Quote #26

We read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use. The guessing and ascribing of fanciful, mostly primitive-assumed structure of the world is precisely what 'philosophy' and 'metaphysics' do. The empirical search for a world-structure and the building of new languages (theories) ... of similar structure ... is precisely what science does.... It develops in the natural order, while metaphysics of every description uses the reversed, and ultimately a pathological order.

More from Alfred Korzybski

  1. Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.
  2. [A Game:] We begin by asking the meaning of every word uttered:Then we ask the meaning of the words used in the definitions and, and this p…
  3. If, in spite of all contrary evidence, or the lack of positive evidence, [a person] holds persistently ... such affective beliefs is seriou…
  4. ...provided we could define all terms. But this is impossible... We thus see that all linguistic schemes, if analyzed far enough, would dep…
  5. ...the analogy between the noises we make when these noises do not symbolize anything which exists, and the worthless checks we write when …
  6. It would be interesting to see the Behaviorists deny that the writing of a mathematical treatise, or of some new theory of quantum mechanic…
  7. We should not be surprised that we find meaningless noises in the foundation of many old 'philosophies', and that from them arise most of t…
  8. Aristotelian , Euclidian [line, space, length] and Newtonian [speed of light] systems... have a few unjustified infinities too many: when s…

All Alfred Korzybski quotes