THE NEED FOR A NEW
LANGUAGE,
ESPECIALLY WITHIN
SCIENCE
C. A. Hilgartner
ABSTRACT
I present not just a new 'idea', but rather,
an actuality - a frame of reference new to the human race, and now ready
for us humans to use.
I consider it a notational language - or
at least, as including a notational language - of the "Let's Keep Track
of What We Say" type. Regard it not merely as different in detail from
other notations, but as structured according to previously unheard-of principles.
To flesh out this frame of reference, I
present some details concerning how it developed - how I happened to make
some of the discriminations or distinctions (non-identities) on which its
structure crucially depends. Then I present some of its implications, including
that:
1. It discloses a fundamental theoretical
error encoded in the grammar common to western Indo-European (WIE) discursive
and notational languages - specifically, encoded in the way we distinguish
between 'noun' and 'verb'. In my analysis, every 'noun' comes to look like
a concealed 'is of identity' proposition, which violates the requirement
that we distinguish between Name and Thing Named (Frege) or between Map
and Territory (Korzybski). To express this violation in words, calling
the be-whiskered furry-faced organism by the noun "cat" amounts to asserting
"cat(name) identical with cat(thing)".
2. The act of unconcealing this
hidden assumption, followed by the act of rejecting and replacing it with
the Postulate of Non-identity, brings about the collapse of the WIE grammar,
and with it, the collapse of the linguistic specializations based on it
- the WIE logics, mathematics, sciences, philosophies, jurisprudences,
religions, etc.
3. Before I unconcealed this hidden
assumption, I had found that I could not write a non-WIE notation - I didn't
know HOW (mainly because I kept using two KINDS of terms, analogous to
'nouns' and 'verbs'). After I unconcealed this hidden assumption, I COULD
AND DID write a non-WIE notational language, with no 'nouns' or 'verbs'
(or any other WIE "parts of speech") in it.