I did a little reading about General Semantics after running into it in SF like Frank Herbert’s; my general take on it is that it’s an extended reminder that ‘the map is not the territory’ and that we do not have access to any eternal verities or true essences but only our tentative limited observations.
Exercises like writing in E-Prime remind us of our own fallibility. We should not say ‘Amanda Knox is innocent’ (who are we, an omniscient god judging her entire life?) but ‘Amanda Knox likely did not commit that murder and I base this probability on the following considerations...’ (note that I don’t hide my own subjective role by saying something like ‘the probability is based on’).
(I’ve never found E-Prime very useful because I’ve always been rather empiricist in philosophy outlook and aware that I should always be able to reduce my statements down to something referring to my observations, and I suspect most LWers would not find E-Prime useful or interesting for much the same reason. But I could see it being useful for normal people.)
In this specific anecdote, the students are mistaking map for territory. The biscuit is perfectly good to eat as dog food is produced to pretty similar quality levels (and health problems would be very unlikely even if the quality were much lower), they have just eaten and enjoyed some anyway, the label ‘dog biscuit’ only refers to one potential use out of a great many, and yet they still have these incredible reactions to a particular label being put on this agglomeration of wheat and other agricultural products, a reaction that has no utility and no reason behind it.
I’ve never found E-Prime very useful because I’ve always been rather empiricist in philosophy outlook and aware that I should always be able to reduce my statements down to something referring to my observations, and I suspect most LWers would not find E-Prime useful or interesting for much the same reason. But I could see it being useful for normal people.
I personally think of it as a tool, not unlike “lint” for C programmers. It shows things in your code (speech) that may contain errors.
To put it another way, if you know how to spot what isn’t E-Prime in a sentence, you can dissect the sentence to expose flawed reasoning… which actually turns out to be a pretty useful tool in e.g. psychotherapy.
Whether or not RET (rational-emotive therapy) and CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) directly derive from General Semantics and E-Prime (or their logical successor, the linguistic meta-model), modern psychotherapy is all about map-territory separation and map repair.
I did a little reading about General Semantics after running into it in SF like Frank Herbert’s; my general take on it is that it’s an extended reminder that ‘the map is not the territory’ and that we do not have access to any eternal verities or true essences but only our tentative limited observations.
Exercises like writing in E-Prime remind us of our own fallibility. We should not say ‘Amanda Knox is innocent’ (who are we, an omniscient god judging her entire life?) but ‘Amanda Knox likely did not commit that murder and I base this probability on the following considerations...’ (note that I don’t hide my own subjective role by saying something like ‘the probability is based on’).
(I’ve never found E-Prime very useful because I’ve always been rather empiricist in philosophy outlook and aware that I should always be able to reduce my statements down to something referring to my observations, and I suspect most LWers would not find E-Prime useful or interesting for much the same reason. But I could see it being useful for normal people.)
In this specific anecdote, the students are mistaking map for territory. The biscuit is perfectly good to eat as dog food is produced to pretty similar quality levels (and health problems would be very unlikely even if the quality were much lower), they have just eaten and enjoyed some anyway, the label ‘dog biscuit’ only refers to one potential use out of a great many, and yet they still have these incredible reactions to a particular label being put on this agglomeration of wheat and other agricultural products, a reaction that has no utility and no reason behind it.
EDIT: an earlier comment of mine on E-Prime: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9g/eprime/6hk
I personally think of it as a tool, not unlike “lint” for C programmers. It shows things in your code (speech) that may contain errors.
To put it another way, if you know how to spot what isn’t E-Prime in a sentence, you can dissect the sentence to expose flawed reasoning… which actually turns out to be a pretty useful tool in e.g. psychotherapy.
Whether or not RET (rational-emotive therapy) and CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) directly derive from General Semantics and E-Prime (or their logical successor, the linguistic meta-model), modern psychotherapy is all about map-territory separation and map repair.