E-Prime

| International Society for General Semantics .

'In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the "is of identity" from the English language. (The "is of identity" takes the form X is a Y. e.g., "Joe is a Communist," "Mary is a dumb file-clerk," "The universe is a giant machine," etc.) In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words "is" or "to be" and the Bourland proposal (English without "isness") he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.' | Anton Wilson on E-Prime |

The Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski Hypothesis

from: TOWARD UNDERSTANDING E -PRIME by Robert Anton Wilson

"It seems likely that the principal software used in the human brain consists of words, metaphors, disguised metaphors, and linguistic structures in general. The Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski Hypothesis, in anthropology, holds that a change in language can alter our perception of the cosmos. A revision of language structure, in particular, can alter the brain as dramatically as a psychedelic. In our metaphor, if we change the software, the computer operates in a new way. "
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The "A"-type statements (Standard English) all implicitly or explicitly assume the medieval view called "Aristotelian essentialism" or "naive realism." In other words, they assume a world made up of block-like entities with indwelling "essences" or spooks- "ghosts in the machine." The "B"-type statements (E-Prime) recast these sentences into a form isomorphic to modern science by first abolishing the "is" of Aristotelian essence and then reformulating each observation in terms of signals received and interpreted by a body (or instrument) moving in space-time.
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Relativity, quantum mechanics, large sections of general physics, perception psychology, sociology, linguistics, modern math, anthropology, ethology, and several other sciences make perfect sense when put into the software of E-Prime. Each of these sciences generates paradoxes, some bordering on "nonsense" or "gibberish," if you try to translate them back into the software of Standard English.

http://members.nbci.com/nosacredcows/eprime.html

"Thus, removing the "to be" verb from English results in a language of a more phenomenological character, in that this change automatically causes a reduction of the number of assumptions in even simple sentences. Statements made in E-Prime almost always mirror first person experience far more adequately than the "is" statements they replace". Spoken E Prime, An Experimental Method for Integrating General Semantics into Daily Life E. W. Kellogg III

TO BE OR NOT TO BE: E-Prime as a Tool for Critical Thinking E-Prime! The Fundamentals D. David Bourland, Jr.

Both-And rather than Either/Or; these two aspects of general semantics work together in a synergistic and integrated fashion:

To advance knowledge and inquiry into non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics through publications, lectures, research, and other appropriate educational and scientific means.

To Be or Not .

| International Society for General Semantics .

."The map is not the territory."

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