Korzybski thought that language and neurology fundamentally limited human understanding, a claim that resembled the more famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Moreover, he argued, we often mistake linguistic abstractions of the world for the world itself. We mistake words for things because Aristotelian concepts have conditioned our thinking. When we use the word "cat," for instance, most of us supposedly take for granted that the word "cat" wholly describes the creature under discussion.