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Nonsense
The little man who wasn't there.

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Nonsense

Banno
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Posted 08/19/09 - 01:43 PM:	#51
We must also at least mention Lear: "The Dong! - THe Dong! The wandering Dong through the forest goes! The Dong! -The Dong! The Dong with he luminous nose!
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

Banno
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Posted 08/19/09 - 01:56 PM:	#52
Taking my lead from BrainPharte, one can provide a most enlightening interpretation: the Dong, of course, must be Kant, shining the light of reason in the forest of experience. But of course, only so far, beyond which is the Dong an sich.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

brainpharte
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Posted 08/19/09 - 04:49 PM:	#53
Banno wrote: JamesBrenton wrote: I know the answer precisely. I must express my gratitude to the mods for banning someone who knows the answer. How boring a place this would be if we were to allow such things to be posted! wink Close one. Banno wrote: Taking my lead from BrainPharte, one can provide a most enlightening interpretation: the Dong, of course, must be Kant, shining the light of reason in the forest of experience. But of course, only so far, beyond which is the Dong an sich. Anachronism.
"I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't. But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened to it along the way."

Schlitz
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Posted 08/20/09 - 02:17 PM:	#54
I think this is true of nonsense, if anything is: Nonsense fails to be semantically evaluable. One way to read this is to say that nonsense can be neither true nor false; however, this is tendentious (it takes the concept of truth to be the foundation of semantics) and rather unenlightening. Here's what I mean- OK, so nonsense isn't semantically evaluable, but the more interesting story is about why this is so. In order to tell this story, I need to invoke semantic theory. So I will. There's one point of semantic theory that I think is undeniable in the face of everyday practice, although it does not apply generally, and that's the principle of compositionality, which (roughly) says that the meaning of a sentence is some kind of function (which kind varies by semantic theory, I suppose) of the meanings of words that compose the sentence. I think this statement of it is dangerously misleading, however, because I buy Frege's arguments that the meaning of a word can only be given by considering the meanings of sentences that include it, but anyway, the point is that by analyzing some alleged sentences according to the principle of compositionality, a person can discover that what looks like a sentence isn't one after all. A good example is Chomsky's example of grammatical nonsense- "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." However, I'm somewhat motivated to call this sentence necessarily false, because there can never be an idea that manages to sleep. Another kind of nonsense is the Heidegger Carnap famously quotes. This kind of nonsense's sin is, by my rusty reading of Carnap, to violate an idealized syntax that, if followed, cannot generate a semantically evaluable sentence. But this answer still fails to inform semantic theory. A Davidsonian approach to nonsense, I conjecture, would be to claim that a sentence of L is nonsense just in case there is no corresponding T-sentence in the T-Theory for L. Assuming an extensionally adequate T-theory and one that will not generate the wrong kinds of true T-sentences, such as '"Snow is white" is true iff grass is green', (and I should say that I have no idea how to construct such a T-theory, or even that the construction of such a T-theory is possible at all), it would be a simple matter to distinguish nonsense from sense: given that a T-theory is a mapping of well-formed-formulas of a language to truth-conditions, and that the nonsense of interest is a well-formed-formula (that is, syntactically correct) that generates a T-sentence that isn't part of the T-theory, when properly inserted into convention T. There is still the question of how to distinguish legitimate T-sentences from imposter T-sentences. I don't know how to answer this one. Still, the Davidsonian approach has the same strategy as Carnap's, but the advantage of not falling victim to the regress Carnap's approach suffers, by admitting as syntactically correct arrangements of words that might not, upon application of the principle of compositionality, turn out to have truth-conditions. This approach also has the the advantage of making the confirmation conditions of a statement knowable a posteriori, which has favorable implications for scientific realism (what confirms "Electricity is flowing through this wire"?) And of course, there is nonsense that goes like this: "!&@^#&@^!^!!!! xvz*&?," but this can be dealt with by being called unsyntactic, and so not a member of the language at hand, and so not a candidate for semantic evaluation in the first place. Edited by Schlitz on 08/26/09 - 07:11 AM

