Notes on Nonsense

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Notes on Nonsense

 

We don’t talk about nonsense enough. Let’s show it some respect. Nonsense belongs to language not reality: there are no nonsensical facts or objects or properties; there are only nonsensical words or strings thereof. Reality itself is completely…what? We have no word for the opposite of “nonsensical”—the word “sensical” exists neither in ordinary discourse nor in the OED.[1] I don’t know why this is; it ought to make perfect sense (be sensical). In any case, reality lacks the property of being nonsensical. With respect to language we can distinguish two kinds of nonsense: the grammatical and the ungrammatical. The grammatical kind is exemplified by “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” and “Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”; the ungrammatical kind is produced by flouting the rules of grammar, as in “It up dog random” and “Rainbow the over”. The first thing to notice is that nonsense exists in close proximity to sense: it’s easy to get from sense to nonsense. The same mechanisms that generate sense can generate nonsense: either rules of grammar or simple word concatenation. The grammatical nonsensical strings obey normal grammatical rules and merely juxtapose clashing semantic units, or else employ nonsense words in a grammatical form. The ungrammatical cases simply join perfectly meaningful words that don’t clash with other words. Nonsense doesn’t arise by going completely outside the normal workings of language; it occurs within language. This is why it is wrong to describe nonsense as simply lack of meaning or sense: random squiggles or sounds are meaningless (like bricks and mortar) but they are not instances of nonsense. Nonsense presupposes functioning language. In fact nonsense is a type of meaning not a lack of meaning—the nonsensical type. There is a lot of meaning in the sentences I gave earlier; they are not semantically lifeless. They have, we might say, meaningless meaning—a second-class, degraded kind of meaning (“para-semantic meaning”). What the sentences express is neither true nor false—it is not “propositional”—but it is imbued with meaning of some sort. This makes them puzzling from a theoretical perspective: how do standard theories of meaning apply to them? How, say, do truth conditions theories of meaning apply to grammatical nonsensical sentences, or Gricean theories, or use theories, or verification theories? Here we seem to have a type of meaning that violates all such theories.

            The question becomes sharper when we ask whether nonsense possesses a logic. In the case of ungrammatical nonsense we can rule this out, since logical relations need at least the semblance of statement making; but it is clear enough that grammatical nonsense exhibits logical properties. Such sentences can be conjoined, disjoined, negated, and put into conditionals; and the normal logical rules will apply. For example, conjunction elimination is still valid, or modus ponens. From “All toves are slithy” and “Socrates is a tove” we can infer “Socrates is slithy”: the form of the sentences allow this inference irrespective of the content. But we can’t say that validity here is a matter of truth-preservation, because nonsensical sentences are never true (or false). The meanings (or quasi-meanings) entail one another, yet there is no truth-value to be preserved. We know that if green ideas sleep furiously then they sleep, but it is neither true nor false that green ideas sleep furiously. So is our usual approach to logic too narrow? Do we need a special logic of nonsense? Some have urged the need for a “para-consistent logic”; do we also need a “para-semantic logic”? We need a logic that can handle category mistakes (“The number 2 is cheerful”) and analytic falsehoods (“Janet is a happily married bachelor”); and it looks like we also need a logic that can handle outright nonsense. It is possible to reason with such sentences, so they ought to fall within the scope of logic. But if nonsense has a logic, it must be meaningful.

            Can nonsensical expressions refer? Or better: can speakers refer using nonsensical terms? Can we contrive a Donnellan case in which a speaker picks out an object for an audience even though the term used is pure nonsense? Sure we can: someone may remark at a party, “The slithy tove in the corner is a famous philosopher”, thereby picking out an individual of slippery but dapper appearance (or just a guy known to like the works of Lewis Carroll). The definite description “the square root of Paris” should receive the same semantic analysis as “the Queen of England”: semantically these are expressions of the same general category. The demonstrative “that colorless green idea” functions as a singular term subject to a Kaplan-style analysis despite its nonsensical status. Couldn’t we introduce a proper name “Zippy” by stipulating that it denotes whatever “the square root of Paris” denotes, viz. nothing? True, there are no nonsensical existing entities for such terms to refer to, but language doesn’t know that; it allows us to generate nonsense expressions of all semantic categories. Some of this nonsense may even have a use—a role in a language game—and may even be used to refer to ordinary things, as with that slippery dapper chap in the corner. Nonsense does not preclude acts of reference and other linguistic practices—whole books may be composed of it (Finnegan’s Wake). And nonsense poems are precisely poems.

