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

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.

" 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.

" Most people ," Korzybski wrote, " identify in value levels I, II, III, and IV and react as if our verbalizations about the first three levels were ' it.

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.

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.

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

Studying the work of such people as Einstein, Korzybski, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, LaoTzu, and Klee, he kept evolving his own dynamic system of principles and concepts that both reflected and nurtured his creative journey.

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.

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.

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.

Van Vogt was always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge ( akin to modern meta-systems ) -- the characters in his very first story used a system called ' Nexialism ' to analyze the alien's behaviour, and he became interested in the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski.

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.

Fresco himself cites several theorists and authors for contributing to his ideas, such as Jacques Loeb, who established the Mechanistic Conception of Life ; Edward Bellamy, who wrote the extremely influential book, Looking Backward ; Thorstein Veblen, who influenced the Technocracy movement and Howard Scott, who popularized it ; Alfred Korzybski, who originated General Semantics ; H. G. Wells, and many others .< ref name =" Influences "> A Personal Interview With Jacque Fresco.

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

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 ".

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.

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.

Korzybski was born in Warsaw, Poland which at that time was part of the Russian Empire.

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

*: 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.

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.

The Institute of General Semantics, which Korzybski and co-workers founded in 1938, continues today.

Intellectual and esoteric influences helped shape their work, which shows traces of Gurdjieff, the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski, the psychedelic philosophy of Timothy Leary, and Tantric meditation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 .”

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 ).

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

Korzybski was educated at the Warsaw University of Technology in engineering.

During the First World War Korzybski served as an intelligence officer in the Russian Army.

In 1938 Korzybski founded the Institute of General Semantics in Chicago.

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase.

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

William Burroughs went to a Korzybski workshop in the Autumn of 1939.

Some of the persons listed are, like Korzybski, polymaths and several categories apply to them.

Richard and George Herbert Mead as well, and that although Korzybski analyzes knowing, he doesn't fully analyze doing.

Korzybski: A Biography.

* 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.

*< cite > Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics </ cite >, Alfred Korzybski, Preface by Robert P. Pula, Institute of General Semantics, 1994, hardcover, 5th edition, ISBN 0-937298-01-8, ( full text online )

In memoriam: Alfred H. Korzybski.