Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition

KevinGrant_duplicate0.2409764628391713

I'm working on a conlang (constructed language) and would like some input from the Less Wrong community. One of the goals is to investigate the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding language affecting cognition. Does anyone here have any ideas regarding linguistic mechanisms that would encourage more rational thinking, apart from those that are present in the oft-discussed conlangs e-prime, loglan, and its offshoot lojban? Or perhaps mechanisms that are used in one of those conlangs, but might be buried too deeply for a person such as myself, who only has superficial knowledge about them, to have recognized? Any input is welcomed, from other conlangs to crazy ideas.

You didn't mention ithkuil, but it basically has the same goal of incorporating every aspect of language that promotes clear thinking. Would look into it to see if it's what you're looking for.

"Another problem of "Liebe Leserinnen und Leser," is that intersex people in the audience aren't included and therefore people who highly value political correctness might object to the phrase and use a phrase that signals more political correctness. "

Thats because words can have multiple meanings, and female and male, is one of them. One of the definitions of male is have Y cromosome, and the definition of female is not have Y chromosome.

This is the definition used at this case, and is not exclude ANY human being because they wou... (read more)

1ChristianKl10y

I don't think ithkuil has the goal. Forcing people to be extremly specific doesn't promote clear thinking. A language should allow people to be vague if they want to be vage. I also think you would have problems when you take an abstract of a scientific paper and try to translate it into ithkuil.

1KevinGrant_duplicate0.240976462839171310y

I looked at the Wikipedia page for Ithkuil. It doesn't seem to be geared towards preventing cognitive errors, so much as packing as much information as possible into as few phonemes as possible. For most of them I can't see the point. In English I can say "Trees are green." in a few simple words. From the sound of it, in Ithkuil I'd have to pack in so much information about the trees that it would take me an hour to figure out how to write the sentence. Is the set of trees spatially contiguous, in a specific but unnamed forest? Or is this the set of all trees on earth, being denoted as members of an abstractly defined set? And how do I feel about the matter? Also, the creator packed the phoneme set so tightly that I can't see how he's going to avoid a high rate of transmission errors. There comes a point where you've got so many vowel sounds that individual sounds are so close together in phonetic space that you can't reliably distinguish between them. So far I've been going in the opposite direction. Rather than including multiple layers of meaning in each word by complicating the sounds and grammar, I've been planning to restrict meaning to one meaning per word, with each additional bit of information requiring more text to transmit, and no restrictions on what the user can leave out because it's irrelevant. It looks to me like Ithkuil goes in the opposite direction. Which isn't to say that there isn't some interesting material there. The creator seems to have broken down his informational overlays into unusual categories, such as "configuration", "affiliation", "perspective", and so forth. It would be interesting to read about why he selected the categories that he did. So there might be some interesting stuff there to borrow. But it seems that he gave up too much in the way of usability. What good is a language that decreases the frequency of common cognitive errors, if the only people who can use it are already so smart that they rarely make such errors?

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Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition

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Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition

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