Aristotle opens the 4th book of his metaphysics with the claim that “There are many senses in which a thing may be said to ‘be’ “. The verb ‘to be’ is perhaps the most commonly used verb in the English language, but we rarely contemplate the fact that it is used in drastically different ways. A thing being a chair is very different to a thing being late. (The former being is the ‘being of identity’, but the latter is the ‘being of predication’.) It has been argued that the different uses of the verb ‘to be’ are so potentially hazardous to human understanding that the verb should be abandoned entirely. I want to take a look at this argument and the implications and possible benefits of to-be’s abandonment.
Not, I guess.
Oxford Dictionary defines General Semantics as “A system of linguistic philosophy developed by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950), which explores the arbitrary nature of words and symbols and attempts to refine ways of using language.” Encyclopedia Britannica says that “Korzybski and his followers sought a scientific, non-Aristotelian basis for clear understanding of the differences between symbol (word) and reality (referent) and the ways in which words themselves can influence (or manipulate) and limit human ability to think.” I think the main idea of General Semantics can be summed up by saying that the language we use affects how we think. The followers of General Semantics believe that by changing the ways we use language, we can change the ways we think and respond to our thoughts. This seems pretty similar to the concept of idea of strong linguistic relativity, but apparently Korzybski came to this idea by himself. (Some of his followers have even gone so far as to refer to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski hypothesis.) I know that linguistic determinism is passionately refuted by many scholars, but I’m sure most people will accept the claim that the words we use can affect how we think. I haven’t read Korzybski’s books, but I sense that there’s some sense behind his ideas. This doesn’t mean these ideas are accurate or reliable though, and academics have been suspicious of General Semantics for more than half a century.
In Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957), Martin Gardener notes that Korzybski and his followers accepted their own ideas too readily and that one follower of General Semantics even claimed that sufficient linguistic programming could lower the amount of acid in a person’s saliva. Gardener explains that General Semantics is basically a mish-mash of other people’s good ideas and doesn’t really contain anything revolutionary. He also notes that the actual practice of GS isn’t effective in changing its practitioners. Gardener does concede that GS may have some merit, but he doesn’t really elaborate on what that merit might be.
I want to examine English Prime or E-Prime, an idea born within the realm of General Semantics, to see if it is of any merit. E-Prime, put simply, is the English language without the verb ‘to be’ or any of its conjugates. That means no ‘be’, ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘being’, ‘was’, ‘were’, or ‘been’. E-Prime was first put forward by David Bourland, a follower of Korzybski. It has its roots in Korzybksi’s distinction between word and referent, a distinction summed up in his mantra, ‘The map is not the territory.’ The idea here is that words are not things they refer to. The word ‘dog’ is not a dog. It’s a word. A dog is a dog. It’s a simple idea, but we forget it fairly regularly.
When we say something like Rob is a teacher, the idea in our heads looks like this:
Rob = a teacher
But the equal sign should be reversible. When we say that 2+2=4, we can also say 4=2+2. The above equation implies that “a teacher = Rob”, but that is obviously incorrect. There are lots of teachers that are not Rob. When we remove the verb ‘to be’ from the statement, we can clarify our meaning. Instead of saying “Rob is a teacher.”, we should say, “Rob teaches for a living.” or just “Rob teaches.” This might not seem hugely improved, but there are examples where avoiding this type of ‘is’ make things easier to understand.
Opinions are more clearly delineated from objective truths in E-Prime. Instead of claiming that ‘Metallica are the best band in the world’, a person speaking E-Prime would say, ‘I prefer Metallica to all other bands.’ Instead of saying that the dress is blue, they would say that the dress appears blue to them. These statements express opinions without inviting argument.
Robert Anton Wilson, an advocate of E-Prime
I first came across E-Prime in a book called Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson (an author I have written extensively about elsewhere), and while the title of that book and the reputation of its author might have some (arrogant) academics rolling their eyes, it was Wilson’s description of E-Prime that convinced me of its usefulness. Instead of saying that a photon is a wave or a particle, Wilson claims that scientists should avoid trying to identify the photon and should instead try to describe it. Instead of saying a photon is a particle or a wave, it is more accurate and less confusing to say that the photon acts like a particle when measured by certain instruments and that it acts like a wave when measured by other instruments. Schrödinger’s cat dies if the atom decays. The cat lives if the atom doesn’t decay. No problems.
Isness has long been recognised as a source of philosophical confusion. E-Prime abandons it and avoids this confusion. The disagreement of Parmenides and Heraclitus can’t be expressed in E-Prime; this form of English allows reality to change while staying the same. This approach might seem like avoiding the topic, but in my view, the problem of existence is either far too complicated to discuss meaningfully or it is actually a non-issue, a philosophical phantom, created by the limitations of our language. ‘I think, therefore I am’ put through E-Prime becomes ‘I think, therefore I think.’ It’s a redundant statement, but it’s not philosophically confusing.
