Whenever I see semantic dissection in major posts, I always worry that language is just too messy, just a towering stack of cards, and wonder why there isn’t more discussion about why we use English when the language doesn’t seem optimal for science and seeking Truth. Obviously it’s rational for those who already speak English to continue using it for lack of an immediately available, preferable alternative, but I don’t see much discussing this fact, arguing whether we should start over, etc. Admittedly, I haven’t yet grokked the “ways words can be wrong” sequence.
Help me get over my linguistic-existential dread by refuting (or accepting) the statement “To develop optimal rationality skills, the first step should be to redesign our linguistic operating system.”
Back in the 17th century, several people had a go at redesigning the whole thing, motivated by the flood of new knowledge coming from scientific investigations and the great exploratory voyages, and a felt inadequacy of the language of the time for expressing it. The languages they designed never came into use, although a direct intellectual line can be traced from there down to the formalisation of mathematical logic and the development of the first computers.
But introducing a whole new language is much harder than introducing a new keyboard layout, and how far has Dvorak got? Nobody will bother except for a few geeks. Qapla’!
Instead, there have been useful suggestions in various sources for small, local tools that one can simply pick up and use. Here’s a list of the ones that occur to me. The first three are from Korzybski, and 4 is from General Semantics (on which there’s a thread here), but invented by David Bourland. 6 and 7 are my own observations, and 5 and 8 are easily googleable for more information.
Subscripting, to draw attention to the fact that Fred(2010) is not Fred(2012), Freda(@home) is not Freda(@work), and Genghis(drunk) is not Genghis(sober).
Liberal use of the word “etc.” to remind one that one never knows all about an object.
Avoidance of elementalistic divisions between things that are not divisible (“mind” vs “body”, “reason” vs “emotion”, “space” vs “time”, etc.), and their replacement by non-elementalistic language.
Try writing in E-Prime: English with all forms of the verb “to be” excluded. And one must do a proper job of tabooing the verb, not merely making a rote replacement by other words without re-examining the thought. One need not write exclusively in E-Prime, but the exercise will train one to look carefully at this troublesome word.
Learn Loglan or Lojban, not necessarily to use as a language, but to use as a linguistic exercise, for the different structure it has, based on mathematical logic. (Learn mathematical logic at the same time, if you don’t know it already.) I think Korzybski would approve, had he lived to see it. The originator, James Cooke Brown, saw Loglan as also a descendant of the old philosophical languages.
Avoid the word “really” and all its synonyms: “actually”, “fundamentally”, “essentially”, etc. Often, they’re an attempt to push reality away by saying “X is really Y” when the simple fact is that X is not Y. (“Fundamentally, there’s a dragon in my garage.”)
Take a hard look at the word “the” now and then. Make sure that you are not attempting a magic spell, trying to conjure something into existence by prefixing a noun phrase with “the”.
Write short stories in 100 words. (Google the word “drabble”.) I’ve been doing one of these a week for nearly a year now. It’s quite fascinating to find how a first draft twice as long can be shrunk without losing anything. Ordinary language begins to seem absurdly padded. You don’t necessarily want to perform liposuction on everything you write, but knowing it is possible prompts me to always be asking “are these words doing any work?” If you’re going to write at length, with a lot of repetition, circling around and around the subject, saying everything several times over in different ways, and with a lot of repetition, better to do it deliberately, for some definite reason.
Well, one place to start is to stop conflating “our linguistic operating system” with the languages we speak.
The former is a cognitive structure which all languages intelligible by humans have in common. Redesigning that might very well be a valuable step, but it’s way outside our current capabilities, and is unlikely to be a first step (or even a tenth or a hundredth step).
But, OK, fine then, should we redesign the languages we speak?
I’m inclined to doubt it. What I expect happens once a large number of people speak the language is that the actual spoken language gets creolized and that it’s just as easy to express fallacies in it as in any other human language.
That said, speaking a particular language might be valuable in a sort of ritual sense… as a way of reminding ourselves that we are “speaking as rationalists,” and should therefore strive for more precision and clarity and truth-preservation than we do in our ordinary lives.
That said, there’s a lot of site jargon that serves that purpose quite well already building on an English frame.
So on balance, I’m inclined to reject the statement.
