Aristotel, Korzybski, E-Prime & A.E.Van Vogt

A & NON-A
General semantics identifies itself as being "non-Aristotelian" in that it seeks to go beyond the theory of axioms and thus the roots of Western scientific logic. However, Aristotle also spoke of four natural causes: material, efficient, formal and final. Western science, which claims to be "Aristotelian" has focused primarily on Aristotle's material cause, has given little consideration to efficient and formal cause, and has excluded his final cause altogether. 



There is increasing consideration of efficient and formal cause in certain fields of science, such as 2nd-order cybernetics and relational biology, but it is not widespread. Robert Rosen introduced a rigorous theory in which final cause can be considered without the epistemological difficulties of past vitalistic notions; however Rosen's view is very poorly understood and not widely used. Most of science has thus, until very recently, largely ignored systems that are closed to their own causation (self-generating), design (self-defining) and especially purpose (self-determining). Such non-mechanistic systems may not be said to be Aristotelian in the traditional sense. Yet we might also say that Aristotle's four causes transcend the limitations on which modern "Aristotelian" science is based. Aristotle himself gave strong deference to Platonic "first principles" and Socratic metaphysics, part of which his view of causes was intended to capture. This leads to a view of reality that is clearly larger than the logical structures of mechanistic science which are thus only part of what Aristotle believed. Aristotle described metaphysics as "... the most general or abstract features of reality and the principles that have universal validity. ... metaphysics studies whatever must be true of all existent things just insofar as they exist, [and] it studies the general conditions which any existing thing must satisfy (O'Connor and Robertson, 1999). Hence we can only conclude that poor Aristotle has been saddled with a false identity, and Aristotle's complete views must be considered "non-Aristotelian." Nevertheless, such are the terms we have adopted over the years. (http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm)

Alfred Korzybski - General Semantics


TOWARD UNDERSTANDING E -PRIME
Robert Anton Wilson

E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of the verb "to be," has its roots in the field of general semantics, as presented by Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity. Korzybski pointed out the pitfalls associated with, and produced by, two usages of "to be": identity and predication. His student D. David Bourland, Jr., observed that even linguistically sensitive people do not seem able to avoid identity and predication uses of "to be" if they continue to use the verb at all. Bourland pioneered in demonstrating that one can indeed write and speak without using any form of "to be," calling this subset of the English language "E-Prime." Many have urged the use of E-Prime in writing scientific and technical papers. Dr. Kellogg exemplifies a prime exponent of this activity. Dr. Albert Ellis has rewritten five of his books in E-Prime, in collaboration with Dr. Robert H. Moore, to improve their clarity and to reap the epistemological benefits of this language revision. Korzybski felt that all humans should receive training in general semantics from grade school on, as "semantic hygiene" against the most prevalent forms of logical error, emotional distortion, and "demonological thinking." E-Prime provides a straightforward training technique for acquiring such semantic hygiene.
To understand E-Prime, consider the human brain as a computer. (Note that I did not say the brain "is" a computer.) As the Prime Law of Computers tells us, GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT (GIGO, for short). The wrong software guarantees wrong answers. Conversely, finding the right software can "miraculously" solve problems that previously appeared intractable.
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.
Consider the following paired sets of propositions, in which Standard English alternates with English-Prime (E-Prime):

lA. The electron is a wave.

lB. The electron appears as a wave when measured with instrument-l.

2A. The electron is a particle.

2B. The electron appears as a particle when measured with instrument-2.

3A. John is lethargic and unhappy.

3B. John appears lethargic and unhappy in the office.

4A. John is bright and cheerful.

4B. John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach.

5A. This is the knife the first man used to stab the second man.

5B. The first man appeared to stab the second man with what looked like a knife to me.

6A. The car involved in the hit-and-run accident was a blue Ford.

6B. In memory, I think I recall the car involved in the hit-and-run accident as a blue Ford.

7A. This is a fascist idea.

7B. This seems like a fascist idea to me.

8A. Beethoven is better than Mozart.

8B. In my present mixed state of musical education and ignorance, Beethoven seems better to me than Mozart.

9A. That is a sexist movie.

9B. That seems like a sexist movie to me.

10A. The fetus is a person.

10B. In my system of metaphysics, I classify the fetus as a person.

