Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Korzybski was born on July 3, 1879 in Warsaw, Poland, and died on March 1, 1950) in Lakeville, Connecticut, USA. He came from an aristocratic family which had worked as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for generations, and he chose to train as an engineer.

Korzybski and 'to be'

It is often said that Korzybski opposed the use of the verb "to be," an unfortunate exaggeration. He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be," called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication," were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as "Joe is a fool" (said of a person named 'Joe' who has done something that we regard as dumb). Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity; in this example, to be continually aware that 'Joe' is not what we call him. We find Joe not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain. This was expressed in Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the territory." Note that "the map is not the territory," uses the phrase 'is not,' a form of the verb "to be." This example shows that he did not intend to abandon the verb as such.

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