Thread by @EveKeneinan

Are you, though?

The rational for e-prime, that you cannot make IS statements, is couched in IS statements. "You ARE declaring ... etc.

"You must not use IS-statements."
"Why not?"
"On the basis of some IS-statements I make."

https://twitter.com/owenbroadcast/status/1494862076216553477

Besides, when I say "That painting is good," I don't mean to say anything about my subjective experience of the painting.

I can, for personal reasons, DISLIKE some good things.

I am perfectly capable, as is everyone, of distinguishing an objective quality judgment from a subjective taste judgment.

E.g. you can judge a member of a sex to which you are not attracted to be sexually attractive (objectively).

War and Peace is one of the greatest novels ever written, objectively, and I hated nearly every page of it.

In fact, I probably have extra resentment at War and Peace for my incapacity to like it, which likely shows something wrong with me.

Charles van Doren taught a great books seminar at Columbia. He never gave tests of any sort; he hated those. He just gave everyone As and called it a day. Eventually, Columbia make it clear he had to give *some sort* of test, if only a final.

van Doren's final exam consisted of two questions:

1 What work that we read this semester did you like least?

2 What deficiency of your soul does this reveal?

And we are all perfectly capable of LIKING things that are not particularly GOOD.

Think of many of the cheap novels or tv shows we consume. Or meals.

It is true that not everyone PRACTICES making the distinction in their judgments between a subjective taste judgment and an objective quality judgment, but they can — and understand the distinction when it is brought to their attention.

If one is really serious in the belief that a tendency to make objective statements when subjective ones are better is a problem, one would inculcate the virtues of (1) vigilence toward the problem/bad habit, and (2) self-control of one's own speech/discourse.

Attempting to jury-ring language to 'automatically' eliminate the problem (by eliminating a vast amount of good things) is both lazy and destructive.

I guarantee that any language that allegedly excludes IS-statements simply hides them with metonymy.

And of course that makes it worse, since an IS-statement metonymically concealed is not only the same problem we started with, but also one that's more intractable because of the hiddenness.

And of course, one cannot say to the other "You are just making IS-statements behind a cloak of metonymy!" because that's an IS-statement, and is (hence) forbidden.

It is hard to see on the face of it how

1 "I feel you are doing X."
2 "I feel I'm not."

is an advance over

3 "You're doing X."
4 "No, I'm not."

1 and 2 can both be true, but just for that reason, there's no possible way to move forward to resolve them.

With

"S is P" vs "S is not P", one of us is right and the other wrong. Conflict may in some circumstances be uncomfortable, but implicit in it is the possibility of moving forward.

With

"I feel that S is P" vs "I feel that S is not P", we're both right. And paralyzed.

Finally, I note that being and truth are both transcendentals (as are unity and goodness).

That is, they are interconvertible. Something is TRUE because it IS SO.

Removing being from language also removes truth.

It's a bad idea.