8 Alfred Korzybski Quotes on Philosophy

Alfred Korzybski quotes on philosophy

1. The word is not the thing.

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.

17. It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.

18. ...a few philosophers really do important work. This applies to the so called 'critical philosophy' and to the theory of knowledge or epistemology. This class of workers I call epistemologists to avoid the disagreeable implications of the term 'philosopher'.

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.

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.

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.

31. The Non-Aristotelian, Non-Euclidian, and Non-Newtonian trilogy is more general than Aristotelian, Euclidian, and Newtonian trilogy... because the older systems are just particular cases of the new Non-Aristotelian, Non-Euclidian, and Non-Newtonian trilogy.