When reading or hearing a negation used in language, you must first process the positive form it contains to understand the entire statement. For example, to understand "the sky is not green", you must first understand "the sky is green", then negate it. Usually, this happens quickly and subconsciously, but it can harmfully slow down or weaken understanding by making you first consider a false idea.
For these reasons, Absolute-English (henceforth Abs-E), where one only speaks in the positive, should be clearer and more honest than current negation-permitting English. I call it Abs-E by analogy to the absolute-value operation in maths, which replaces both positive and negative with only positive. The simple form of Abs-E forbids the words "no", "not", and "-n't" (as in "won't" or "isn't"). The strict form of Abs-E, which may be more effective, forbids all of the following:
"no"
"not"
"cannot"
"-n't"
"im-", "in-", "non-", "un-", and "-less" where negating adjectives, as in "immortal", "indigestible", "nonsensical", "unfit", and "wireless". Some other adjectives, like "imminent" and "informative", are positive root words on their own.
empty quantifiers/negative correlative (as "nothing" or "nowhere")
The proposal is loosely inspired by the existing E-Prime, which forbids "to be" and all its inflections for its own, different reasons. You could combine the restrictions to make Abs-E-Prime, replacing "the sky is not green" with "the sky appears blue", but I only care about positivity.
Under Abs-E, binary questions ("yes"-or-"no") are less obvious to answer. If your answer would ordinarily be "no", you must instead reply as if the question was open-ended. For example, your reply to "will you be here tomorrow?" may be "yes", or "I will be in the office tomorrow", or "I will stay home tomorrow". This forces you to speak with more information. On average, that makes conversation more fun and lying harder. If your interlocutor knows about Abs-E, they can make questions and answers play out more naturally by replacing all binary questions with open-ended questions, such as "where will you be tomorrow?" in place of "will you be here tomorrow?".
I am serious about following strict Abs-E, at least for some trial time to see its effects. If, in my speech or writing, you find me using a negative form, you are welcome to call it out for me to correct.
Pedantically, there are an equal number of true and false statements (both infinite). Given any one maximum length of statements, there are only finitely many true statements and many more (still finite) false statements.
I see a problem with this approach when the speaker does not know the answer to the question:
Under Abs-E, binary questions ("yes"-or-"no") are less obvious to answer. If your answer would ordinarily be "no", you must instead reply as if the question was open-ended. For example, your reply to "will you be here tomorrow?" may be "yes", or "I will be in the office tomorrow", or "I will stay home tomorrow". This forces you to speak with more information.
How do you respond when you don't know what you will be doing tomorrow? This could be a case where you haven't made up your mind yet (in which case "I will decide on that later" is a valid answer), or it could be because you genuinely don't have the information and have no way to find it. "What will the closing price of Apple be at the end of the year?" is difficult to answer as far as I can tell, especially if the person asking the question thinks you should know the answer. "You will have to wait for the end of the year before you can know that" doesn't convey the same information as "Short of stock manipulation, nobody can know the answer to that until the time comes." The first one could mean that I know the answer but choose not to tell you, while the second one conveys the more reasonable claim that the question cannot be answered in advance.
So, I think this is an interesting thought experiment, but I suspect that the amount of time spent mentally rewording everything before you speak will outweigh any positive value.
You almost always have some information to concentrate your priors. Between mutually-helpful speakers, implicit with an answer to a question is that the answer gives all the information you have on the question that could benefit the questioner. E.g.
What will the closing price of Apple be at the end of the year?
"Almost certainly somewhere between $150 and $250."
"Positive" and "negative", as used here, refer to truth-values and logical structure, rather than emotional valence.
On almost any topic, there are many potential false statements, and comparatively very few[1] true statements. Thus a simple true statement (like "the sky is blue") is usually much more informative than the negation of a similar false statement (like "the sky is not green").
When reading or hearing a negation used in language, you must first process the positive form it contains to understand the entire statement. For example, to understand "the sky is not green", you must first understand "the sky is green", then negate it. Usually, this happens quickly and subconsciously, but it can harmfully slow down or weaken understanding by making you first consider a false idea.
For these reasons, Absolute-English (henceforth Abs-E), where one only speaks in the positive, should be clearer and more honest than current negation-permitting English. I call it Abs-E by analogy to the absolute-value operation in maths, which replaces both positive and negative with only positive. The simple form of Abs-E forbids the words "no", "not", and "-n't" (as in "won't" or "isn't"). The strict form of Abs-E, which may be more effective, forbids all of the following:
The proposal is loosely inspired by the existing E-Prime, which forbids "to be" and all its inflections for its own, different reasons. You could combine the restrictions to make Abs-E-Prime, replacing "the sky is not green" with "the sky appears blue", but I only care about positivity.
Under Abs-E, binary questions ("yes"-or-"no") are less obvious to answer. If your answer would ordinarily be "no", you must instead reply as if the question was open-ended. For example, your reply to "will you be here tomorrow?" may be "yes", or "I will be in the office tomorrow", or "I will stay home tomorrow". This forces you to speak with more information. On average, that makes conversation more fun and lying harder. If your interlocutor knows about Abs-E, they can make questions and answers play out more naturally by replacing all binary questions with open-ended questions, such as "where will you be tomorrow?" in place of "will you be here tomorrow?".
I am serious about following strict Abs-E, at least for some trial time to see its effects. If, in my speech or writing, you find me using a negative form, you are welcome to call it out for me to correct.
Pedantically, there are an equal number of true and false statements (both infinite). Given any one maximum length of statements, there are only finitely many true statements and many more (still finite) false statements.