As the man said – ‘The map is not the territory’…
The entire text of Alfred Korzybski’s
Science and Sanity is online, albeit in pdf format. I can’t claim I’ve gotten through the entire book myself… it’s been bending my bookshelf for quite a while now.
The origin of this work was a new functional definition of ‘man’, as formulated in 1921, based on an analysis of uniquely human potentialities; namely, that each generation may begin where the former left off. This characteristic I called the ‘time-binding’ capacity. Here the reactions of humans are not split verbally and elementalistically into separate ‘body’, ‘mind’, ’emotions’, ‘intellect’, ‘intuitions’, etc., but are treated from an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment (external and internal) point of view. This parallels the Einstein-Minkowski space-time integration in physics, and both are necessitated by the modern evolution of sciences.
– Alfred Korzybski
It is vital to have a constant awareness or habitual feeling that our formulation of a situation is not the situation itself. The structure of our statements about things is not necessarily the way things are.
– Korzybski
A review of Science & Sanity »
(Thanks to Alex Burns at disinfo.com)
Read Science and Sanity »