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.
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.
Concretely, "The electron is a wave" employs the Aristotelian "is" and thereby introduces us to the false-to-experience notion that we can know the indwelling "essence" of the electron. "The electron appears as a wave when measured by instrument-1" reports what actually occurred in space-time, namely that the electron when constrained by a certain instrument behaved in a certain way.
Similarly, "The electron is a particle" contains medieval Aristotelian software, but "The electron appears as a particle when measured by instrument-2" contains modern scientific software. Once again, the software determines whether we impose a medieval or modern grid upon our reality-tunnel.
Note that "the electron is a wave" and "the electron is a particle" contradict each other and begin the insidious process by which we move gradually from paradox to nonsense to total gibberish. On the other hand, the modern scientific statements "the electron appears as a wave when measured one way" and "the electron appears as a particle measured another way" do not contradict, but rather complement each other. (Bohr's Principle of Complementarity, which explained this and revolutionized physics, would have appeared obvious to all, and not just to a person of his genius, if physicists had written in E-Prime all along. . . .)
Looking at our next pair, "John is lethargic and unhappy" vs. "John is bright and cheerful,' we see again how medieval software creates metaphysical puzzles and totally imaginary contradictions. Operationalizing the statements, as physicists since Bohr have learned to operationalize, we find that the E-Prime translations do not contain any contradiction, and even give us a clue as to causes of John's changing moods. (Look back if you forgot the translations.)
"The first man stabbed the second man with a knife" lacks the overt "is" of identity but contains Aristotelian software nonetheless. The E-Prime translation not only operationalizes the data, but may fit the facts better-if the incident occurred in a psychology class, which often conduct this experiment. (The first man "stabs," or makes stabbing gestures at, the second man, with a banana, but many students, conditioned by Aristotelian software, nonetheless "see" a knife. You don't need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.)
The reader may employ his or her own ingenuity in analyzing how "is-ness" creates false-to-facts reality-tunnels in the remaining examples, and how E-Prime brings us back to the scientific, the operational, the existential, the phenomenological--to what humans and their instruments actually do in space-time as they create observations, perceptions, thoughts, deductions, and General Theories.
I have found repeatedly 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. Often, solutions appear immediately-just as happens when you throw out the "wrong" software and put the "right" software into your PC. In other cases, I at least get an insight into why the problem remains intractable and where and how future science might go about finding an answer. (This has contributed greatly to my ever-escalating agnosticism about the political, ideological, and religious issues that still generate the most passion on this primitive planet.)
When a proposition resists all efforts to recast it in a form consistent with what we now call E-Prime, many consider it "meaningless." Korzybski, Wittgenstein, the Logical Positivists, and (in his own way) Niels Bohr promoted this view. I happen to agree with that verdict (which condemns 99 percent of theology and 99.999999 percent of metaphysics to the category of Noise rather than Meaning)--but we must save that subject for another article. For now, it suffices to note that those who fervently believe such Aristotelian propositions as "A piece of bread, blessed by a priest, is a person (who died two thousand years ago)," "The flag is a living being," or "The fetus is a human being" do not, in general, appear to make sense by normal twentieth-century scientific standards.


This text comes from:
D. David Bourland, Jr. & Paul Dennithorne Johnston, "To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology," International Society for General Semantics, 1991, pp. 23-26


Robert Anton Wilson has published science fiction, historical novels, poetry, and futuristic sociology, and he has two plays published.
An earlier version of this article appeared in Trajectories, no. 5, the newsletter published by Robert Anton Wilson. Reprinted from Etcetera 46, no. 4 (Winter 1989).
Also see Robert Anton Wilson's "Quantum Psychology," (E and E-Prime, Chapter 13, pages 97-107), New Falcon Publications, 1990


The verb forms of "to be" that E-Prime excludes includes the words: "is, are, were, was, am, be, been," and their contractions.