            Now that we have a feel for the reality of nonsense (if I may put it so) we can pose some more adventurous questions. Could there be an ideal language that precluded the possibility of nonsense? It is hard to see how there could be: language allows for unlimited grammatical (and ungrammatical) combinations—that is part of its inherent creativity—and this will always permit the possibility of nonsensical combinations. Hence the proximity of sense and nonsense in the mechanisms of language production; the same thing is capable of producing both. Nonsense is as embedded in language (as a formal apparatus) as sense is. We don’t have much use for nonsense most of the time, but it is always latent in the linguistic system: “colorless green ideas” is as much part of language as “bright red flowers”. The notion of a logically perfect language incapable of producing nonsensical monsters is therefore an illusion. Grammar is nonsense-neutral (of course not with respect to ungrammatical nonsense). We could even say that meaning itself is nonsense-neutral, since nonsense sentences have a kind of meaning. Then here is a second (vertiginous) question: Is there room for a brand of skepticism that questions the meaningfulness of our discourse? I don’t mean the familiar positivist-Quine-Kripke-Wittgenstein types of semantic skepticism, but rather a type of skepticism that dangles the possibility that we are talking nonsense all the time, despite our belief that we are making sense. Some of Lewis Carroll’s characters talk nonsense without knowing it—might we be in like case? That is, is the belief that we are talking sense fallible? I say, “Little white lambs sleep peacefully”: have I said something analogous to “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” without knowing it? Don’t I sometimes say things in my dreams that I later realize were nonsensical? Might I be dreaming all the time and hence possibly talking nonsense constantly without knowing it? It sounds impossible to maintain that my simple utterances might actually be nonsense, but the skeptic is a resourceful enemy: can I be certain that “It’s raining” isn’t nonsense? Is this as certain as the Cogito? Maybe my brain is generating nonsensical strings and then disguising them as making sense. The mind can play peculiar tricks. Haven’t some people been totally convinced that their utterances make sense and yet upon examination they turn out to be nonsense (the holy trinity, Newtonian absolute space and time, the unrestricted concept of a set)? Nonsense can be a sneaky thing. So maybe no one has ever said a “sensical” thing ever—all is nonsense. In the beginning was the nonsense word. Maybe “I think, therefore I am” is itself a piece of nonsense! Judgments of what makes sense don’t seem immune to skeptical doubt. The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was fond of saying that many of our ordinary utterances are strictly nonsense—what about an ultra-Wittgenstein who thinks that all our utterances are really nonsense? It’s all “slithy toves” and “colorless green ideas”.

            It has been maintained that a principle of charity must govern our practice of interpretation: we must find the other largely logical and truth believing. Some have wished to weaken this to a principle of humanity: we must find the other rationally explicable, though not necessarily logical and truthful. But we can picture a further weakening to allow for the possibility of the nonsensical other—the alien who talks a lot of nonsense, perhaps complete and total nonsense. Couldn’t we be forced to conclude that the linguistic behavior of the alien consists mainly, or wholly, of sheer nonsense? Isn’t this what Alice concludes about some of the aliens she encounters through the looking glass? I don’t see why not: perhaps our target tribe has a malfunctioning brain (by our standards) that produces only nonsense; perhaps they utter nonsense all the time just to amuse themselves; perhaps there is a religious taboo prohibiting sensible utterance. In any case they spout nothing but nonsense from dawn till dusk: it’s all jabberwockies and bandersnatches, relieved only by the odd colorless green idea. There need be no assent to any of this nonsense on their part, no “holding true”, and hence no route from such data to an assignment of meaning; still, they do mean something by their utterances, even if we deem it a kind of substandard meaning. Their spoken language has meaning of a sort—it isn’t devoid of all semantic content—but it doesn’t map onto ours in the way envisaged by proponents of the principle of charity. As Wittgenstein would say, they play a particular language game, and within that game language has a use, a purpose. They may think perfectly sensible things, and know that others do too, but their actual speech is knowingly made up of nothing but nonsense; they may wonder at the pedestrian verbal ways of sense-making speakers such as ourselves.[2]

