semantics " turned out to be an empirical natural science.

To me the great error Korzybski made — and I carried on, financial necessity — and for which we pay the price today in many criticisms, consisted in not restricting ourselves to training very thoroughly a very few people who would be competent to utilize the discipline in various fields and to train others.

Korzybski claimed this to be a unique capacity, separating people from animals.

The term systemantics is a commentary on prior work by Alfred Korzybski called General Semantics which conjectured that all systems failures could be attributed to a single root cause -- a failure to communicate.

Korzybski thought that people do not have access to direct knowledge of reality ; rather they have access to perceptions and to a set of beliefs which human society has confused with direct knowledge of reality.

Some of the General Semantics tradition was continued by Samuel I. Hayakawa, who had a dispute with Korzybski.

After partial launches under the names " human engineering " and " humanology ," Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski ( 1879 – 1950 ) fully launched the program as " general semantics " in 1933 with the publication of Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.

Bandler and Grinder say that they drew ideas from Gregory Bateson and Alfred Korzybski, particularly about human modeling and ideas associated with their expression, " the map is not the territory ".

Following Łukasiewicz's early work, Korzybski and later proponents of General Semantics associate these truth values with probabilities and the use of scientific induction.

:“ One of the particular strengths of this story was that it presented in dramatic form, a full year before the publication of van Vogt ’ s The World of Null-A, some of the key ideas associated with Alfred Korzybski .”

Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, i. e. confuse models of reality with reality itself.

In 1952, together with William Vogt, he gave the first Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, inaugurating the series.

The general semantics discipline was founded by Korzybski, who gained recognition first with the publication of Manhood of Humanity ( 1921 ) and then Science and Sanity ( 1933 ).

Every year since 1952, it has sponsored the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, with presenters from a broad range of disciplines, from science to medicine to entertainment, including names like actor Steve Allen, psychologist Albert Ellis, scientist and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller, linguist Allen Walker Read, and philosopher F. S. C. Northrop.

*: The article on Whorf states " Drawing on Nietzsche's ideas of perspectivism Alfred Korzybski developed the theory of general semantics which has been compared to Whorf's notions of linguistic relativity.

Korzybski advocated raising one's awareness of structural issues generally through training in general semantics.

Drawing on Nietzsche's ideas of perspectivism Alfred Korzybski developed the theory of general semantics which has been compared to Whorf's notions of linguistic relativity.

A theory of sanity was proposed by Alfred Korzybski in his general semantics.

Many recognized specialists in the knowledge areas where Korzybski claimed to have anchored general semantics — biology, epistemology, mathematics, neurology, physics, psychiatry, etc .— supported his work in his lifetime, including Cassius J. Keyser, C. B. Bridges, W. E. Ritter, P. W. Bridgman, G. E. Coghill, William Alanson White, Clarence B. Farrar, David Fairchild, and Erich Kähler.

" Because Korzybski, in Science and Sanity, had articulated his program using " semantic " as a standalone qualifier on hundreds of pages in constructions like " semantic factors ," " semantic disturbances ," and especially " semantic reactions ," to label the general semantics program " semantics " amounted to only a convenient shorthand.

until 1970 — Korzybski and his followers at the Institute of General Semantics began to complain that Hayakawa had wrongly coopted general semantics.

But although many people were introduced to general semantics — perhaps the majority through Hayakawa's more limited ' semantics '— superficial lip service seemed more common than the deep internalization that Korzybski and his co-workers at the Institute aimed for.

Korzybski is not recorded to have acknowledged any influence from this quarter, but he formulated general semantics during the same years that the first popularizations of Zen were becoming part of the intellectual currency of educated speakers of English.

Albert Ellis ( 1913 – 2007 ), who developed Rational emotive behavior therapy, acknowledged influence from general semantics and delivered the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture in 1991.

Ellis credits Alfred Korzybski, his book, Science and Sanity, and general semantics for starting him on the philosophical path for founding rational therapy.

Ellis alludes to similarities between REBT and the general semantics when explaining the role of irrational beliefs in self-defeating tendencies, citing Alfred Korzybski as a significant modern influence on this thinking.

* Alfred Korzybski, semantics

* human progress as seen from the perspective of general semantics, an educational discipline created by Alfred Korzybski in the 1930s

:* Alfred Korzybski, Samuel I. Hayakawa and “ general semantics ”

Created by Alfred Korzybski, and awarded a U. S. patent on May 26, 1925, it is used as a training device in general semantics.