Addendum
by Jim Walker
Originated 09 Sep. 2001
I have received several emails criticizing Wilson's article where they point out that the use of E-prime seems to make statements unusually longer than necessary. Indeed, all of Wilson's E-prime examples above contain longer sentences than their commonly expressed standard English variants. Please realize that in some cases, especially when explaining difficult scientific concepts, you actually need more words to express a concept accurately and clearly. But in many other cases, E-prime can clarify a concept more concisely with fewer words. It depends on the situation. Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.
In Wilson's examples, he might have chosen to convert, "The electron is a wave," to "An electron appears wave-like." The statement, "The car involved in the hit-and-run accident was a blue Ford," can convert to, "I recall a blue Ford involved in the hit-and-run accident," and so forth.
One critic of E-prime wrote: "A jury will be much more impressed with the statement: 'This is the gun that fired the bullet that killed Mr. Jones'" than its E-based: 'This weapon which has the characteristics of a gun has produced the same markings that seem to mar this bullet that allegedly made Mr. Jones appear dead."
Of course anyone can force E-prime into a longer form if one wishes, but I could shorten his first version to a more direct: "The bullet fired from this gun killed Mr. Jones."
There do, however, appear some forms of expressions that tend to have shorter sentence structures than E-prime constructions. Those expressions usually involve some form of lie, deception or an attempt to convert or convince someone, especially in religions, political ideologies, or advertisements (see below).
Another concern I hear from people involves a false belief that those who advocate the use of E-prime wish to change the English language through some form of coercion, or lawful action. Folks, E-prime serves as a linguistic tool, not as an instrument of power. I know of no advocate of E-prime, including its inventors, who desire to change the history of literature or to force people to use E-prime. Almost all of the works of literature, poetry, and religious scripture contain abundant uses of non-E-prime and I've yet to meet an E-prime advocate who wishes to change that.
Interestingly some advocates of E-prime claim that if you examine the history of literature, the works which contain the largest number of "to be" words usually involve the most vague or misleading concepts. The works that contain the least number of "to be" words usually come across much clearer. For an example, the preamble of the U.S. Constitution stands as a fine example of natural E-prime.
Nor have I heard its advocates demand E-prime for all expressions. In some cases E-prime would hinder the aim of its authors. For example, in the use of colloquial language, satire, jokes, lies, religious scripture, advertisements, or propaganda, E-prime could actually block the author's intent.
For example, the Army's motto, "Be all you can be," works as a powerful propaganda ploy to get naive boys to join the service. The motto appears so grandiose, yet what does it mean? The imagination can fill that empty "be" word with visions of heroic battle and grandeur. Converting the motto to E-prime would weaken it to some form such as, "Do all that you can do." Of course "do" here represents what the Army wants you to do such as clean toilets, run until exhausted, or risk death in a war that you haven't a clue about. The Army has recently changed its motto to an even scarier lie: "Be an Army of One." No doubt the Army here attempts to appeal to the individualist but the entire concept of soldiering involves submission to authority, and to follow orders without question. Yet can you imagine what might happen if a soldier actually believed himself as an army? I don't know about you but I'd stay a long distance from him.
The little word "is" gets used more than any other word in the English language. This gives politicians, advertisers and scam artists the ability to fool and lie to the public. Since "is" and "be" contain only two letters (or only one letter in contractions), the advertisers can make their lies short and concise. Falsehoods don't need lengthy explanations, and they tend to survive best when shortened to their easiest remembered forms.
Below describes some examples of famous advertisement slogans:

"Coke is it." (Coca-Cola)
"A diamond is foreever." (De Beers Consolidated)
"Guinness is good for you." (Guinness)
"Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is." (Alka Seltzer)
"Don't be vague. Ask for Haig." (Haig Scotch)
"It is. Are you?" (The Independent)
"You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's." (Levy's Rye Bread)
"The future's bright. The future's Orange." (Orange)
"Where's the beef?" (Wendy's)

And here gives some other examples that work better without E-prime (but what in the world do they mean?):

"And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM...." (God in Exodus 3:14)
"I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam." (Popeye the sailor man)
"The Truth is from thy Lord; so be not at all in doubt." (English translation of the Koran, 2.147)
"How are you?" (common greeting)
"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine." (folk song by Jimmie Davis)
"Will you be my Valentine?" (Valentine saying)
"Is that all there is?" (Song sung by Peggy Lee)

Of course anyone can express vagueness and falsehoods just as easily with E-prime, but it wouldn't have the impact without "to be" forms. So if you want to lie, deceive, or convert someone, stay away from E-prime.


