Friday, February 24, 2012

"A Full-Fledged Epistemological System"

"My work may be mere bunk, but the actual facts in the case are that I have formulated a full-fledged theory, even more, a full-fledged epistemological system, non-aristotelian in character which in every important detail leads, for better or worse to nearly a complete reversal of many accepted orthodox creeds." 
— Alfred Korzybski
letter to T. Swann Harding, Jan. 10, 1928, 
[AK Digital Archives, 21.601]

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Quote of the Day – 'Man'

"We have indeed known that the character and status of the so-called human or social sciences depend upon what man is; but we have not reflected upon the fact that they depend also, in equal or greater measure, upon what humans think man is."
— Cassius J. Keyser,
"The Nature of Man" in Mole Philosophy and Other Essays, p. 211

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Quote of the Day - "One And One"

Korzybski liked to quote his mentor, Cassius J. Keyser who said, "To be is to be related" Here is a 'related' quote from one of Korzybski's favorite books, Sir Arthur S. Eddington's 1928 The Nature of the Physical World, Chapter V – "Becoming":
"There is one ideal of survey which would look into each minute compartment of space in turn to see what it may contain and so make what it would regard as a complete inventory of the world. But this misses any world-features which are not located in minute compartments. We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because "two" is "one and one". We forget that we have still to make a study of "and". Secondary physics is the study of "and"—that is to say, of organization."
Korzybski marked and underlined the last two sentences of this paragraph in his copy of Eddington's book, and used them in the opening list of quotes at the start of Chapter XII, "ON ORDER", of Science and Sanity (p. 151).