Expert: Laurie Hamilton - 6/23/2009

Question
QUESTION: Dear Laurie,

Thank you for being available to answer questions about Scientology. My question is this:

I was looking through L Ron Hubbard's book, Dianetics," and on the very first page I found this: "The only reason a person gives up a study ... is because he or she has gone past a word which was not understood [up to here it's in italics] ... Every subject you have taken up and abandoned had its words which you failed to get defined."

It could be that I'm missing something -- but to me this seems so obviously false that I'm surprised he would put it in his book. There are an enormous number of reasons a person gives up a course of study. You become ill. You get an offer of a really good job. You move to another city. You realize that you just don't want to pursue that course of study. You become addicted to drugs. You join the Peace Corps and get sent to Malawi. I'm sure you can think of others.

Could I get your thoughts on this?

Thank you, David

ANSWER: The key words here are "give up."  As in "I just can't do it.  I give up."

Being interrupted or discovering that the study leads in a direction which is not useful to one's life is not giving up.

The tacit assumptions made in the statement are that a study is valid, contains useful and applicable information, and that its materials are capable of being understood.  Even in the case of materials which cannot be understood, there is always the theoretical possibility that somewhere there ARE materials on the study which can be understood - Which, given that for nearly all conceivable studies, there is SOMEONE who is practicing in that field, would seem to be the case.  If no understandable materials were in existence - even if the materials consist of oral tradition - then no one would ever learn or practice the field.

Then, of course, there are a few false studies - ones which no one is actually practicing because all of their data and premises are false, or the product of the field of endeavor is actually non-existent.  Sorcerer perhaps, or psychiatrist.

The catch-22 is that one can be fooled into believing that a study is without worth BECAUSE they failed to understand critical words in their study of it.

But if a study has actual worth to one, and one could have benefited had they completed it, then they abandoned it or "gave it up," having surrendered to their inability to understand it, because of words.

Here's the deal.  If you are sane, and if you want or need what the study has to offer, and if you were capable of absorbing its information, then you would.  If you cannot absorb the information, which it couched in language, then what is that language you could not absorb made of?  Words.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thanks, Laurie. For what it's worth: Google's dictionary has 11 entries for the term "give up." The third one is: "Drop out: give up in the face of defeat of lacking hope; admit defeat," which is how you are defining the term. But the fourth one is, "discontinue; put an end to a state or activity," which is how I construed it in my question. [Interestingly, as a noun -- ie, "a give-up" -- it's a technical term used by stockbrokers.]

I don't know if these definitions are listed in order of acceptability, or frequency of usage, or anything else. But in any case it seems to me that, regardless of which of our definitions he is using, here Mr Hubbard is using a term which clearly will be misunderstood by large numbers of people. Which doesn't seem to fit in with his stated principle of clearly understanding the meaning of all the words you read.

Thanks, Laurie. Your intelligence and knowledge make it a pleasure to correspond with you.

David

Answer
You're welcome.  And thank YOU!

Almost every word or phrase has multiple meanings.  It is incumbent upon a reader to divine which meaning is appropriate to the context - as I did here.  Obviously, writing would lose all character, style and potentially the ability to communicate if there were a rule that the "best" way to write were to pick words by assuming only the first-listed definition in Webster's was acceptable or "optimum" usage.

We start from the assumption that the author has something to say, that usually it is something will make sense, and that, if we fully understand the words, we will almost inevitably be able to get that sense from the writing.

You ought to read legal briefs and contracts sometime.  The effort that goes into making sure these documents CANNOT be misconstrued makes them borderline impossible to read.  Go figure.