Zero Person Singular

October 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie

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.

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Empty the World into Yourself

July 3rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

The work of Korzybski on General Semantics is one source for the linguistic/psychological exercise referred to as ‘e-prime’. In e-prime one adopts a way of speaking in which the verb ‘to be’ is consciously suppressed, forcing one to use circumlocutions in order to express ideas and share observations which would otherwise use that verb. From personal experience, I can say that the long term adopting of this way of speaking does undoubtedly have an effect on thought and ultimately on worldview.

A possible interpretation of the reasons for the effectiveness of this strategy in offering alternative ways of being is that it contributes toward a breakdown of the habitual dualism which characterises modern thought and individual philosophy. Our routine existence is dominated by a sense, largely unspoken, that experience is divided into two parts, the object of that experience, which is detached, external and ‘over there’, and the subject of that experience,which is personal, hidden, and ‘inside’. This duality is often spoken of in terms of ’self’ and ‘other’, and is probably formed at a very early age. As Paul Bloom notes in ‘Descartes Baby’, we may all be ‘natural born dualists‘.

An aspect of the natural dualism which is so familiar to us is that, both conceptually and linguistically, we talk about the world in two different ways, one which is grounded in objective properties, and one which is grounded in subjective perceptions. When we are striving for a sense of objectivity we talk about the objects of the world in terms of the properties they possess independent of our perceptions. So for example we might say that the leaves of this tree are green, suggesting that there are some objects in the world, call them leaves, existing independently of ourselves, and these objects possess a property which we can identify as greenness. Alternatively, if we are not trying to achieve this objectivity we might say instead that the leaves on the tree appear green to me. This subtle difference relocates the property of greenness back where it belongs, inside the body of the perceiver. This relocation has been effected by the suppression of the verb ‘to be’ which is present in the first sentence but absent in the second. Being is transformed in ’seeming’.

The wholesale use of this technique eventually deprivileges the conceptual framework supporting dualism in favour of a monist understanding in which all experience, ‘external’ and ‘internal’, ‘over there’ and ‘in here’, is suffused with a single sense of active awareness.

This sense of awareness grounded in perception rather than in a putative set of objective properties also has implications for the self-perception of conscious awareness. When applied to an understanding of self one is obliged to interpret self-awareness not as an experience of human being but of human seeming.

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