Language:
E-Prime and Semantics
Constructivist and Buddhist approaches emphasize the key role that language plays in creating and maintaining our sense of truth and reality. When we study language carefully we will see that words themselves have no inherent meaning. The meaning of language depends on the cultural and personal contexts in which we use it. However, with common agreed-upon usage we have the tendency to reify our language and to believe that words reflect a reality that exists independently of our human construction. In other words, we project our interpretations of events on to the events themselves, and we come to believe that the words that we use reflect qualities of the events rather than qualities of our language and its cultural and personal context. Awareness of this tendency, and freedom from its negative effects, requires that we develop greater consciousness of our use of language.
I believe that we can benefit from taking responsibility for our personal experience and for the personally and socially constructed nature of the words that we use to describe the world. One thrust of my research and scholarship addresses this issue, primarily by showing how the use of E-prime, a technique from General Semantics that excludes all forms of the verb “to be” from English, can assist us in this process. Although such a practice may sound strange, it helps us take responsibility for our interpretations of events and communicate our experience more clearly. My scholarship demonstrates how E-prime, along with other methods for facilitating awareness of how we use language, can help to address some of the concerns and problems that PCP and Zen have identified.
You might observe, by the way, that I have used E-prime throughout this web site.