. He is remembered for developing the theory of general semantics
. Korzybski's work argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and by the structure of language.
For Korzybski, people do not have access to direct knowledge of of reality; rather they have access to perceptions and to a set of beliefs which human society has confused with direct knowledge of reality.
The map is not the territory ... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map...
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...
The main thesis of this non-Aristotelian system is that as yet we all (with extremely few exceptions) copy animals in our nervous processes, and that practically all human difficulties, mental ills ... have this ... component.
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.
The word is not the thing.