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.
This reminds me of Mr. Rogers' "Freddish," or his specific way of talking to children. One of his principles was this exact point: only phrase things in the positive. Thus, rather than saying, "Don't cross the street by yourself," word it more like, "Ask an adult before crossing the street." There were several other components to Freddish, like emphasizing the benefits of listening to adults and praising the child for their compliance, but "phrasing things in the positive" was the one that stuck the most in my mind, and is the most germane to this discussion.
(I think I've also heard something similar regarding e.g. warning signs, that positive statements like "Stay away from the wires" are more effective than negative statements, like "Don't touch the wires," because your brain basically ignores the negative part of it. "*mumble mumble* touch the wires? Don't mind if I do!")
The wires one immediately sounds very plausible. I think its because "stay away from the wires" gives me a clear instruction I can immediately start following. "Don't touch the wires" instead gets logged away as something I will hopefully remember if I start thinking about the wires again.
There seems to be a body of evidence supporting the idea that positive statements require less cognitive load to process than negative statements. These are a couple of examples I could pull up:
https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000057
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10979-007-9103-y
I remember in a Tali Sharot talk, sorry I can't remember the specific one, where she noted it was easier to get people to press a button at the right time when an incentive is offered than it is to dissuade people from pressing a button with a penalty. Which broadly seems corroborated by Skinnerian "Schedules of Reinforcement" research.
"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.