Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski () ( July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950 ) was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist.

* 1879 – Alfred Korzybski, Polish linguist ( d. 1950 )

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.

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

* Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, foreword by Edward Kasner, notes by M. Kendig, Institute of General Semantics, 1950, hardcover, 2nd edition, 391 pages, ISBN 0-937298-00-X.

Although newer knowledge in biology has more sharply defined what the text in these 1946 boxes labels " electro-colloidal ," the diagram remains, as Korzybski wrote in his last published paper in 1950, " satisfactory for our purpose of explaining briefly the most general and important points.

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

Bourland, who had studied under Korzybski, coined the term in a 1965 essay entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime ( originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin ).

" 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.

" And in 1952, two years after Korzybski died, American skeptic Martin Gardner wrote, " work moves into the realm of cultism and pseudo-science.

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.

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.

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 ).

As Korzybski said, GS should not be confused with semantics, a different subject.

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.

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.

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 remembered as the author of the dictum: " The map is not the territory ".

" You see ," Korzybski remarked, " I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.

E-prime is used in neuro-linguistic programming as a technique, and the theoretical basis of NLP relies heavily on Korzybski and Bourland's work.

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.

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 ".

Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that " the map is not the territory ", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself.

The expression " the map is not the territory " first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931: In Science and Sanity, Korzybski acknowledges his debt to mathematician Eric Temple Bell, whose epigram " the map is not the thing mapped " was published in Numerology.

* General Semantics is a school of thought founded by engineer Alfred Korzybski and later popularized by S. I.

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

The structural differential was used by Korzybski to demonstrate that human beings abstract from their environments, that these abstractions leave out many characteristics, and that verbal abstractions build on themselves indefinitely, through many orders or levels, represented by seven or eight labels ( or less, or more, it is totally arbitrary how many we want to symbolize the higher levels ), chained in order.

The Institute of General Semantics ( IGS ) is a not-for-profit corporation established in 1938 by Alfred Korzybski, to support research and publication on the topic of General Semantics.

It is an annual event sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics in honor of Alfred Korzybski.

" Once we differentiate, differentiation becomes the denial of identity ," Korzybski wrote in Science and Sanity.

Korzybski focused on the use of three or more truth values in the new systems of logic, although he connected this to his own rejection of Aristotle's principle of identity.

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.

A selection of essays and short excerpts from different authors on linguistic themes emphasized by General Semantics — without reference to Korzybski, except for an essay by him.

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

The structural differential, patented by Korzybski in the 1920s, remained among the chief training aids to help students reach " the silent level ," a prerequisite for achieving " neurological delay.