E-Prime (general semantics) and moralistic judgments

[Marc Moini]

A friend pointed me to this article:

 

 

http://www.noogenesis.com/nvc/ePrime_NVC.html

 

Here are excerpts below. I think the ideas discussed in this article make a strong case for replacing moralistic judgment with more accurate statements. Please comment if you find any mistakes in this (I am particularly interested in comments about the main point).

 

 

• The movie was good.
• He is weird.
• I am ugly.
• You are a genius!
• John is depressed.
• John is happy

Each sentence appears to contain a judgment and uses a form of the verb "to be" to connect a noun subject with a noun or adjective predicate. Can the presence of the verb form "to be" in a sentence serve as a cue for judgmental statements? If so, then we may have a simple way of detecting evaluative statements in our speech and writing enabling us to take corrective action to convert them to observations.

Alfred Korzybski, the founder of the field of general semantics, asserted that these particular uses of the verb "to be," promoted "demonological thinking," inaccurate perceptions of the world ultimately leading to more conflict. In 1933, in his book "Science and Sanity, he suggested we could reduce this kind of thinking if we could speak or write without using any form of the verb "to be." In 1949, his graduate student D. David Bourland, Jr., took on the challenge and successfully trained himself to speak and write without using any form of the verb "to be." In 1965, he named this subset of the English language "E-Prime," short for English Prime.

 

...

 

Bourland, in his 1989 article, "To Be Or Not To Be: E-Prime as a Tool for Critical Thinking," explains E-Prime:

"(1) Noun Phrase-1 + TO BE + Noun Phrase-2 (Identity)

(2) Noun Phrase-1 + TO BE + Adjective Phrase-1 (Predication)

where TO BE represents an appropriately inflected form of the verb "to be."

Critical thinkers have argued against using statements having the structure of (1) because they immediately produce high order abstractions that lead the user to premature judgments. Consider the following example:

(3) John is a farmer.

The immediate consequence of such an identification at the very least brings about unjustified abbreviation. For example, consider the following three sentences about "John":

(4) John farms three acres.

(5) John owns and operates a 2,000-acre farm.

(6) 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:

(7) John, after living in the city all his life, has just bought a farm.

(8) John grew up on a farm and has farmed there for 61 years.

Despite the fact that (4) through (8) make extremely different statements about "John," most English-speaking people feel comfortable making the jump from any one of (4) through (8) to (3). Critical thinkers trained in general semantics hold that (3) does not represent a valid higher order abstraction which could come from such observations as (4) through (8), but rather a possibly incorrect and certainly inadequate abbreviation of the larger picture."

 

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[Duderio]

goodbye