Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski (kor-ZIB-skee, kə-ZHIP-skee; Polish: [ˈalfrɛt kɔˈʐɨpskʲi]; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American philosopher and 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 is most notable for proposing 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". Many of his ideas and theories were presented in his book Science and Sanity (1933), which became the foundational text of general semantics.
