4 ms·
So what, for you, distinguishes "opinions" from "facts"? Can you give some examples of opinion-easily-mistaken-for-fact in ordinary English and explain what mak
by gjm11 18y ago
So what, for you, distinguishes "opinions" from "facts"? Can you give some examples of opinion-easily-mistaken-for-fact in ordinary English and explain what makes them harder to express in E-prime than other sentences of ordinary English? (Or, if you think that misses the point, what makes their E-prime equivalents less likely to spring to the mind of someone writing in E-prime?)
People often express aesthetic judgements as factual statements, and perhaps they shouldn't; so let's take some examples and see how they go into E-prime.
"Bach is the greatest composer who ever lived" means much the same as "No other composer wrote such great music as Bach did". That didn't feel at all difficult, and the E-prime version contains just as much opinion, which looks just as much like fact, as the E-notprime version.
"The Mona Lisa is overrated" means much the same as "Most people rate the Mona Lisa's merits more highly than it really deserves". Again, expressing that sentiment in E-prime gives no difficulty, and the E-prime version has the same problems as the E-notprime version while using more words.
Perhaps we should look at politics rather than the arts?
"The Republicans are concerned only to feather their own and their benefactors' nests": this one requires scarcely any change, and I might very easily have happened to express it in E-prime without trying. "The Republicans want to feather their own and their benefactors' nests, and don't care about anything else."
"Barack Obama is a charlatan whose only real skill is persuasive oratory." Well, "is a charlatan" doesn't go easily into E-prime, but one can say "Barack Obama's success in politics results entirely from his persuasive oratory, despite the false impression to the contrary that he is careful to give", and as usual the translation gives little trouble and preserves the undesirable features of the original.
So, I dunno, but it doesn't seem to me as if writing in E-prime makes it easier for opinions to look like facts. Would you care to enlighten me?
Remark: all of the above (apart from examples in quotation marks) is in E-prime, unless I goofed, and by far the most difficult thing to say without the copula was the first sentence of the second paragraph; and in fact "perhaps they shouldn't" (which I would in fact regard as opinion-easily-mistaken-for-fact) was the best I could do to replace things like "arguably aesthetic judgements are matters of opinion rather than fact". This may of course just indicate that I'm not good at writing in E-prime, but I do find it interesting that the main effect of doing so was to introduce an opinion-as-fact problem.
- silentbicycle 18y ago> "The Mona Lisa is overrated" means much the same as "Most people rate the Mona Lisa's merits more highly than it really deserves". The former sentence implies the existence of an essential characteristic of being overrated, while the latter makes an observation, possibly incorrect. I think facts vs. opinions isn't so much the relevant distinction here as things being as they are because of Aristotelian essences vs. happening because of action (in this case, judgement). With the Barack Obama example, the is-ness crept back in with "false impression" ("the impression is false"); rewriting English the whole way down seems excessively cumbersome to me, of course, but I've found doing it as an exercise to helps me recognize when ideas are reified largely due to language quirks.
- gjm11 18y agoI think the dubious assumptions in the two versions of the Mona Lisa one are equivalent; what's implied by "being overrated" is the same as what's implied by "really deserves". If you think "false impression" is bad because "the impression is false" has a copula in it, then congratulations: you just abolished adjectives. "... the red bicycle ..." -> "the bicycle is red". Whatever the problem is here, it isn't is-ness. I completely agree that rewriting what you say in a restricted subset of English (or whatever natural language) has value for seeing what assumptions are slipping in unobserved. It's totally not clear to me that "is"-less English is any better for this purpose than, say, adverb-less English or e-less English; I suspect that most of the gain comes from forcing yourself to write with a strong constraint, which makes you think more. It's not so very different from (one reason) why poetic and musical forms (sonnets, sonata form, haiku, fugue, ...) work well. I wouldn't be surprised if forbidding "is" were a bit better than those, for various reasons. But I suspect that the bulk of the winnage comes from the mere fact of being constrained.
- silentbicycle 18y ago> "... writing with a strong constraint, which makes you think more." I agree. E-Prime was inspired by General Semantics ( see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics , the "Overview" section on that page seems sufficient), though, and had a much more specific motive than just improving writing. While E-Prime can focus too much on just "is", I think it seems like an approachable introduction to the ideas. I also thought they might be of interest here, because there's a neat parallel between them and e.g. thinking about is-a/has-a in OO design, the ways having quote empowers Lisp, etc.