Timeline for Why is "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" considered meaningless?
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42 events
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| Nov 30 at 11:26 | comment | added | user3840170 | @Spailpín It was that it is possible to judge the grammaticality of a sentence based on something else from how often it is spoken, or even its individual constituent words. He compares the sentence with one with the words reversed and notices that probably neither has been spoken before, but one is well-formed and the other is not. | |
| S Jul 2 at 14:08 | history | bounty ended | CommunityBot | ||
| S Jul 2 at 14:08 | history | notice removed | CommunityBot | ||
| S Jun 24 at 13:00 | history | bounty started | Spailpín | ||
| S Jun 24 at 13:00 | history | notice added | Spailpín | Canonical answer required | |
| Jun 24 at 12:54 | comment | added | Spailpín | @user3840170 Can you elaborate as to what's Chomsky's actual point was? | |
| Jun 24 at 12:53 | comment | added | Spailpín | @user45758 Yes, I'm quite familiar with elementary formal logic. If "Colourless green ideas..." is interpreted as meaning "All colourless green ideas...", then sure, it'd be true. I wasn't interpreting it that way, but even if one does, then my point still stands and the sentence isn't meaningless. | |
| S Jun 23 at 12:22 | history | suggested | user3840170 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
use block quote markup properly
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| Jun 23 at 11:52 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Jun 23 at 12:22 | |||||
| Jun 23 at 11:43 | comment | added | user3840170 | Chomsky’s point doesn’t actually rely on the sentence being meaningless – that was just an easy way to come up with a sentence that has never been spoken before. | |
| Jun 22 at 13:48 | comment | added | Lambie | Isn't that Chomsky's real point? | |
| Jun 22 at 12:59 | comment | added | Lambie | Something can be grammatically correct while semantically nonsensical, which is what the great Lewis Carroll amply showed. If my first sentence were not true, how could we even read The Jabberwocky? As I said below, you can bracket T and F statements by doing this: It is true (that the sky is green is false). OR It is false (that the sky is green is false). Just using first order statements cannot get the job done. In fact, without a meta-something, you can't even discuss them... | |
| Jun 22 at 12:50 | comment | added | Lambie | The Chomsky phrase is not about logic at all. Why has everybody gone down that rabbit hole? | |
| Jun 22 at 9:25 | history | protected | curiousdannii♦ | ||
| Jun 22 at 7:26 | answer | added | alltogether toomucheffort | timeline score: -1 | |
| Jun 21 at 19:19 | comment | added | user45758 | If anything, your argument shows that the statement is vacuously true. Are you familiar with elementary formal logic? | |
| Jun 21 at 16:45 | comment | added | David McKee | "It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously." -- CM Street | |
| Jun 21 at 16:22 | answer | added | Peter - Reinstate Monica | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jun 21 at 15:26 | comment | added | Sneftel | @DanielDinnyes That wasn't what I asked. | |
| Jun 21 at 15:16 | comment | added | Daniel Dinnyes | @Sneftel Not any bit less relevant than whether Zeus exists is true or false, or whether it is at all possible to know, or whether the question is even sensible. | |
| Jun 21 at 15:03 | comment | added | Sneftel | @DanielDinnyes I don't see the relevance of exotic quantum mechanical effects which are impossible for all practical purposes. If the Copenhagen interpretation were proved false, would you retract your objections? Or do you believe that it's fundamental to logical deduction? | |
| Jun 21 at 14:59 | comment | added | Daniel Dinnyes | @Spailpín Obviously sure, everything is either true or false. So is Schrodinger's cat dead or alive? Was it alive back then? Or, is it alive now? Has anybody looked at it yet? If two people looks at it, will they arrive to the same conclusion? | |
| Jun 21 at 10:10 | comment | added | Spailpín | @JanusBahsJacquet Yes, "Zeus exists" is obviously false. It mightn't be obviously false to the ancient Greeks—but that's because they were wrong. (If you seriously don't think "Zeus exists" is false, then I encourage you, as an ardent believer, to go to your nearest temple to Zeus and make some offerings to him.) And whether or not "God exists" is true or false, it is obviously not a "subjective statement"—He either exists or He doesn't. "Coffee is delicious" is tricky, and I don't know what to say about it, but it's completely off the beaten track from my original question. | |
| Jun 21 at 10:06 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | If “Zeus exists” obviously false? Would it be obviously false if you asked someone in Ancient Greece? Is “God exists” obviously false? Is “Coffee is delicious” true or false? Those are all subjective statements, which are a separate kettle of fish that don’t have an objective true/false value. | |
