“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.”

Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]) (July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. 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 reality; rather they have access to perceptions and to a set of beliefs which human society has confused with direct knowledge of reality. To embody this insight, Korzybski is remembered as the author of the dictum: “The map is not the territory“.