Nonsense
Nonsense is a form of communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system, that lacks any coherent meaning.
The individual words make sense and are arranged according to proper grammatical rules, yet the result is nonsense.
The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction and seemingly irrelevant and/or incompatible characteristics, which conspire to make the phrase meaningless, but are open to interpretation.
[Editor’s note: It is possible to imagine a context where case-sensitive word-strings such as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” could be meaningfully used as a passphrase to decrypt a digital file.
This one counterfactual suggests that both literary meaning and nonsense are dependent upon the particular “language-game” in which words (or characters) are used or misused.
Lewis Carroll, seeking a nonsense riddle, once posed the question How is a raven like a writing desk?.
The first verse of Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll; 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
There's a Nong Nang Ning The first verse of Spirk Troll-Derisive by James Whitcomb Riley;[4] The Crankadox leaned o'er the edge of the moon, And wistfully gazed on the sea Where the Gryxabodill madly whistled a tune To the air of "Ti-fol-de-ding-dee."
The first four lines of The Mayor of Scuttleton by Mary Mapes Dodge;[4] The Mayor of Scuttleton burned his nose Trying to warm his copper toes; He lost his money and spoiled his will By signing his name with an icicle quill; Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz; a creation of Douglas Adams Oh freddled gruntbuggly, Thy micturations are to me As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
[5] Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus that some of the propositions contained in his own book should be regarded as nonsense.
Moore’s “proof” is essentially an attempt to assert the truth of the sentence ‘Here is one hand’ as a paradigm case of genuine knowledge.
In Wittgenstein’s view, linguistic meaning for the most part is the way sentences are used in various contexts to accomplish certain goals (PI §43).
Disguised epistemic nonsense therefore is the misuse of ordinary declarative sentences in philosophical contexts where they seem meaningful but produce little or nothing of significance (cf.
Moore’s unintentional misuse of ‘Here is one hand’ thus fails to state anything that his audience could possibly understand in the context of his lecture.
Both bogus theories violate the rules of the epistemic game that make genuine doubt and certainty meaningful.
The broader implication is that classical philosophical “problems” may be little more than complicated semantic illusions that are empirically unsolvable (cf.
For example, the sentence ‘Worms integrate the moon by C# when moralizing to rescind apples’ is neither true nor false and therefore is semantic nonsense.
Thus, when we use terms like ‘nonsense’ and ‘meaningless’ in the epistemic sense, the correct use of them requires only that what is uttered seem absurdly false.
Nonsense implies the destruction of all views or opinions, on the wake of the Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna.
By contrast, cryptographers typically seek to make their cipher texts resemble random distributions, to avoid telltale repetitions and patterns which may give an opening for cryptanalysis.
Another method is sometimes called the Mad Libs method: it involves creating templates for various sentence structures and filling in the blanks with noun phrases or verb phrases; these phrase-generation procedures can be looped to add recursion, giving the output the appearance of greater complexity and sophistication.