            Nonsense is a kind of robust semantic presence not a mere semantic absence. It isn’t the lack of meaning but a special type of meaning. Philosophers of language have gradually expanded out from what they conceived to be central cases of meaning (usually verifiably true sentences) to other types of meaning (imperative meaning, performative meaning, context-dependent meaning, emotive meaning, etc.); I am suggesting we expand out a stage further to include nonsensical meaning. Even Wittgenstein, with his inclusive notion of the language game, didn’t see fit to include nonsense as a legitimate form of meaning, but there are good reasons to bring nonsense into the semantic fold. Talking nonsense is one form of talking, one way that language manifests itself. And nonsense is as much part of language as sense; indeed it exemplifies the creativity that is the essence of language. Perhaps we should do more of it.

[1] Actually the word “sensical” is not unheard of, but it is not generally accepted as part of the English language.

[2] Could there be a completely nonsensical conceptual scheme? Now that is pushing it: how could the language of thought be composed of nothing but nonsense? Could all thought be inherently nonsensical? In our case there is always a bedrock of sense on which nonsense is parasitic, but in the case of the nonsensical conceptual scheme it is nonsense all the way down. This is hard to make sense of (perhaps it is a species of nonsense). 

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Dreaming and Philosophy

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Dreaming and Philosophy

 

I have an empirical hypothesis: dreaming caused philosophy. That is, it was dreaming that tipped our ancestors off to philosophical questions, and it still does. Dreaming embodies so much of what stimulates philosophical thought; it’s the cradle of philosophy. Not all of it, to be sure, philosophy being a wide-ranging subject, but a good deal of what is most characteristic of philosophy. Dreaming triggers the philosophical mood or mindset, its inner thrust. Without dreaming we would not be the philosophers we are (though we might be a different kind of philosopher). The most obvious manifestation of this is skepticism: dreams irresistibly prompt skepticism about the external world (the primary kind of skepticism). The question “How do I know I am not dreaming?” is the quintessential philosophical question; and it can’t be asked if you are not a dreamer. You wake up in the morning, your dreams fresh in your mind, you recall that you were just now convinced of the reality of what you dreamt, and you wonder whether the same could be true of your present waking (you think) experience. You reflect that there was nothing internal to your dream experience that alerted you to its fantastic nature, so what justifies your belief that your present experience isn’t the same? This basic question brings with it a host of subsidiary questions concerning experience, the senses, justification, knowledge, truth, error, and the relation between mind and reality. Now you are off to the philosophical races. All these questions introduce concepts that need examination, though you normally take them for granted. You realize that you don’t really understand these concepts: what is experience, justification, knowledge, truth, etc.? You are forced to confront the basic questions of epistemology and metaphysics. Clearly experience of a world can take place in the absence of the world experienced, as dreams vividly show, so the question of the relation between experience and world becomes problematic—how can experience justify belief in a real world? But what is the “real world”—what belongs to it and what doesn’t? What is existence anyway? Reflection on dreams prompts these distinctively philosophical questions. And dreams are natural to us, a human universal, shared with other animals, a feature of normal childhood: so philosophy is also natural to us, being coeval with dreaming. The concept of a dream is itself a philosophical concept, especially when coupled with the word “mere”: for the concept of a dream brings with it the concept of the mind as something distinct from external reality, and that concept is the entry point into philosophy. Now we have the distinction between appearance and reality in play, a foundational philosophical distinction.

