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Scientifictionist, v. 1, issue 5, June-July 1946
Page 7
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A LANGUAGES by Don Bratton "I am not here." --A sentence which is grammatically correct but which can never be said! From Ripley's Believe It or Not. The above quotation struck me a surprising blow when as a child I first read it. At that time I was surprised that such a sentence could exist. There is surely something about the structure of the sentence which makes it incompatible with reality -- incompatible with the world outside my skin. Of course it lies in the use of the word 'here'. In the sentence we have a concise illustration of the fact that language can have a structure all its own, a structure which is independent of the world about which the language talks. Now that I am an older child it becomes a wonder to me that there are not many sentences like the one of Ripley's. If our language has a structure all its own then why not deliberately and carefully shape it so that it becomes impossible to make any statement which is incompatible with the world? What a dream that would be! Yes, I'll admit that such an idea is ridiculously utopian, existing only as an approachable but unattainable limit. How heretic these thoughts are! One hundred years ago a learned man would have found them sheer insanity. Only a Lewis Carroll might have appreciated them. But thankfully we do not judge scientific worth by means of ancestral opinion. Only since 1933 when a new science called general semantics was formulated, have we been conscious of the inherent structure of language. It took centuries of abstruse mathematicians, muddled philosophers and curious scientists to uncover the idea. Once discovered and critically examined we find that 99.44% of our ideas must suffer a revision on account of it. This revision has been begun by Alfred Korzybeki in his SCIENCE AND SANITY, the text book of general semantics. No just how am I using this word language? Insofar as general linguistic structure goes, all everyday languages of Western civilization are the same. General semantics is not concerned so much with the difference between French and Hebrew, Spanish or Anglo-Saxon, but their similarities, features which they share among themselves and have in common with culture of the past -- with linguistic structures inherited from primitive man. Then the general semantics use of the term language is very broad. With such a usage, mathematics becomes a language! Do you object to this? Once we remove the vicious idea that disciplines like mathematics and logic represent "eternal truths, independent of man," etc., then there is no ground left for an objection. For example the geometry collected and edited by Euclid circa 550 BC was reduced to a certain set of basic propositions. These half-dozen statements could not be proved, so they remained as purely arbitrary postulates around which the system had been built. But the Greeks considered the postulates to be 'self-evident' and the euclidean geometry to be the geometry. Recently mathematicians challenged the assumptions of the euclidean geometry and produced other geometries based upon new assumptions, contradictory to the old. The non-euclidean systems which resulted turned out to be just as good as the euclidean system in their application to 'the world'. Thus it was seen that geometry is not 'eternal truth' but simply a product of human beings and therefore nothing more than a language. And we all feel perfectly free to change the language which we use to talk about the world, at least if we have had the opportunity of learning a second language. Now it seems that the revolution in general orientations produced by general semantics is parallel to the revolution in geometry. The old system which general semantics rejects as a whole is a group of doctrines which has a 2000 year old history. This group of doctrines is so general that Korzybski, Alfred: Science and Sanity; an introduction to non-aristotelian systems and general semantics. Lancaster, Penn.: Science Press printing co. 2nd ed., c1941 page 7
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A LANGUAGES by Don Bratton "I am not here." --A sentence which is grammatically correct but which can never be said! From Ripley's Believe It or Not. The above quotation struck me a surprising blow when as a child I first read it. At that time I was surprised that such a sentence could exist. There is surely something about the structure of the sentence which makes it incompatible with reality -- incompatible with the world outside my skin. Of course it lies in the use of the word 'here'. In the sentence we have a concise illustration of the fact that language can have a structure all its own, a structure which is independent of the world about which the language talks. Now that I am an older child it becomes a wonder to me that there are not many sentences like the one of Ripley's. If our language has a structure all its own then why not deliberately and carefully shape it so that it becomes impossible to make any statement which is incompatible with the world? What a dream that would be! Yes, I'll admit that such an idea is ridiculously utopian, existing only as an approachable but unattainable limit. How heretic these thoughts are! One hundred years ago a learned man would have found them sheer insanity. Only a Lewis Carroll might have appreciated them. But thankfully we do not judge scientific worth by means of ancestral opinion. Only since 1933 when a new science called general semantics was formulated, have we been conscious of the inherent structure of language. It took centuries of abstruse mathematicians, muddled philosophers and curious scientists to uncover the idea. Once discovered and critically examined we find that 99.44% of our ideas must suffer a revision on account of it. This revision has been begun by Alfred Korzybeki in his SCIENCE AND SANITY, the text book of general semantics. No just how am I using this word language? Insofar as general linguistic structure goes, all everyday languages of Western civilization are the same. General semantics is not concerned so much with the difference between French and Hebrew, Spanish or Anglo-Saxon, but their similarities, features which they share among themselves and have in common with culture of the past -- with linguistic structures inherited from primitive man. Then the general semantics use of the term language is very broad. With such a usage, mathematics becomes a language! Do you object to this? Once we remove the vicious idea that disciplines like mathematics and logic represent "eternal truths, independent of man," etc., then there is no ground left for an objection. For example the geometry collected and edited by Euclid circa 550 BC was reduced to a certain set of basic propositions. These half-dozen statements could not be proved, so they remained as purely arbitrary postulates around which the system had been built. But the Greeks considered the postulates to be 'self-evident' and the euclidean geometry to be the geometry. Recently mathematicians challenged the assumptions of the euclidean geometry and produced other geometries based upon new assumptions, contradictory to the old. The non-euclidean systems which resulted turned out to be just as good as the euclidean system in their application to 'the world'. Thus it was seen that geometry is not 'eternal truth' but simply a product of human beings and therefore nothing more than a language. And we all feel perfectly free to change the language which we use to talk about the world, at least if we have had the opportunity of learning a second language. Now it seems that the revolution in general orientations produced by general semantics is parallel to the revolution in geometry. The old system which general semantics rejects as a whole is a group of doctrines which has a 2000 year old history. This group of doctrines is so general that Korzybski, Alfred: Science and Sanity; an introduction to non-aristotelian systems and general semantics. Lancaster, Penn.: Science Press printing co. 2nd ed., c1941 page 7
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