Banno
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Posted 08/22/09 - 09:00 PM:	#55
Schlitz wrote: There is still the question of how to distinguish legitimate T-sentences from imposter T-sentences. I don't know how to answer this one. Presumably one applies the principle of charity, and assumes the sentence is true for some interpretation in L. But this (it appears) has the interesting difficulty that Davidson can never say a sentence is nonsense. This seems to even apply to "!&@^#&@^!^!!!! xvz&?," - on what grounds could we infer that there was no sentence in L* with which this might be matched in a T-sentence? Davidson seems unable to rid the world of nonsense. Nice.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

ragus
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Posted 08/22/09 - 11:44 PM:	#56
Schlitz wrote There's one point of semantic theory that I think is undeniable in the face of everyday practice, although it does not apply generally, and that's the principle of compositionality, which (roughly) says that the meaning of a sentence is some kind of function (which kind varies by semantic theory, I suppose) of the meanings of words that compose the sentence. I think this statement of it is dangerously misleading, however, because I buy Frege's arguments that the meaning of a word can only be given by considering the meanings of sentences that include it, but anyway, the point is that by analyzing some alleged sentences according to the principle of compositionality, a person can discover that what looks like a sentence isn't one after all. A good example is Chomsky's example of grammatical nonsense- "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." However, I'm somewhat motivated to call this sentence necessarily false, because there can never be an idea that manages to sleep. So some folk think that the meaning of any sentence is dependent on the meaning of its words and others think the meaning of words depend on the meaning of sentences. Do you agree? Chomsky's sentence I think is syntactically (grammatically) correct but semantically nonsense. Am I using grammar in a different way from you?
"A word in your ear is like an untethered goat in a field" Wittigenstein

brainpharte
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Posted 08/23/09 - 09:43 AM:	#57
Meaning is an experience. It is constructed in minds. We use mutually agreed upon language expressions and rules to refer to our experiences, concepts, feelings, internal states, etc. But just because we use language doesn't imply that the meaning is in the language. The originator of a sentence is typically using that language to express his sensory experiences or emotions or conceptualizations or judgments or will etc. And the hearer/reader is constructing meaning in his own head from his own understanding ot the referents of that language. If the reader/listener has no referents for the words or larger constructions of a given sentence, then he can construct no experience of meaning from that sentence, he can make no sense of it. And no sense is nonsense. The sense or lack of sense is in the person, not in the sentence itself. When a lot of people cannot make sense out of a given sentence, then they agree that that sentence is nonsense, but this judgment is a function of individual minds’ inability to process that particular sentence in such a way that they can construct meaning from it,
"I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't. But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened to it along the way."

Maxvilly
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Posted 08/24/09 - 08:53 AM:	#58
You took the words out of my mind. Well said brainpharte
I had details here, ones.

Cadrache
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Posted 08/24/09 - 10:57 AM:	#59
And if we threw semantics in the mix? One might be able to claim that semantic could be the tool for first person experience. The quote text by Shelley then possibly derives no meaning from neither postpriori nor what is contained within the words in the last few posts. (I don't think, at least.) So instead of Shelley's being nonsensical you end up with: 1. Direct action of the writer of the tablet is the direct cause of the percieved loss of everything. 2. Not acting but observation itself created this change. 3. Was the man of high standing? Or some 'low-life' of society? 4. Is the person you met the one who wrote? The first poem -about being a man- derives semantically a dualistic application of being a man through action and being called a man by naming.
"...There was a writer who asked why it was that when we find positive experiences we say that only the physical facts are real, but in negative experiences we believe that reality is subjective. He made an example of those who say that in birth only the pain is real, the joy a subjective point of view, but that in death it is the emotional loss that is the reality." - Tony Ballantyne, Recursion. _____________________________________________ Truth is want. - The internal state of matters. Truth is Need. - The external state of affairs.

Cadrache
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Posted 08/24/09 - 11:01 AM:	#60
As well, in the case of shelley: Who you are now - be you the listener in the poem, the reader, the writer has further insights dependant on which 'present' you want to examine it in. If instead of a penniless wanderer, you chatted with a rich merchant.. an entirely different set of semantic logic. (if semantics can claim logic.)
"...There was a writer who asked why it was that when we find positive experiences we say that only the physical facts are real, but in negative experiences we believe that reality is subjective. He made an example of those who say that in birth only the pain is real, the joy a subjective point of view, but that in death it is the emotional loss that is the reality." - Tony Ballantyne, Recursion. _____________________________________________ Truth is want. - The internal state of matters. Truth is Need. - The external state of affairs.

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