Zero Person Singular

October 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Elephant, Korzybski, Alfred, Language, Objectivity, Phenomenology, Science |

First and third person accounts are the dominant positions of phenomenological and physical enquiry; phenomenology uses the 1st person ‘I’, objective science uses the 3rd person ‘he’, ’she’, or ‘it’. Science usually uses the passive mode, such as when we say that ‘this measurement was made’, or ‘this experiment was carried out’, the 3rd person making the measurement or carrying out the experiment is implied rather than overtly stated or named.

An ongoing problem in areas of study which draw on the techniques of both phenomenological and physical enquiry, consciousness research for example, is resolving these 1st and 3rd person accounts into one single coherent account, taken from a single viewpoint. To rational science the 1st person is invalid, to phenomenology the 3rd person is irrelevant.

A possible means for establishing a hiatus in this problem is by developing a mode of discourse which is neither 1st nor 3rd person, and one possible candidate for such a discourse would be an enhanced version of the way of speaking known as e-prime, which draws on Korzybski’s General Semantics. In standard e-prime the verb ‘to be’ is suppressed, such that any statement which claims an objective physical fact by saying that some object is some property (such as ‘that elephant is grey), is disallowed, and must be re-articulated to include the viewing position (so that the sentence above becomes ‘that elephant appears grey to me’, or more pedantically ‘the side of the elephant facing me appears grey to me’). Clearly, standard e-prime favours a 1st person account, countering the implied 3rd person objectivity of the is statement. An enhanced version of e-prime would also eliminate this 1st person in favour of a zero person singular account, in which no reference is made, overtly or covertly, to any viewer whatever.