            Consider Plato’s cave, itself a foundational philosophical image. Isn’t it an apt metaphor for dreaming? The cave dwellers experience only shadows that they mistake for reality, as dreamers experience only phantasms of the mind, which they mistake for reality. To leave the cave and achieve real knowledge is like waking up and smelling the coffee—a transition from a state of deception to a state of truth. Now reality floods in, where before it was all fantasy and error. Did Plato think of the cave parable because he already knew about dreaming? Dreamers are like part-time cave dwellers: every night we enter a world of illusion that we take to be real, as the cave people might alternate between cave life and life outside the cave. They might start to wonder whether they ever really leave the cave: is what they call “the outside world” really just another kind of cave? They thus have their “cave skeptics”, those who insist that there is no justification for declaring one world real and the other unreal—perhaps, indeed, the cave world is the real one! Our dream life acts as a pointer towards radical doubts about common sense, reason, truth, and all the reassuring apparatus of waking life. That’s why I say it’s the prime impetus towards philosophy, because it raises these questions in a particularly pressing and vivid form. Without dreams we might just acquiesce in the natural standpoint (Husserl’s phrase) and not question the relation between mind and world: for nothing in waking experience, except the odd visual illusion, really forces the question of the relation between knowledge of reality and subjective experience. Philosophy arises when we start to think reflectively about the distinction between experience and reality, and dreams force this distinction upon us. It is true that animals and small children dream and yet don’t philosophize, so dreaming is not sufficient for philosophy; but all that is required is the ability to remember and think about our dreams—to conceptualize them. We could formulate, and fret over, the appearance-reality distinction without knowledge of dreams, by standing back from our normal waking experience; but that would be an intellectual feat not natural to ordinary people, unlike simple awareness of our dreams. I am not talking about what is logically possible here; I am talking about what is natural to human beings constituted as we are—about evolutionary anthropology. My empirical hypothesis is that dreams, and our awareness of them, and our talk about them, are the de facto root of philosophical thinking—how we actually came to be philosophers at some point in evolutionary history (perhaps around the time we made those famous cave (!) paintings).

            There is another point about dreams that feeds into their philosophical fecundity: they are mysterious. Dreams confront the questing mind with a problem of a peculiarly recalcitrant kind. We can see how our senses might have led naturally to the existence of natural science, and these questions were by no means easy, but in the case of dreams we are faced with an enigma of another order. We don’t know why we dream, what function dreams serve, what they mean (if anything), what they tell us about human nature. We can imagine our ancestors puzzling over their dreams, concocting many a fanciful theory, admitting total bafflement, not getting anywhere; this could be their first experience of complete incomprehension and futility. And it isn’t as if we have now solved a problem that baffled them; we still don’t understand dreams. This is characteristic of philosophy: extreme recalcitrance, irresoluble disagreement, not knowing even where to begin, lack of a reliable method, bemused wonderment. Dreams presented our ancestors with a shocking demonstration of the limits of the human intellect, or (what is the same) the opaqueness of the objective world. So dreams created (we are hypothesizing) our early exposure to the joys of philosophical perplexity. The epistemic optimist in us is brought up short by the existence of dreams. We have now solved some of the major problems of science—the nature of the perceived heavens, the existence of animal species, the mechanism of inheritance—but we are still struggling with the problem of dreams. This problem prefigures, and produces, many of the problems of philosophy; and it exemplifies the normal state of the philosophical mind—which is a kind of tormented not knowing. Dreams are a conundrum in their own right as well as a source of further conundrums.