Other references on the internet:

E-Prime and Linguistic Revision, by C. A. Hilgartner:

http://www.hilgart.org/papers_html/091S196.B07.html

Quantum Psychology: E and E-Prime, by Robert Anton Wilson (an earlier version of the the above article):

http://www.rawilson.com/quantum.html

E-prime: The Spirit and the Letter, by Ralph E. Kenyon Jr.

http://www.xenodochy.org/gs/e-prime.html

Discovering E-Prime, by Elaine C. Johnson

http://learn-gs.org/library/elaine-eprime.htm

Books:
To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology, D. David Bourland, Jr. & Paul Dennithorne Johnston,
More E-Prime: To Be or Not II, by Paul Dennithorne Johnston (Editor), D. David Bourland Jr. (Editor)
E-Prime III!: A Third Anthology, by D. David Bourland (Editor), Paul Dennithorne Johnston (Editor)
Quantum Psychology , (Chapter 13) by Robert Anton Wilson

(http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm)





a e van vogt - the voyage of the space beagle

The term "nexialism" was coined in 1950 by A.E. Van Vogt in his science fiction novel, "The Voyage of the Space Beagle." In that book, Van Vogt created a protagonist, Dr. Elliott Grosvenor, who was the first graduate of "the Nexial Foundation." Trained in integrated science and thought, Grosvenor was able to see the connection between many aspects of a problem that other specialists could not see because of their narrow training. In this Star Trek like adventure, Grosvenor provides indispensible skills to save the ship and the future of humanity. Perhaps truer to life, the book also explores the interpersonal dimensions of scientific rivalry, fear, and skepticism that results.

Van Vogt's vision of a new "science-of-all-sciences" undoubtedly stemmed from his fascination with the work of Alfred Korzybski in "general semantics," which has been carried on since 1938 by the Institute of General Semantics.
Van Vogt referred to "The General Semantics Institute" in his popular "Null-A" ("non-Aristotelian") science fiction books. There was a strong relationship in Van Vogt's mind between general semantics and its offspring, "nexialism." Nexialism is thinking and acting holistically and practically; that is, using both general semantics and logical structures to solve problems and gain understanding. According to Van Vogt:"Nexialism is the science of joining in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields. It provides techniques for speeding up the processes of absorbing knowledge and of using effectively what has been learned." In our interpretation at the Nexial Institute, this goes beyond traditional 20th Century science, to integrate science and other modes of understanding. It is surprising that such a simple concept is so little practised today, nor are there widely recognized methods for its development. The Nexial Institute begins a collaborative investigation into integral views of nature, and practices of integrated understanding. Perhaps it will someday realize Van Vogt's vision of a Foundation for the education of a new breed of scientists -- the first true "nexialists."

Relationship to Systems Science

The work of the Nexial Institute is strongly rooted in systems science and philosophy, which is generally recognized to have been conceived by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in the 1940's, and described in his book "General System Theory" (Von Bertalanffy, 1968). In 1954 Von Bertalanffy founded the "Society for General System Research," which is today called theInternational Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS). Systems science is the part of science that explores whole, natural systems and their internal relationships, including relationships with their own origin and context. The foundation of the Nexial Institute rests on system science, and particularly the system definitions proposed by Robert Rosen, who was one of the later architects of systems science and once President of the ISSS. Rosen's life's work, which ended in 1999, may well qualify him as the "Einstein" of biological science, in that he clearly identified the boundary between simple and complex, beyond which lie natural and living systems; and he provided a rigid mathematical framework for comprehending complex and living systems. He carefully and methodically exposed the exclusion of life from our modern scientific philosophy, which is the mechanical view; and he mapped a path toward re-integration by developing "relational biology" from the ideas of Alexander Rashevski (Rosen, 1999). Rosen's theories provide a strong rational and mathematical foundation for an integrated scientific view of life. The ISSS continues the work of Von Bertalanffy and many others who created a branch of science capable of considering anticipatory and participatory systems. The systems sciences is thus the natural home for the integration we seek.