| Jun 21 at 10:00 | comment | added | Spailpín | @JanusBahsJacquet I'm not convinced by your example, which essentially boils down to the claim that statements aren't "false in strict terms" (whatever that means) if they have an expression without a referent. But "Zeus exists" is obviously false despite "Zeus" not referring. So I still don't see the need for this "truthy"/"falsy" business. | |
| Jun 21 at 6:56 | comment | added | kutschkem | Or it could be true if you interpret it as "For all ideas: The idea being green and colourless implies it sleeps furiously." For all x: P(x) -> Q(x) is true if P(x) is always false. | |
| Jun 21 at 1:22 | answer | added | kaya3 | timeline score: 12 | |
| Jun 20 at 21:00 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Jun 20 at 16:32 | answer | added | Draconis♦ | timeline score: 11 | |
| Jun 20 at 14:58 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | → could easily own a car that could be described, and you need real-world knowledge to know whether or not a description of it is true, false or unidentified. Any statement about drinking stones or dreaming ideas can only ever be unidentified since the phrases themselves cannot, by definition, have real-world referents. | |
| Jun 20 at 14:56 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Spailpín By ‘truthy’ and ‘falsy’, I mean that the values do not have to be specifically exactly true or false, but something that can be deconstructed into being true-ish or false-ish. For example, “My car is blue” would be falsy, because it is indeed the case that I don’t own a car that is blue; but it would not be false in strict terms, because in actual fact, I don’t own a car at all, so even the phrase ‘my car’ has no real-world referent, and any description of it can’t be considered really ‘true’ or ‘false’, just ‘undefined’. Unlike the drinking stone or dreaming ideas, though, I → | |
| Jun 20 at 14:49 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet |
@JonathanZ That was indeed the sort of distinction I was thinking about. NULL, as well as unidentified or uninitialized, or whatever your language of preference calls it) is distinct from TRUE or FALSE in a way that is fairly analogous to the difference between ‘can reasonably happen, but is not the case here’ and ‘cannot possibly happen in the real world’.
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| Jun 20 at 14:45 | comment | added | JonathanZ | @JanusBahsJacquet - Your comment reminds me of the NULL value in the SQL programming language: If a variable/field has the value NULL, then every predicate involving it evaluates to false. I.e. if v = NULL, then v == 0 is false, and v <> 0 is also false. | |
| Jun 20 at 14:31 | comment | added | Alex B. | Technically such sentences are quite often labelled in linguistics as semantically anomalous but I do agree with Janus, Philosophy SE would be a much better place for you to ask such a question see e.g. philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/51115/18834 | |
| Jun 20 at 13:44 | comment | added | Spailpín | @Janus The negation of "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" is "It is not the case that colourless green ideas sleep furiously", which I would consider true, by the above reasoning. If "Colourless green ideas do not sleep furiously" means the same, then I would also consider that true. I don't know what you mean by "truthy" and "falsy". And if all you mean by "the notion of drinking does not apply to stones at all" is that stones can't drink, then I agree; but why should that mean that "Stones drink" is meaningless? I will also post in Philosophy, but it still seems linguistics-relevant. | |
| Jun 20 at 13:37 | comment | added | Spailpín | @AlexB. Thanks for the clarification; I would treat the two as more or less synonymous, but maybe Chomsky would distinguish them. | |
| Jun 20 at 13:21 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | Does it make any more sense to say that it is false? If it is false, negating it should yield a truthy statement, but “Colourless green ideas do not sleep furiously” is subject to the same real-world limitations as its non-negated counterpart and is no more truthy or falsy. It’s not that stones do not drink (etc.), but that the notion of drinking does not apply to stones at all, which is a fundamentally different thing to me. At any rate, this seems like more of a philosophical than a linguistic question; probably a better fit for Philosophy. | |
| Jun 20 at 13:14 | comment | added | Alex B. | Also fyi Chomsky actually used the word nonsensical, not meaningless, not sure if it makes any difference, just saying. | |
| Jun 20 at 13:12 | comment | added | Spailpín | @AlexB. Thanks for the reference. I've seen lots of attempts to assign the sentence a meaning by interpreting it metaphorically, e.g., by taking "sleep" to mean "lie dormant" or something like that, like in your link. However, I think the sentence is meaningful without any need for metaphorical interpretation. | |
| Jun 20 at 13:04 | comment | added | Alex B. | You may want to take a look at mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/proseDP/text/… | |
| S Jun 20 at 12:59 | review | First questions | |||
| Jun 20 at 21:18 | |||||
| S Jun 20 at 12:59 | history | asked | Spailpín | CC BY-SA 4.0 |