            Other subsidiary themes can be seen to flow from dreaming into philosophical thought: the concepts of existence, of possibility, of belief, of imagination, of fiction, of consciousness, of the self, even of morality. What is existence, given that dream objects don’t have it? What distinguishes the real from the unreal? What we dream seems generally to be possible in some sense, but what is this notion of possibility, this creation of alien worlds? Are we spinning possible worlds every night from within our own mind—or magically perceiving such worlds in our dreaming mind’s eye? Dreaming seems to revel in the merely possible, revealing our talent for modal consciousness. In dreams we seem to believe what we dream, just like in waking life, but what is this thing called belief? How does it differ from knowledge? Can dreams generate their own kind of knowledge? Or is it wrong to think that we believe what we dream—do we just dream that we believe? In waking life we exercise the faculty of imagination, which resembles the dreaming faculty in many ways, but is it really the same faculty in both cases? Is dream experience actually just imaginative experience? Or is it perhaps like sensory hallucination—or some third kind of experience specific to dreaming? How are dream stories related to waking fiction? Is dreaming the font of fiction too? Can dreams and fiction express their own kind of truth? Are we conscious when we dream? We are clearly unconscious in one sense, but aren’t we also conscious in another sense? What is this notion of consciousness that is common to sleeping and waking? Are we conscious in the same sense in both cases? Is the self that dreams identical to the self that exists in waking life? Or do we have a second dreaming self? What is this self that can exist in these two forms? The puzzles of personal identity crop up in considering dreaming. And am I morally responsible for what I dream? If I dream of violence and sex, am I to blame myself for indulging in such things? Do dreams reveal my secret moral nature (as Freud supposed)? Are dreams proper objects of shame? Thus a lot of philosophy gets condensed into the dream experience, and dreams frame these questions in a particularly sharp way.[1] One could devise an introduction to philosophy course by focusing on dreams and their philosophical progeny (Dreaming and Philosophy 101). That would anchor the subject firmly in facts about the daily experience of the students, as opposed to arid texts and abstract speculations. I suspect enrollment would go up.

            What else could have caused philosophy? It isn’t easy to say how philosophy arose in the human mind; it can look like an unprecedented leap in the dark, a remarkable saltation (to use a term from evolutionary biology). Did someone just suddenly start thinking about skepticism one day and talk to his neighbors about it? Other subjects have clear roots in everyday experience, but philosophy seems to have no clear basis in our ordinary concerns. What triggered the philosophical brain to spring into action? The advantage of the dream hypothesis is that it identifies a psychological trait of humans that could naturally morph into philosophical thought, perhaps conjoined with other traits such as language. Dreams are subjects of natural concern to their owners (some people can’t stop talking about them) and they readily give rise to the kinds of questions I have listed. So dreams are a likely candidate for acting as the cause of philosophy. It is an interesting empirical question whether there is a causal link between dreaming in children and a dawning awareness of philosophical issues: maybe there is a predictable developmental sequence leading from one to the other, possibly aided by outside stimuli. And if there are cases of dreaming pathology, we might investigate whether this has any impact on philosophical maturation.[2] Philosophy naturalized.

 

[1] I could also mention the problem of privacy and other minds: no one can tell what you are dreaming just by observing your body as you sleep. Dreams are private mental events par excellence. Of course we can also ask how dream experience relates to the brain, producing one version of the mind-body problem (behaviorism looks distinctly unappealing). 

[2] Are professional philosophers particularly prone to reflect on their dreams? Are there any dreamless philosophers? What kind of philosophy would they produce? I often dream about philosophy, as I suppose other philosophers also do: does this confirm the conjectured link between the two? In my late teens I became fascinated by dreams, which led me to Freud; was my later transition from psychology to philosophy unconsciously powered by the same interest? I do think dreams play a much more pervasive role in waking life than is generally recognized, so they may be close to the surface in conscious philosophizing. Doesn’t the rapt philosopher have a dreamy air about him? I nearly always think about philosophy as soon as I wake up, with my dreams still fresh in my mind. Descartes liked to work on philosophy in bed in the morning. Rodin’s Thinker looks like he might be asleep.  Etc.

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Trying: Its Scope and Limits

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Trying: Its Scope and Limits

 

What can we try to do and what can’t we try to do? The OED defines “try” as “to make an attempt or effort to do something”, so our question becomes what can we make an attempt to do. The following come within the scope of trying: bodily and mental actions such as lifting a weight or calculating in the head, remembering facts or experiences, imagining objects or states of affairs, thinking about particular things (but not thinking tout court), conceiving of something as possible, attending to something. On the other hand, the following would be agreed to fall outside the scope of trying: perceiving, believing, knowing, feeling an emotion, having a desire, and trying itself (you can’t try to try to open a letter). I can’t try to see something just like that, though I can try to get a better look at something, because seeing isn’t an action that I do; similarly for believing and knowing. Nor can I try to feel angry at someone, or try to desire what I don’t desire. These things are not “subject to the will”. Of course, we can try to undertake actions that will reliably lead to certain emotions or desires, but it is futile to attempt to feel an emotion or have a desire just by trying to: these things are not actions, so we can’t make an attempt to do them. Trying presupposes action, so where there is no action there can be no trying (same for deciding and intending). I can’t try to do what I know can’t be done.  

