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Nonsense Made Intelligible

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Abstract

My topic is the relation between nonsense and (un-)intelligibility, and the contrast between nonsense and falsehood which played a pivotal role in the rise of analytic philosophy (sct. 1). I shall pursue three lines of inquiry. First I shall briefly consider the positive case, namely linguistic understanding (sct. 2). Secondly, I shall consider the negative case—different breakdowns of understanding and connected forms of failure to make sense (sct. 3–4). Third, I shall criticize three important misconceptions of nonsense and unintelligibility: the austere conception of nonsense propounded by the New Wittgensteinians (scts. 5–6); the “no nonsense position” which roundly denies that there are cases of nonsense—Chomsky’s semantic anomalies or Ryle’s category mistakes–that are grammatically well-formed, without even having the potential for being used to make a truth-apt statement (scts. 7–8); the individualistic conception of language and of semantic mistakes championed by Davidson (scts. 9–10). All three positions, I shall argue, ignore or deny combinatorial nonsense, the fact that perfectly meaningful sentence-components can be combined in a way that may be grammatical, yet without resulting in a sentence that is itself “meaningful”, i.e. endowed with linguistic sense. At a more strategic level, the first and the third position deny or ignore that natural languages are communal historical practices that go beyond idiolects and the employments of expressions in specific contexts and that are guided by semantic rules—standards for the meaningful use of words.

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Notes

  1. Chomsky (1957, p. 15) treats this “semantic anomaly” as grammatical yet nonseniscal. By contrast, Chomsky (1965) contests the idea that such sentences are syntactically well-formed.

  2. For the distinction between first- and second-order powers see Kenny (1989, p. 20) and Hacker (2006, pp. 105–106).

  3. See Rundle (2001, pp. 109–110), Baker and Hacker (2005, pp. 381–382). Even this variant of my account differs from theirs, however, by conceding the episodic nature of token understanding and by employing the dichotomies between first- and second-order powers and between one-way and two-way powers.

  4. The distinction between a power, its exercise and the opportunity conditions for that exercise hails from Kenny, e.g. (1989, ch. 5).

  5. Several items on this list hail from Waismann (1965, p. 347). Others combine Wittgensteinian ideas with more recent distinctions (drawn in Künne 1983, pp. 196–202).

  6. By dint of its venerable pedigree, persistence and pervasiveness, this confusion can lay claim to the title “the mother of all philosophical errors”.

  7. A threat of circularity looms here, if familiarity with words presupposes the capacity to employ them in sentences. In fact, however, children are become familiar with certain words through training involving simply speech acts like labelling or one-word sentences. This provides the foundation for the ability to employ these words in more complex speech acts.

  8. Another kernel of truth is that in the case of ambiguous words, context is needed to determine which of the different meanings is at issue. But first, even such words have their different meanings outside of a sentential context, e.g. in a list of homonyms. And secondly, disambiguation does not always require the context of a complete sentence. To exclude the meaning harbour, for instance, “a bottle of port” will do just fine.

  9. Several of the combinatorial principles invoked are closely related to Evans’ “generality constraint”. Ironically, Evans himself specifically excluded category mistakes from the scope of that constraint (1982, p. 101n).

  10. Magidor denies that simile can explain metaphors to begin with. She appeals to Davidson’s objection that the theory cannot do justice to the fact that metaphors are difficult to figure out and defy paraphrase in literal terms. But analogies and comparisons can be complex, rich and unserveyable. These kinds of comparisons defy straightforward paraphrase no less than ambitious metaphors do. For a convincing defence of the simile account against other objections see Schroeder 2004.

  11. Glock 2010 provides a more sustained critique of Davidson’s position.

  12. In a manuscript of 2002, p. 3, they claim that “we have no trouble understanding what he meant to convey”. However, they do not repeat either this wonderful example nor their assessment in the published version (2007).

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Acknowledgments

For comments on previous versions, I am indebted to Alex Burri, Peter Hacker, as well as to audiences at Regensburg and Erfurt. I am particularly grateful to Kai Büttner and David Dolby for alerting me to complications concerning the passive nature of understanding and the connection between the privation view of nonsense and nonsense monism.

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  1. Philosophisches Seminar, Universität Zürich, Zürichbergstrasse 43, 8044, Zurich, Switzerland

    Hans-Johann Glock

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Glock, HJ. Nonsense Made Intelligible. Erkenn 80 (Suppl 1), 111–136 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9662-5

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