Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist
1970's, Every Man an Artist: Talks at Documenta 5', 1972
Language as Conspiracy, p. 277
Everything Is Under Control (1998)
Context: You need the "is of identity" to describe conspiracy theories. Korzybski would say that proves that illusions, delusions, and "mental" illnesses require the "is" to perpetuate them. (He often said, "Isness is an illness.")
Korzybski also popularized the idea that most sentences, especially the sentences that people quarrel over or even go to war over, do not rank as propositions in the logical sense, but belong to the category that Bertrand Russell called propositional functions. They do not have one meaning, as a proposition in logic should have; they have several meanings, like an algebraic function.
Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist
1970's, Every Man an Artist: Talks at Documenta 5', 1972
Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) mathematician, logician, philosopher
Nur im Zusammenhange eines Satzes bedeuten die Wörter etwas. Es wird also darauf ankommen, den Sinn eines Satzes zu erklären, in dem ein Zahlwort vorkommt.
Gottlob Frege (1950 [1884]). p. 73
Christopher Caldwell (1962) American political writer
Interview with Bill Kristol (March 2017)
Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher
Rudolf Carnap (1935) Philosophy and Logical Syntax. p. 9-10
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: 1910s, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), Ch. 16: Descriptions
Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher
Source: Carnap’s intellectual biography (1963), p. 62
Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) American neuroscientist
Source: A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity (1943), p. 115
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)
Context: I have found no better expression than "religious" for confidence in the rational nature of reality as it is accessible to human reason. Wherever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism. … I cannot accept your opinion concerning science and ethics or the determination of aims. What we call science has the sole purpose of determining what is. The determining of what ought to be is unrelated to it and cannot be accomplished methodically. Science can only arrange ethical propositions logically and furnish the means for the realization of ethical aims, but the determination of aims is beyond its scope. At least that is the way I see it.
Letter to his friend Maurice Solovine (1 January 1951) p. 120
Abraham Kaplan (1918–1993) American philosopher
Source: "The Conduct of Inquiry", p. 43.