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.

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.

" 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.

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

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

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.

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.

* 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 )

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.

Chase called Korzybski " a pioneer " and described Science and Sanity as " formulating a genuine science of communication.

" 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.

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

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.

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 ).

*: 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.

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 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.

* 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.

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

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.

* Alfred Korzybski, semantics

Korzybski pointed out the circularity of many dictionary definitions, and suggested adoption of the convention, then recently introduced among mathematicians, of acknowledging some minimal ensemble of terms as necessarily ' undefined '; he chose ' structure ', ' order ', and ' relation '.

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.

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 ).

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.

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.