E-Prime delineates opinions from facts, it can make science less confusing and it bypasses philosophical nuisances. It seems like a pretty good idea to me. My main concern is that it doesn’t go far enough. ‘To be’ is a verb, and I am convinced that it is a troublesome one, but every single noun in the English language implies an ‘isness’. If we are getting rid of the word ‘is’, perhaps we ought to get rid of implied ‘isness’ too.
“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
But is a rose really a rose? Roses, like most other plants, consist of mainly carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. These atoms and their particles incessantly interact with the atoms in the air and soil surrounding the rose. To which sub-atomic particle can we point and say ‘This is where the rose ends and the soil begins?’ To delineate one object from the objects surrounding that object may make day-to-day human experience seem more manageable, but no thing can ever exist independently of its surroundings. Things can’t really ‘be’ in and of themselves, but nouns operate in such a way that they make us think that things “are”. If language becomes more accurate by omitting all forms of the verb ‘to be’, does it follow that its accuracy will be further enhanced by avoiding all words that imply ‘being’?
No. A language without nouns falls apart pretty quickly. Verbs have no subjects or objects to latch onto, and pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, articles, and prepositions become meaningless without nouns. I write this not in any sincere effort to get people to abandon language, but to suggest that language is not designed to accurately describe the actual physical word. It is designed to make sense out of human’s subjective experiences of that world. Our language is built to set up to help us find food, shelter and mates. It’s not really equipped to describe the objective nature of existence.
What of E-Prime then? Should we be satisfied with a means to increase the accuracy of our language knowing that it falls short of complete linguistic clarity? Does it do any good?
Robert Anton Wilson wrote that “when baffled by a problem in science, in “philosophy,” or in daily life, I gain immediate insight by writing down what I know about the enigma in strict E-Prime.” I’m not convinced E-Prime would be useful enough to warrant adopting it in our day to day lives, but I do think that it can be a useful strategy to help think about things. It forces the use of active verbs, and I have personally found that it can help clarify ideas.
When I started researching for this post, I came across a lecture on youtube given by Dr. Daniel Zimmerman. I was expecting a deeply academic analysis of the philosophy behind E-Prime, but thankfully it was more a practical presentation on the use of E-Prime as a means to revise academic essays. Zimmerman claims that it sharpens his students’ language and makes their meaning clearer. In English Teaching Forum, online (Volume 41, Issue 3), “a quarterly journal published by the U.S. Department of State for teachers of English as a foreign or second language”, John C. Herbert, a professor of English as Akashi College, advocates using E-Prime to strengthen ELL learners’ written English, claiming that “E-Prime shows great potential for transforming standard English sentences into more creative and clearer statements of description.” Even David Bourland, the father of E-Prime, referred to his creation as a “tool for critical thinking”, and I think that this is exactly how we should think of it. E-Prime is a tool to help clarify things; it’s not an instant deliverance to linguistic enlightenment.
I haven’t used E-Prime in my own classroom yet, but that’s only because I am currently working with lower level ELL students. I definitely intend to try out an assignment in E-Prime with higher level students in the future. I didn’t write this post in E-Prime, but I did use it to refine certain paragraphs and sentences that were getting a bit slippery. I don’t believe that it’s necessary for us to entirely abandon the verb ‘to be’, but I do think that E-Prime can be used as a tool to help clarify meaning in argumentative, philosophical and scientific writing.
The other posts on this blog have focused on one or two books. This one involved a good bit of reading, so I’m going to include a disorganized bibliography for my own future reference.
Bibliography:
Quantum Psychology – Robert Anton Wilson
https://www.britannica.com/science/general-semantics
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Martin-Gardner-Fads-and-Fallacies-in-the-Name-of-Science.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20061007112531/http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol41/no3/p26.htm
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/56091/what-is-the-difference-between-the-is-of-predication-and-the-is-of-identity
https://web.archive.org/web/20130204204954/http://www.generalsemantics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/articles/etc/46-3-bourland.pdf
https://www.generalsemantics.org/the-general-semantics-learning-center/overview-of-general-semantics/basic-understandings/
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/general_semantics
http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/16/e-prime-change-your-life
https://youtu.be/sl4UZDLFNT0 – Zimmerman
http://www.textjournal.com.au/april16/frazer.htm
The other posts on this blog and any book I read for them
http://www.nobeliefs.com/Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski.htm
http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20080103161605/http://www.esgs.org/uk/art/epr1.htm
http://www.generalsemantics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/articles/etc/47-4-kellogg-bourland.pdf