By “make its users more aware of their biases” I mean, for example, a language where it’s really obvious when you say something illogical, or have a flaw in your reasoning.
Some ideas I had for this:
Explicitly defined sematic spaces for every word, to dissolve questions and help people agree on the locations of phenomena in thingspace. Mechanisms for searching thingspace (while, for example, you can say “red chair” to narrow the space of all chairs down to the space of all chairs which reflect red light, it would be nice to be able to express things like “thing such that there is no meaningful answer to the question ‘is it a chair’ ”
A fourth grammatical category which, alongside tense, aspect, and mood, indicates your relationship to the statement. For example, “Apples taste good” would have a relationship of “speaker’s observation-derived opinion”, and “Mars is a planet” would have a relationship of “property of speaker’s consensus-derived world model”. This would make the statement “Socrates is a man” feel more like “My brain perceptually classifies Socrates as a match against the ‘human’ concept”
Distinctions between “logically true” (true in all possible worlds, i.e. 1+1=2), “Occam’s-razor true” (~100% chance of being true in all minus a negligible amount of the worlds that could be ours, i.e. there is no God), and “empirically true” (~100% chance of being true in THIS world specifically, i.e. the sky is blue), and “illogically infinitely true” (true in this world but not in all possible worlds. This is impossible IRL and would only be used in thought experiments.)
By “make its users more aware of their biases” I mean, for example, a language where it’s really obvious when you say something illogical, or have a flaw in your reasoning.
Some ideas I had for this:
Explicitly defined sematic spaces for every word, to dissolve questions and help people agree on the locations of phenomena in thingspace. Mechanisms for searching thingspace (while, for example, you can say “red chair” to narrow the space of all chairs down to the space of all chairs which reflect red light, it would be nice to be able to express things like “thing such that there is no meaningful answer to the question ‘is it a chair’ ”
A fourth grammatical category which, alongside tense, aspect, and mood, indicates your relationship to the statement. For example, “Apples taste good” would have a relationship of “speaker’s observation-derived opinion”, and “Mars is a planet” would have a relationship of “property of speaker’s consensus-derived world model”. This would make the statement “Socrates is a man” feel more like “My brain perceptually classifies Socrates as a match against the ‘human’ concept”
Distinctions between “logically true” (true in all possible worlds, i.e. 1+1=2), “Occam’s-razor true” (~100% chance of being true in all minus a negligible amount of the worlds that could be ours, i.e. there is no God), and “empirically true” (~100% chance of being true in THIS world specifically, i.e. the sky is blue), and “illogically infinitely true” (true in this world but not in all possible worlds. This is impossible IRL and would only be used in thought experiments.)