Editing Alfred Korzybski (section)

=="To be"==
Many devotees and critics of Korzybski reduced his rather complex system to a simple matter of what he said about the verb form "is" of the general verb "to be."<ref>Alfred Korzybski, ''Selections from Science and Sanity'', 2010.</ref> His system, however, is based primarily on such terminology as the different "orders of abstraction," and formulations such as "consciousness of abstracting." The contention that Korzybski ''opposed'' the use of the verb "to be" would be a profound exaggeration.

He thought that ''certain uses'' of the verb "to be", called the "is of identity" and the "is of [[E-Prime#Different functions of "to be"|predication]]", were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as, "Elizabeth is a fool" (said of a person named "Elizabeth" who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Elizabeth belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Elizabeth herself. Korzybski's remedy was to ''deny'' identity; in this example, to be aware continually that "Elizabeth" is ''not'' what we ''call'' her. We find Elizabeth not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain (the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This was expressed by Korzybski's most famous premise, "[[Map–territory relation|the map is not the territory]]". Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of "to be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he said explicitly<ref>{{cite journal | last=Korzybski | first=Alfred | title=The Role of Language in the Perceptual Process | journal=Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings 1920–1950 | year=1951 | page=698 | publisher=Institute of General Semantics}}</ref> that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an [[E-prime#The different functions of 'to be'|auxiliary verb]] or when used to state existence or location. It was even acceptable at times to use the faulty forms of the verb "to be," as long as one was aware of their structural limitations.