Whenever I see semantic dissection in major posts, I always worry that language is just too messy, just a towering stack of cards, and wonder why there isn’t more discussion about why we use English when the language doesn’t seem optimal for science and seeking Truth. Obviously it’s rational for those who already speak English to continue using it for lack of an immediately available, preferable alternative, but I don’t see much discussing this fact, arguing whether we should start over, etc. Admittedly, I haven’t yet grokked the “ways words can be wrong” sequence.
My previous post on the topic.
Help me get over my linguistic-existential dread by refuting (or accepting) the statement “To develop optimal rationality skills, the first step should be to redesign our linguistic operating system.”
Back in the 17th century, several people had a go at redesigning the whole thing, motivated by the flood of new knowledge coming from scientific investigations and the great exploratory voyages, and a felt inadequacy of the language of the time for expressing it. The languages they designed never came into use, although a direct intellectual line can be traced from there down to the formalisation of mathematical logic and the development of the first computers.
But introducing a whole new language is much harder than introducing a new keyboard layout, and how far has Dvorak got? Nobody will bother except for a few geeks. Qapla’!
Instead, there have been useful suggestions in various sources for small, local tools that one can simply pick up and use. Here’s a list of the ones that occur to me. The first three are from Korzybski, and 4 is from General Semantics (on which there’s a thread here), but invented by David Bourland. 6 and 7 are my own observations, and 5 and 8 are easily googleable for more information.
Subscripting, to draw attention to the fact that Fred(2010) is not Fred(2012), Freda(@home) is not Freda(@work), and Genghis(drunk) is not Genghis(sober).
Liberal use of the word “etc.” to remind one that one never knows all about an object.
Avoidance of elementalistic divisions between things that are not divisible (“mind” vs “body”, “reason” vs “emotion”, “space” vs “time”, etc.), and their replacement by non-elementalistic language.
Try writing in E-Prime: English with all forms of the verb “to be” excluded. And one must do a proper job of tabooing the verb, not merely making a rote replacement by other words without re-examining the thought. One need not write exclusively in E-Prime, but the exercise will train one to look carefully at this troublesome word.
Learn Loglan or Lojban, not necessarily to use as a language, but to use as a linguistic exercise, for the different structure it has, based on mathematical logic. (Learn mathematical logic at the same time, if you don’t know it already.) I think Korzybski would approve, had he lived to see it. The originator, James Cooke Brown, saw Loglan as also a descendant of the old philosophical languages.
Avoid the word “really” and all its synonyms: “actually”, “fundamentally”, “essentially”, etc. Often, they’re an attempt to push reality away by saying “X is really Y” when the simple fact is that X is not Y. (“Fundamentally, there’s a dragon in my garage.”)
Take a hard look at the word “the” now and then. Make sure that you are not attempting a magic spell, trying to conjure something into existence by prefixing a noun phrase with “the”.
Write short stories in 100 words. (Google the word “drabble”.) I’ve been doing one of these a week for nearly a year now. It’s quite fascinating to find how a first draft twice as long can be shrunk without losing anything. Ordinary language begins to seem absurdly padded. You don’t necessarily want to perform liposuction on everything you write, but knowing it is possible prompts me to always be asking “are these words doing any work?” If you’re going to write at length, with a lot of repetition, circling around and around the subject, saying everything several times over in different ways, and with a lot of repetition, better to do it deliberately, for some definite reason.
As RichardKennaway says, it has been tried before, and never worked. You might be interested in Umberto Eco’s book “Search for the Perfect Language”.
Well, one place to start is to stop conflating “our linguistic operating system” with the languages we speak.
The former is a cognitive structure which all languages intelligible by humans have in common. Redesigning that might very well be a valuable step, but it’s way outside our current capabilities, and is unlikely to be a first step (or even a tenth or a hundredth step).
But, OK, fine then, should we redesign the languages we speak?
I’m inclined to doubt it. What I expect happens once a large number of people speak the language is that the actual spoken language gets creolized and that it’s just as easy to express fallacies in it as in any other human language.
That said, speaking a particular language might be valuable in a sort of ritual sense… as a way of reminding ourselves that we are “speaking as rationalists,” and should therefore strive for more precision and clarity and truth-preservation than we do in our ordinary lives.
That said, there’s a lot of site jargon that serves that purpose quite well already building on an English frame.
So on balance, I’m inclined to reject the statement.