Worldviews

We each have a philosophical worldview at the root of our thoughts, and all aspects of human life are affected by it. A worldview is the lens through which we view reality. Humanity is currently polarized by two general world views; the archtypically eastern view of reality as a unified flow of creative happenings; and the archtypically western view of reality as separate things in energetic motion. The Nexial Institute seeks integration across this dichotomy to achieve a fuller understanding of nature and our place in it.
Nexial's investigations into life deal with the deepest questions about the origin of life and its intrinsic nature. Merely asking this question is a significant step in science, because it implies that life itself is something and thus something that can have causal effects of its own. Most modern treatments of the definition of life presume that it is essentially non-existent, except as a particular pattern of behaviors or organization of non-living parts. The traditional definition therefore defines what life does instead of what it is. "Objective" science in general attempts to construct a view of reality from parts to wholes, and never from wholes to parts. We thus have a worldview that life isn't something of itself. But that leaves the poets, lovers, artists, musicians, spiritualists, humanists, and just common people out of the picture, because outside of intellectual concepts, most of us are more concerned with living than with an objective view of life. If the definition of life is based on behavior alone, then what is it we experience as living? What is it we feel as love? WILL therefore includes both the observation of life and the experience of life in an attempt to understand it and to represent it, or its effects, better in science. The effort is both scientific and experiential; seeking a common metaphysical view for both. These investigations were a major part of the development of the Nexial Institute. Many links to this work are on the Nexial.org web site. While Nexial will hopefully pursue many related approaches and relevant research topics, these initial studies have outlined a direction of study that we hope will be developed further by others following similar paths.

The Path of Understanding

While science explores what can be "known" from study of one's external reality, "understanding" is harder to define, involving the part of human experience that is both cognitive and experiential. Exploration of that inner reality -- the essence of being -- also requires careful methods and painstaking work, but of a very different kind. There are many organizations centered on the goal of inner awareness and methods for discovering it, and there are organizations that attempt to represent the field (for example, The Institute of Noetic Science). The Nexial Institute is similarly involved in understanding the principles of mind and noetics from experiential perspectives. In a complete view of reality, exploration of both internal experiential reality, and external observational reality must be connected. This is a basic principle on which the Institute is founded.
The Nexial Institute does not promote any particular religious belief or practise. The principles and teachings of modern contemplative and medatative practices, however, are seen as methods for discovering deep philosophical and psychological truths that may also be represented in the ancient spiritual writings going back to the Vedas and Upanishads. There is an emerging contemporary psychology that attempts to integrate western Christian views with the "perennial philosophy" discussed, for example, by Alan Watts, Peter Russel, Kenneth Wilber, Depak Chopra, and modern "gurus" such as Sai Baba, Krishnamurti, Ram Das, and many others. Nexial recognizes these veiws and practices as representing a foundational thought system with considerable relevance to questions of life, consciousness, mind, and society. Many other related practices and teachings are also of interest.

The Social Context

The Nexial Institute publishes and discusses leading edge work from new perspectives in the systems and noetic sciences at annual meetings of the ISSS. It addresses questions such as: What does all life have in common? What fundamental principles are involved in the origin of life? Why is life different from non-life? Is life a cause or an effect? Is evolution passive or active? Is the universe alive? Do we determine our future? Is life meaningful? Although much has been said on these questions, Nexial's goal is to develop integral views that organize and establish rigorous foundations for our answers. Because society depends heavily on the answers to these questions, Nexial attempts to be socially relevant and culturally creative, relating systems philosophy and science to current issues in futureism and conflict resolution. The questions asked at Nexial Institute take us to the deepest roots of science and noetics.
The most useful answers are necessarily those that lead to a more comprehensive understanding and thereby benefit individual, social, and systemic well-being. The answers to modern day social, political, and humanistic problems will not come wholly from one perspective, but from an understanding that is informed by a combination of the primary ways of "knowing." These include scientific, practical, philosophical, spiritual, introspective, and artistic methods. Broadly, these combine observational and experiential knowledge. Nexial's philosophy of integrated understanding is central to pursuing this goal, and thus a curriculum for integrated thinking and understanding is being developed. As the name implies, the curriculum inherits the vision of a "nexus" of views and methods, or the practise of seeing a problem from a fully integrated perspective.
We would gain little through this effort if we could not apply it for the betterment of our condition. Nexial science, philosophy, and practise converge in service to mankind and the whole of nature. Service that helps to heal the person, the society, our natural surroundings and our experience, is service to both humanity and creation (however one perceives that) as an undivided whole. Through the practise of integrated understanding, or "nexialism," unique and wholistic solutions to problems can be found and applied.



http://www.nexial.org/nexialism.htm