Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski (Warsaw, 1879 – Lakeville, Connecticut, 1950) was a Polish-American thinker best known for developing general semantics, a field he regarded as distinct from semantics and broader than it. His work, from the first half of the twentieth century, belongs to the debate about the limits of human knowledge and the role of language in how we perceive the world.

He came from a Polish aristocratic family with a long line of mathematicians, scientists and engineers. He learned Polish at home and Russian at school, and with a French and a German governess he became fluent in four languages as a child. He studied engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology. During the First World War he served as an intelligence officer in the Russian army. After being wounded in a leg, he moved to North America in 1916, first to Canada and then to the United States, where he stayed after the war and became a citizen in 1940. His first book, Manhood of Humanity (1921), put forward a new theory of humankind centred on time-binding, the ability to pass knowledge from one generation to the next, which he saw as what sets our species apart from other animals. His principal work, Science and Sanity (1933), laid out the foundations of general semantics. In 1938 he founded the Institute of General Semantics, which he directed until his death.

His central claim is that we never reach the world directly, only through abstractions: nonverbal impressions coming from the nervous system and verbal indicators coming from language. These can lead us to confuse our perceptions and words with the facts they describe, which is the origin of his best-known phrase, "the map is not the territory". Korzybski proposed training what he called consciousness of abstracting, drawing on methods he had learned from mathematics and science, in order to change the way people deal with reality. He did not reject the verb "to be" outright; he targeted specific uses he considered structurally faulty.

His influence reached Gestalt therapy, rational emotive behaviour therapy and neuro-linguistic programming, as well as science fiction writers such as A. E. van Vogt and Robert A. Heinlein, and thinkers such as Alan Watts and Gregory Bateson.