Comment Permalink

gwern16y120

I tried E-prime when I was younger. I ultimately decided that natural language was deceiving in this respect. Syntactic level restrictions don't buy you much, as they are way too easy to get around, inadvertently break, and are fundamentally a weakening and not a strengthening of the language.

To put it in programming terms, E-prime wasn't much more useful for me than Hungarian notation is for a C programmer. What is useful is a type system which is actually a type system and not an ad-hoc convention or design pattern! It needs to be enforced ('strong') and provide powerful facilities for saying the correct things (something on the level of Hindly-Milner type systems, with all the good things like abstract data types and polymorphism). E-prime fails on both counts.

(Lojban may be better in these respects, but I don't know enough about it.)

See in context

18 E-Prime

by CannibalSmith

8th Apr 2009

1 min read

18

I found this and thought we could find a use for it.

Wikipedia describes E-Prime, short for English-Prime, as a modified form of English. E-Prime uses very slightly simplified syntax and vocabulary, eliminating all forms of the verb to be.

Some people use E-Prime as a mental discipline to filter speech and translate the speech of others. For example, the sentence "the movie was good", translated into E-Prime, could become "I liked the movie". The translation communicates the speaker's subjective experience of the movie rather than the speaker's judgment of the movie. In this example, using E-Prime makes it harder for the writer or reader to confuse a statement of opinion with a statement of fact.

Discuss! In E-Prime!

Philosophy of LanguageRationalist Taboo

Personal Blog

18

Mentioned in

249Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great

49How Much Thought

2How can you find the best information out of all information?

New Comment

20 comments, sorted by

top scoring

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 9:36 AM

[-]gwern16y120

(Lojban may be better in these respects, but I don't know enough about it.)

[-]gjm16y110

The discipline of writing in E-prime splits, I think, into two parts.

The first part, less interesting perhaps, consists of avoiding one particular verb in all its forms. What determines whether a particular proposition requires that verb for its expression? To a great extent, historical happenstance. I can say "...whether a particular proposition requires that verb" but not "... whether that verb IS required to express a particular proposition", for instance. Avoiding that verb resembles (not "IS like") avoiding the letter "e" -- a discipline that might equally reasonably go by the name (not "BE called") E-prime: writers may find that it helps them write better, but largely because such restrictions trigger creative thinking and slow down one's writing.

The second part, not mandated by E-prime as such, consists of avoiding predication: not affirming propositions of the form "P(x)" stating that a particular individual (or every one in some class) has a particular property. It happens that some such statements use the forbidden verb; but not all. If the inventor of E-prime thought he saw a good reason for finding the ones that use it worse than the ones that don't, that reason is not known to me. I think this is the more important aspect of E-prime in its inventor's view, but remain thoroughly unconvinced of its value myself. The main benefit of avoiding predication comes, I think, from having to qualify many statements by saying (for instance) who thinks/feels/experiences a particular thing; but why predication should need such qualification more than other statements puzzles me as much as why predication that uses the forbidden verb should need it more than predication that doesn't.

So it seems to me that whatever benefits writing in E-prime may confer derive not from the central ostensible purpose of E-prime, namely avoiding predication, but from other aspects of it that arise almost by coincidence.

[-]pjeby16y50

IMO, the NLP metamodel (sometimes referred to as the "precision model") is easier to use than E-Prime, and more useful in practice. (Bandler and Grinder were heavily influenced by Bateson and Korzybski in its creation; in some senses, NLP is a more practically-oriented offshoot of General Semantics.)

While there are conceptually more patterns involved in the meta-model than in E-Prime, the patterns themselves contain the questions you need to ask to expose the missing information or challenge the generalizations contained therein. (E.g. "who says? better for what purpose? All? What happens if you do? What happens if you don't? How do you know?") That is, they are explicitly questions for finding out about someone's map, as opposed to the territory they're claiming to point to.

(I also found them tremendously valuable in my work as a computer programmer/management consultant/tech manager long before I used them in the self-help field. They're a great way to separate people's actual requirements from the designs and specs they try to give you instead.)

Of course, the NLP founders themselves pointed out that when they first taught people the metamodel questions, people were prone to "meta-meddling" and creating a "meta muddle" by overusing them on friends and family members, rather than pointing them at themselves or at clients. So, use wisely, and as the NLP guys would say "apply to self first". ;-)

[-]Paul Crowley16y10

Top tip: use backslashes to escape brackets in links, like this [something](http://foo.com/link_\\\(brackets\\\)\)

EDIT: figured out how to stop hyperlinking by reading Vladimir_Nesov's comment below. The trick is not to escape the first open parenthesis!

[-]Vladimir_Nesov16y00

If you write in the editor

\[something\](http://example.com/link_\\\\\\\(brackets\\\\\\\))

then it'll render as

[something](http://example.com/link_\\\(brackets\\\))

which is what you'd need to write in the editor to get

something)

[-]Paul Crowley16y00

That's what I wrote, except that I escaped the first parenthesis; not doing that suppresses the hyperlinking. Thanks!

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky16y40

Does E-Prime allow "might be useful" or do you need to say "thought you could use this"?

[-]CannibalSmith16y20

Part of me knew somebody would call me out on that and screamed at me as I clicked the submit button. I should've listened. I've edited the article to conform to E-Prime.

[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley16y10

If it's allowed, it certainly violates the spirit of E-Prime. As I understand it, part of the point is to attach such statements to an actor. Why might something be useful? Who or what makes it useful? Maybe the correct statement in E-Prime would be "I thought you might make good use of this".

[-]Cyan16y30

If we allow it, it certainly violates the spirit of E-Prime. As I understand it, E-prime forces one to attach such statements to an actor. Why might something be useful? Who or what makes it useful? I think you would express the statement in correct E-Prime as "I thought you might make good use of this".

[-]PhilGoetz16y30

E' isn't really about avoiding the verb "be". For example, IMHO E' could allow the passive. (I don't like the passive for other reasons.) It could allow us to say "The purpose of E' is X", because that's equivalent to "E' accomplishes X". Any usage of "is" that you could restate without "is", and without introducing new data, is fine.

The bad kind of "is" is the "is" that hides data. When someone says "Hot peppers are nasty", they should instead say, "I don't like hot peppers." When someone says "Jimmy is irrational," they should instead say "Jimmy plays the lottery", or present whatever data they're using to infer that "is".

[-]Cyan16y30

Try this experiment: see if the writing at this link seems natural to you. RAW got by without "to be"; can you?

ETA: RAW on E-prime.

[-]rosyatrandom16y30

Try talking in E-Prime without the use of personal pronouns, if you want to try for Really Damned Unassuming!

[-]thomblake16y00

The supposed distinction between fact and opinion is pernicious. I think that those who take this distinction seriously are really thinking of a distinction between matters of taste, as opposed to things that are not merely matters of taste.

I don't think we'd usually confuse a statement about a matter of taste for one of a different sort. For example, when I say "Sushi is yummy", it's completely clear that I'm making a statement about a matter of taste; someone else responding "Sushi is yucky" is not expected to provide a refutation of my claim, as they're claims about different facts.

If there's a distinction to be drawn between facts and opinions, it's that facts are the referents of opinions. My opinion, "The world is round" (if it is true) refers to the fact that the world is round. My opinion, "Sushi is yummy" (if it is true) refers to the fact that sushi is yummy (to me, since this is clearly a matter of taste).

Stating things that are opinions as though they are from some neutral perspective does not make them any less opinions, and all propositional beliefs are opinions.