Back in the Golden Age of Science Fiction seventy-something years ago there was a novel everyone read, title The World of Null-A. It was about a future planet Earth that had moved on from simple Aristotelean logic to something more subtle. So the "A" there stood for Aristotle. The author, A. E. Van Vogt, was actually promoting a trendy philosophical system called General Semantics. This was one of those pseudoscientific fads that were popular in the mid-20th century, like William Sheldon's body-typing, Wilhelm Reich's theory of orgone energy, Immanuel Velikovsky's colliding planets, or J.B. ...