17 Alfred Korzybski Quotes on Language

Alfred Korzybski quotes on language

1. The word is not the thing.

2. Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language...

3. If we consider that all we deal with represents constantly changing sub-microscopic, interrelated processes which are not, and cannot be 'identical with themselves', the old dictum that 'everything is identical with itself' becomes in [today's understanding of the universe] a principle invariably false to facts.' (Note: Korzybski used '1933' to specify the current understanding. This editor has subsituted the 'more general' form: [today's understanding...])

4. The only link between the verbal and objective world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all 'knowledge' is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex of relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order. From this point of view, all language can be considered as names for unspeakable entities on the objective level, be it things or feelings, or as names of relations. In fact... we find that an object represents an abstraction of a low order produced by our nervous system as the result of a sub-microscopic events acting as stimuli upon the nervous system.

7. Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

13. It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification - the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life.

14. Any proposition containing the word 'is' creates a linguistical structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.

15. If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

16. Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

19. In the rough, a symbol is a sign that stands for something... Before a noise, etc., may become a symbol, something must exist for the symbol to symbolize.

21. ...the main achievement of Einstein was precisely in the fact that he refused to divide verbally time and space, which experimentally cannot be so divided.

22. We should not be surprised that we find meaningless noises in the foundation of many old 'philosophies', and that from them arise most of the old 'philosophical' fights and arguments.

23. ...the analogy between the noises we make when these noises do not symbolize anything which exists, and the worthless checks we write when our bank balance is zero...

25. Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

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.

27. [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 process is continued for no more than ten or fifteen minutes until the victim begins to speak in circles...

28. ...provided we could define all terms. But this is impossible... We thus see that all linguistic schemes, if analyzed far enough, would depend on undefined terms.