Sam Gentle.com

Non-binary

Long ago I learned about the idea of gradable and ungradable adjectives or, as I thought of them, non-binary and binary adjectives. The difference being that you can be very hot, very scared or very tall, but you can't be very unique, very pregnant or very amazing. The latter class is binary: it's either true or false. I think with superlatives (very fantastic, very amazing, very awesome) it's reasonable to discourage their use. After all, "very" is an intensifier, and if you already have the most intense form of a word, intensifying it more isn't really necessary.

However, cases like "very pregnant" are interesting, because they bespeak a certain confusion about the way we analyse language vs the way language is constructed. While it's true you can construct a formal grammar in which certain properties are binary and certain properties aren't, I don't believe that is actually reflective of our thoughts or our speech. "Pregnant", like "German", "boiling", or "fatal", is a cluster of concepts that we associate together. Much like nouns, which in theory refer to a single thing, but whose basis is really a fuzzy cloud in concept-space. You can easily reveal the nature of that cloud by turning the noun into an adjective: what is the most "chairy" chair you can think of? What is the least chairy?

I explained this idea to a friend and asked whether there was anything you couldn't do this trick with; that you couldn't make non-binary if you tried hard enough. The response was obvious, in retrospect: mathematics. Can x be "very equal" to 3? Obviously not. And in a sense that's the point. Our formal systems are designed to have these strange rigid properties that are alien to us.

Perhaps, if things were different and we were beings of pure binary logic, we might find ourselves inventing systems for fuzzy reasoning instead.