            Can every action be attempted? Can I try to jump to the moon, say? It is widely accepted that such actions can’t be intended: you can’t intend to do what you know it is impossible for you to do. The OED defines “intend” as “have as one’s aim or plan”, and one can’t have as one’s aim or plan what one believes it is impossible to do. But can one try to do what one deems to be impossible? I think not: if I believe it is impossible to jump to the moon, I can’t try to do it—I can’t make the attempt. I can try to jump some of the distance to the moon (and succeed in this attempt), as I can try to give the impression that I am trying to jump to the moon, or try to act the part of someone trying to jump to the moon: but I can’t actually try to jump to the moon given that I believe it is impossible—though I can try it if I am convinced that it is possible. Trying is constrained by belief: belief limits what can be tried. The will is limited by cognition. Thus the will acts only with the permission of belief; it isn’t an independent faculty. We should really speak of the conation-cognition complex. You can see what you know is impossible (e.g. an Escher drawing), but you can’t will what you know is impossible—specifically, you can’t try to do what you know can’t be done. Trying is not some primitive upsurge of the conative faculty; it needs the cooperation of the cognitive faculty. Given that we try to do everything we do (conversational implicatures to the contrary), we have the result that all actions presuppose a belief that the action in question is possible—even just walking down the street. If you were to believe that walking is impossible, you could not try to walk, which means that you would not walk: walking implies trying to walk, but trying to walk implies believing it to be possible. If you believe yourself to be paralyzed, truly or falsely, you won’t do any walking (though you might be hooked up to a machine that made you perform walking-like motions). The agent needs a general belief (assumption, presupposition, instinctive conviction) that she can do what she can in fact do. Willing and believing are not conceptually separable. Trying can’t exist in a cognitive vacuum.[1]

            You can’t try to do what you believe you can’t do, but can you try to do what you believe you must do? Can you try to do what you know is unavoidable? Can you try to breathe if you can’t help breathing, for example? Can you try to do what you are already doing reflexively? I don’t think you can: you have to believe that it is possible to do what you are not doing. If I believe that I have no alternative to what I am doing, I can’t try to do it—at most I can try to let it happen. I can’t try to fall through space if I have been ejected into outer space; I can’t try to lift my arm if I see it automatically going up; I can’t try to close my eyelid if I feel it closing reflexively. At most I can try to aid these motions, but I can’t try to initiate them. So trying requires the belief that the action envisaged is not an inevitability. I can only try to do what I believe it is possible for me not to do: that is the cognitive background to my act of trying. Generally this is the situation—it is rare that I am compelled to act as I do—but in conceivable cases my power to try is limited by my beliefs about what I must do. In such cases I don’t have to try, because I have no alternative. So there are possible actions that are not preceded by trying. Nearly all actions are preceded by trying, since it is rare that the agent has no alternative, but such cases are conceivable. Trying is thus sensitive to background modal belief both as to possibility and necessity, so it cannot occur without appropriate such beliefs: you can’t try and simultaneously believe the action is impossible or that it is necessary.

[1] You might wonder whether an absence of belief is sufficient to allow for trying: what if the agent simply has no belief either way about the feasibility of the action? Could a man try to jump to the moon while having no belief that it is possible so to jump (and no belief that it is impossible)? That would imply that if you asked him whether his projected action is possible he would truly reply, “I have no idea either way”. That seems hard to understand: one would be tempted to respond, “How can you try if you don’t even think it’s possible?” He would be committed to holding, given his agnosticism, that he had not ruled out the impossibility option and yet was still prepared to go ahead and try. In normal cases the agent will say, “Of course, I think it’s possible or else I wouldn’t make the attempt”. What we try to do is shaped by what we think we can do—we don’t go around trying to do what we know very well we can’t do.

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