Consider the sentence:
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
It is meaningful, but to a person like me who does not know what the words "ontogeny", "recapitulation" and "phylogeny" mean, it sounds like gibberish. For anyone curious, it means "the development of an organism (ontogeny) summarizes (recapitulates) evolutionary history and all the intermediate forms of its ancestors (phylogeny)".
But my lack of understanding of its meaning is my problem, not the problem of the expert who made that sentence. Perhaps, they could've been more empathetic and used simpler words when talking to a layperson.
But a sentence like "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" is devoid of any meaning, if we assume that:
* Colour is the interpretation of the signals from our cone cells by the brain
* Cone cells are only sensitive to electromagnetic waves in the visible spectrum
* We only see colours because they are the visible spectrum radiations from an external physical source focused to a point on the retina containing the cone cells (i.e. colour is a property of physical substances in the external world)
* Synesthetic people have an exception by which their brain assigns colours to sounds
* Coloured substances are not colourless
* Green is a colour
* Ideas are phenomena of internal perception which are not sensed from the external world like colour
* Only living beings sleep
* Ideas are not living beings
* One is inactive in sleep
* One is active when furious
Then we have "furiously sleep ideas green colorless", which totally violates the syntax, and hence does not have any meaning at all.
But consider this one:
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK
...
fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
Here, we have something that does not violate the syntax completely, but it doesn't complete a sentence structure either. No semantic meaning can be inferred from such a statement.
The real reason I wanted to ask this question was from my experience with a conversation on Twitter (X), which changed my world-view on language. The following are some replies from my interlocutor (not in this order):
So, you’re pathologically and religiously taking a contrarian argument in order to pretend there’s a supernatural perspective which is just you trying to put forth your own belief and equating it with science.
Yes, established that you’re a gaslighter. (I wasn't religious, I was just saying that the two parties involved in the conflict believe in the same religious history, so whether the religion is universally true is irrelevant to their conflict.)
Obviously it’s contrarian. It’s the non-scientific argument of a cybersophist lawyer trying to equate his binary religious worldview with the non-binary view of science, and then pretend he didn’t add his own voice. (This is where I gave up responding)
You’re pathologically affirming a disjunct for everything that is presented. Circular reasoning. Autological. (All I really did here was disprove his claim, and he was complaining that I was disproving it. And it wasn't circular reasoning, he was making the circular argument, and I disproved all of it, and he claimed that I was the one making the circular reasoning here.)
No, I asked why would we ignore the connection when you’re literally gaslighting us? If you can’t respect consent, then that’s on you. (When I invalidated his argument, he complained that I'm violating 'consent' and 'gaslighting' him because I don't consider his opinion to be valid.)
There it is, everyone. The attempt to equate de facto arguments (science) with de jure (judicial) arguments sums up the Amarna Revolution. Autological. Regressive, circular, dogmatic, digressive, non-relative (aka timeless). (IDK what this means)
Just to be clear, this discussion was about Zionism, and he's an atheist, and I'm agnostic. And this person claimed that the monotheism of Judaism necessarily had to originate from Atenism in Egypt, because supernaturalism is nonsensical, and therefore all events are built off of previous events. I said that the two events could've happened independently and showed him that the Egyptian language family is distinct from the Semitic language family, and their cultures are very different. So he said that I'm "invalidating arguments" (which I clearly was, with proper arguments) and thus "gaslighting" him and "violating consent".
There was a lot of circumvention involved in this discussion, and he kept repeatedly throwing in a specific question that I had answered 5-6 times previously causing semantic satiation and mental disarray, and later repeatedly avoided my question as to whether he thinks "it's okay to kill a child who believes in a fairy, because it isn't logically provable"?
The reason I pursued this conversation was because I initially wanted to see what kinds of meaningful arguments they had, and later to just see what kind of sentences can be made. So I infer that not all conversations are meaningful, and there's a fine line between meaningful conversation and noise. To repeat my question, at what point do sentences lose their meaning?
