 he
most powerful defense against what Stuart Chase called
the “tyranny of words,” and the bondage to others that inevitably follows,
is the mental process that Dr. Percy W. Bridgman described and advocated
in his book The Logic of Modern Physics. It's called operational
thinking.
When one thinks operationally, he or she focuses on the process underlying
a word or a word-string, rather than on the words themselves.
As Dr. Bridgman put it, “The true meaning of a term is to be found by
observing what a man does with it, not what he says about it.” In other
words, don't tell me what a word means; explain to me how it works.
Take the words “political correctness” and “censorship,” for example.
According to Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition,
“political correctness” means conformance to a belief that languages and
practices which could offend political sensibilities, as in matters of
sex or race, should be eliminated. While “censorship” means the institution,
system, or practice of examining in order to suppress or delete anything
considered objectionable.
Clearly, then, the processes underlying the terms “political correctness”
and “censorship" are the same — telling people what they may not say. Ergo,
the terms “political correctness” and “censorship,” stripped of all emotional
content and convoluted reasoning, both have the same meaning.
And that's just one instance of many of how people control you just
with words. Metaphorically speaking, they take two identical objects and
camouflage their sameness by putting each in a different-sized package,
suitably padded within. Unless you closely examine the boxed objects themselves,
you could easily infer that they are of a different size and, perhaps,
even of a different shape. But if you do examine them, you realize that
they are sisters under the skin, after all.
Think about it. |
