Alfred Korzybski Quotes
Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings.
Ironically, most religious fundamentalists would agree with this statement. Where they differ is that they have diametrically different notions of what are the false ideas and false teachings. Religious leaders have warned about the dangers of heresy for centuries, but the notion that religious, fundamentalist teaching, can be harmful is a relatively modern notion of the last 3 centuries. Some scientists now see the problem as one of the reasons America is not producing enough scientists. There are very few world class scientists in the last century who were religious fundamentalists of any kind. And the more fundamentalist a person’s upbringing, the less likely he or she will be to become a modern scientist and see science as a positive force. .A typical modern
Alfred Korzybski, 1879 –1950, Polish Mathematician & Philosopher, Manhood of Humanity : The Science and Art of Human Engineering, 1921, scientist will likely reverse his most fundamental scientific beliefs several times in a modern career.]
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The conclusion that almost all scientists who have studied the problem of climate change and global warming us that there is a substantial change ongoing. That conclusion is reached as the result of literally thousands of observations and studies about the many aspects of climate change. Like any other science, a number of studies have flaws and there are many who fear that government funds will be used to cope with climate change at a cost to the economy. They point to the flaws of individual studies or researchers and have spent millions of dollars to produce uncertainty into the mind of the pubic and politicians. Science, however, ALWAYS has uncertainty and flaws are ALWAYS discovered in established scientific principles. It does not mean that these larger theories and principles are wrong if several of the studies or points are wrong and are understood in a larger and more sophisticated context. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity could be foolishly be called wrong because Einstein did not take account of what would become Quantum Mechanics and there were some contradictions. None the less Relativity is still the most important physical discovery of all time and influences all thinking in physics even though he could not account for the very small physics of quarks, electrons and other atomic particles.
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory".
