(FB 1548991173 Timestamp)

Bill Joslin

IMO korzybski devised a way to enact an essentially relativistic and nihilists position.

The brilliance of this tool, again IMO , was grounding e-prime into a standard criteria i.e. operationalism. By doing so it closes the door to the relativistic, nihilistic uses.

Further to that, e-prime strongly couples our speech and thought to the operational criteria. But if left at this alone, I think it would suffer the same flaws as logical positivism…

By expanding the criteria into multiple dimensions, we don’t reduce our warrant (speech and thought) to overly restrictive limitations (i.e. cherry picking, erroneous or undue dismissiveness.)

The last component , acknowledging truth as an approximation (as per Curt’s view) prevents us from undue certainty and dogmatically held assertions of “truth”.

So

– E-prime eliminates unfounded assertions

– Operationalism eliminates relativistic nihilistic application

– Expanded operationalism (testimonial criteria) eliminates myopic limitations (undue dismissiveness)

– And provisional truth theories eliminate dogmatic assertions of certainty.

– The first contributor did the light lifting – nothing really

– The second (Bridgeman) cross the major threshold

– Curt and his community (assuming other contributed – Curzon etc) the the heavy lifting