E-Prime

Abstract: E-Prime! The Fundamentals AMBROSE BIERCE, in his famous Devil's Dictionary, defined logic as "The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding" As we become conscious of our misunderstandings we improve the quality of our thinking, and most particularly our thinking about thinking, which Richard Paul defines as "critical thinking" In this article I will describe an offshoot of Korzybski's system (18, 19) known as E-Prime: English without any form of the verb to be The name comes from the equation E' = E-e, where E represents the words of the English language, and e represents the inflected forms of to be Depending on exactly how one defines "word," most scholars regard the English language as embracing some one to two million "words," or lexical items (Note 1) In E-Prime one simply does without 20 or so of these lexical items; specifically, the to be family: be, is, am, are, was, were, been, being; plus contractions--'m, 's, 're; plus various archaic and dialectual forms--eg, ain't While statistically E-Prime only makes trivial changes relative to the English lexicon, it does affect the syntax Even this effect, however, does not seem as severe as it might appear This unexpected lack of severity proceeds from the well-known "richness" of the English language, which provides a wealth of linking verbs (become, seem, appear, verbs related to the senses), apposition, etc, that can take over most of our habitual applications of to be On the other hand, E-Prime does admittedly entail the necessity of expressing the progressive aspect by using " continues to ," and it makes use of the passive voice difficult or even impossible (Note 2) In marked contrast with the areas of the lexicon and syntax, E-Prime delivers major and unexpected consequences to English semantics The E-Prime revision of English, although trivial in some respects, has deep underlying epistemological antecedents and consequences Critical thinkers have struggled with the semantic consequences of the verb to be for hundreds of years These distinguished persons include Thomas Hobbes (11), Augustus de Morgan (22), Bertrand Russell (24), Alfred North Whitehead (27), George Santayana (25), and Alfred Korzybski (19) Their concern, and ours as critical thinkers, centers upon two semantic usages of to be, Identity and Predication, that have these general structures in which TO BE represents an appropriately inflected form of the verb to be: Identity: Noun Phrase, + TO BE + Noun Phrase[sub2] Predication: Noun Phrase, + TO BE + Adjective Phrase, Identity Critical thinkers have argued against using statements having the structure of Identity because they immediately produce high order abstractions that lead the user to premature judgments Consider the following statement: John is a farmer The immediate consequence of such an identification at the very least brings about unjustified abbreviation, which can severely interfere with communication For example, consider the following three sentences about John: 1) John farms three acres 2) John owns and operates a 2,000-acre farm 3) John receives $20,000 a year from the government for not growing anything on his farm We could even carry this illustration into a different dimension: 4) John, after living in the city all his life, has just bought a farm 5) John grew up on a farm and has farmed there for 61 years Despite the fact that 1) through 5) make extremely different statements about John, most English-speaking people feel comfortable making the jump from any one of these statements to John is a farmer Critical thinkers trained in general semantics hold that John is a farmer does not represent a valid higher order abstraction which could come from such observations as 1) through 5), but rather a possibly incorrect and certainly inadequate abbreviation of the larger picture …

Abstract: At the outset, there are sharp differences between Nietzsche and Korzybski: the former is a distinguished critic of Platonic philosophy, a poet, philologist, and philosopher with an unusual style of writing, a thinker whose influence on Western intellectual history was not popularly recognized in the English-speaking countries until the 1960s, and a pioneer of the linguistic turn and poststructuralism/postmodernism, while the latter is a founder of general semantics, a builder of a "non-Aristotelian system" that tries to synthesize diverse areas of human knowledge, a scholar whose work gave rise to the "general semantic movement" in the 1940s and 1950s, and a practitioner of altering people's way of thinking and acting by changing their linguistic behavior At a deeper level, however, Nietzsche and Korzybski share at least one common position, that is, to deconstruct the ancient Greek philosophical tradition as a basis of Western culture by illuminating the harmful pseudo-identity between the law of reality and the law of language It is the deconstructive insight and function that marks both Nietzsche and Korzybski's contribution to contemporary scholarship Many scholars have acknowledged this in similar ways Foucault (1973), for example, believes that Nietzsche is actually the first thinker who not only treats language as a central issue of philosophy, but also deconstructs philosophy by displaying the identity between language and metaphysics (1) Breazeale (1976) observes that Nietzsche is "practically and theoretically concerned with problems of language to a degree unparalleled among serious thinkers of modern times" (p 301) Wilcox (1982), Schrift (1985), and Crawford (1988) argue that Nietzsche's theory of truth, value, and knowledge is inseparable from his philosophy of language On the other hand, Ogden (1935) claims that Korzybski's work "presents a revolutionary thesis" (p 82) as well as a wealth of materials that may "clarify a world view" (p 84) Chase (1938) stresses Korzybski's "stubborn attempt to find out how words behave, and why meaning is so often frustrated" (p 7), Postman (1988) characterizes Korzybski and general semantics as revealing the relationship between the world of words and the world of non-words as well as how people use words to abstract and symbolize reality This paper is a comparative study of Nietzsche and Korzybski's thought on several philosophical and linguistic issues It consists of four sections: the first one focuses on their critique of Greek metaphysics and their own worldview; the second centers on their deconstruction of logocentralism; the third explores how they understand the nature of language and its relationship to thought and reality; and the fourth inquiries into their similarity and difference by comparing structuralism with poststructuralism The paper suggests that although Korzybski does not acknowledge Nietzsche's influence on studies of language, the latter actually sheds more light on the relationship between language, thought, and reality than anyone Korzybski does give credit to; compared to Korzybski's pragmatic endeavor in changing people's linguistic behavior, Nietzsche's philosophical investigation has been proved more powerful and far-reaching in altering people's way of understanding and coping with language; in the final analysis, Korzybski can be said of a promoter of structuralism and Nietzsche a forerunner of poststructuralism Traditional Metaphysics and New Worldview In reading Nietzsche and Korzybski, one finds that they share interests in some basic themes, advance a number of similar ideas, and even employ the same key words (2) Both of them, for example, apply new achievements of natural sciences to their own research; both take a psychological approach to philosophical and linguistic issues; and both seek for answers to theoretical and practical problems in light of mankind's nature However, the first and foremost similarity is manifested in three respects: critique of ancient Greek metaphysics; analysis of the basic laws of logic; and discussion on the relationship of language to thought and reality …