About Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American philosopher and independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory". Many of his ideas were presented in his book Science and Sanity (1933). During the First World War (1914–1918) Korzybski served as an intelligence officer in the Russian Army. Dutton published Korzybski's first book, Manhood of Humanity, in 1921. In 1938, Korzybski founded the Institute of General Semantics in Chicago.
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