"A judgment ("He is a fine boy," "It was a beautiful service," "Baseball is a healthful sport," "She is an awful bore") is a conclusion, summing up a large number of previously observed facts. The reader is probably familiar with the fact that students almost always have difficulty in writing themes of the required length because their ideas give out after a paragraph or two. The reason for this is that those early paragraphs contain so many judgments that there is little left to be said. When the conclusions are carefully excluded, however, and observed facts are given instead, there is never any trouble about the length of papers; in fact, they tend to become too long, since inexperienced writers, when told to give facts, often give far more than are necessary, because they lack discrimination between the important and the trivial. (p.46)"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Language_in_Thought_and_Action
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Language in Thought and Action
Language in Thought and Action is a book on semantics by Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, based on his previous work Language in Action published in 1939. Early editions were written in consultation with different people. The current 5th edition was published in 1991.
44 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Language in Thought and Action →
Related Quotes
"My deepest debt in this book is to the General Semantics ('non-Aristotelian system') of Alfred Korzybski. I have also…"
"Insight into human symbolic behavior and into human interaction through symbolic mechanisms comes from all sorts of d…"
"People who like to think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and bu…"
"Indeed, most of the time when we are listening to the noises people make or looking at the black marks on paper that …"
"A human being, then, is never dependent on his own experience alone for his information. Even in a primitive culture …"
"Language, that is to say, is the indispensable mechanism of human life -- of life such as ours that is molded, guided…"
"To be able to read and write, therefore, is to learn to profit by and take part in the greatest of human achievements…"
"We live in a highly competitive society, each of us trying to outdo the other in wealth, in popularity or social pres…"
"What such a philosophy overlooks is that, despite all the competition at the surface, there is a huge substratum of c…"
"The original version of this book, Language in Action, published in 1941, was in many respects a response to the dang…"