Toys! Shiny!

[featherynscale]

An e-prime assistant. This nifty little script checks text for forms of "to be", in order that a writer might eliminate them.

Also, Mentat Wiki, yet more resources for using your brain in a meaningful and coherent fashion. I want to be a Mentat when I grow up. Also, I feel a new icon coming on. Watch this space.

Comments

It's not so much a linguistic argument as a psychological one.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Korzybski didn't care for them because in his brain, they created or empowered logical fallacies, stereotypes, and pigeonholing.

When you say that someone *did* something, then the thing they did is just a thing they did. They may never have done the thing before in their lives, and may never do it again. If they *are* something, though, that starts to feel like a permanent, unchangeable attribute. For example, compare the meanings: "John lied" vs. "John is a liar".

In Four Levels terms, E-prime forces more attention on Physical Reality and asks us to really examine the things we place in Mythic Reality.

Also, some therapists push E-prime as a tool to help people with depression. People who suffer from depression tend to view their lives in global, static terms, so therapists can often help them by facilitating a change to individualized, dynamic terms. For example, a therapist would encourage someone to say "I made a poor choice, but I can make new choices now and move on" as opposed to "I am a bad decision-maker, and I always choose poorly, and that's just the way it is." When you make it more difficult to say that anything "is just the way it is", you create the potential for re-evaluation and change.

Then, also, E-prime forces you to have a definite subject, which encourages assignment of responsibility, and... (I could go on, but I think LiveJournal has a length limit for comments.)

Re: It's not so much a linguistic argument as a psychological one.

[kcgreenman.livejournal.com]

Wow!

I Like this. I had thought this before but didn't know it had a name. Cool...

Re: It's not so much a linguistic argument as a psychological one.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

The relationship between brain function and language engages me likewhoa. I can go on for hours about this stuff if people let me.

I bet you would enjoy the Four Levels of Reality material. It covers a multi-layered process of evaluating events and the ability to assign certain "facts" about the event to the appropriate source (i.e. internally generated or externally generated facts), so that a person can make a clear decision about "what really happened". We present this stuff at Gaia on a pretty regular basis.

Going on for hours...

[kcgreenman.livejournal.com]

Cool...

This philosophical stuff starts my engine too...Lets talk sometime. We can have someone hose us down if we go too long....:)

Ok, 4 level stuff sounds interesting too. Whens the next class?

Re: Going on for hours...

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Hose us down?

Usually they just have to tell me I'm pontificating, and on rare occasions, take my glass away. (I find it difficult to pontificate without a glass, regardless of what the glass actually contains.)

As to next 4 levels class, I don't know. I don't think we have one scheduled this year that exclusively focuses on that, but it often creeps in to other classes' material.