Nonsense and Knowledge
Nonsense is the end result of all sense.
Georges Bataille
Nonsense interacts dynamically with reason in the quest for knowledge. To talk about nonsense and rational knowledge in the same breath seems contrary to common sense, for reason and nonsense supposedly directly oppose each other. In this case, however, common sense is a vast oversimplification. And in reality, the concept of nonsense is as indispensable for rigorous rational inquiry as are the concepts of truth and falsehood. This chapter will present and support six statements about relationships between nonsense and knowledge. Together, they paint a more accurate, complex, interesting, and colorful picture of nonsense in the search for rational knowledge than common sense does.
Nonsense Is Neither True Nor False
Many people assume that nonsense is the same as falsehood or that nonsense is a particularly blatant and glaring form of falsehood. Hence, the statement that nonsense is neither true nor false may seem counterintuitive at first. Nonsense and falsehood move in separate planes of thought and analysis. Confusing them causes no immediate harmful effect on the mind. Down the line, however, confusing nonsense with falsehood severely compromises one’s ability to think cogently about some important questions of science, psychology, religion, and spirituality.
Falsehood is the opposite of truth. Nonsense is the opposite of meaningful, intelligible language. Hence, since the two concepts do not have the same opposite, nonsense and falsehood are not the same. Accordingly, if nonsense and falsehood are confused, much nonsense, falsehood, and confusion will result.
Historically, concepts of nonsense, truth, and falsehood were discovered in that order. Ancient shamans and magicians understood that nonsense is a meaningless, unintelligible form of language that projected special powers. Before there was a clear formal concept of truth or falsehood, Heraclitus scorned nonsense as meaningless and unintelligible, using it as a term of reproach. Parmenides, the father of deductive logic, propounded the concept of truth, or that which is the case independently of anyone’s opinion. Then, decades later, Plato defined the notion of falsehood, or that which is not the case independently of anyone’s opinion, as the opposite of truth. Seeing that the concept of nonsense came first, truth second, and falsehood third makes it plain that nonsense and falsehood are not the same.
Statements Are Either True or False, and Typically They Are Declarative Sentences of Literal Meaning
Knowing the literal meaning of a statement is necessary for determining whether it is true or false. For example, consider the statement “Some dogs are brown.” Anyone who knows the literal meaning of that statement and has a modicum of experience observing dogs would know that the statement is true.
Next, consider the statement “A bat is a kind of bird.” Anyone who knows the literal meaning of that statement and has a modicum of experience observing bats would agree that the statement is false. Evidently, then, knowing the literal meaning of a statement is necessary for determining whether the statement is true or false. In other words, “true” and “false” are terms that apply specifically to literal, meaningful statements.
Now, consider the sentence “A plurgish gloapster startled a whining, illiterate rainbow.” This is a grammatically correct sentence, and it is meaningless, unintelligible nonsense. Because the sentence has no intelligible meaning, the question of its being true or false simply does not arise.
Asking whether the nonsensical declarative sentence above is true or false is like asking whether a pumpkin pie is awake or asleep, or whether the square root of a number is pink or yellow. The distinction between truth and falsehood simply does not apply to nonsensical declarative sentences.
A declarative sentence must be meaningful and intelligible to be a true or false statement. In other words, unintelligibility is a prerequisite for applying the distinction between truth and falsehood. Therefore, nonsensical, unintelligible declarative sentences are neither true nor false.
Deliberate nonsense sentences like “A plurgish gloapster startled a whining, illiterate rainbow” are not likely to be mistaken for a meaningful statement. In cases like that, therefore, confusing nonsense with falsehood does not present a problem. Sometimes, however, a sentence that is actually unintelligible nonsense may look to someone like a meaningful, intelligible true-or-false statement. Then, when that person tries to apply ordinary logic to the disguised nonsense sentence, particularly baffling problems arise.
Later on, we will see that precisely that kind of problem has arisen in the history of the quest for knowledge. The distinction between nonsense and falsehood is an important principle of reason. Nonsense and falsehood are concepts that belong to two different levels of rational analysis.
Nonsense Comes In Degrees
Zeno was the first philosopher to observe that one thing can be more nonsensical and unintelligible than some other unintelligible, nonsensical things. Specifically, Zeno said that common-sense assumptions about motion actually lead to more nonsensical consequences than does Parmenides’s position that reality is stationary, timeless and unitary. Zeno’s insight was that unintelligibility lies in a continuum, or a spectrum of shades and degrees.
I wrote the two pairs of sentences below to illustrate Zeno’s point. Each of the sentences is equal in length. Yet, in each pair, the second sentence is plainly more nonsensical and unintelligible than the first sentence:
Five silly cleebers solemnly climbed up a nurgly spiral staircase.
Five flispy blargers toobled some spimsy, flurgish spergwhallers into drukes.
The mystic monkey chattered and threw equations at the spectators.
The lonely, vibrating percentage sang religious carrots and venerable rails.
The degrees of nonsense and unintelligibility that we perceive in comparing sentences like those above can be roughly quantified. Hence, in general, the greater the percentage of made-up meaningless words in a sentence of near-English, the more nonsensical the sentence becomes. Similarly, in general, the greater the number of incommensurable things and attributes that a sentence of categorical nonsense mismatches, the more nonsensical the sentence becomes.
Examples could also be written that would illustrate Zeno’s point for almost any type of nonsense that we have named. In other words, numerative nonsense, conjunctive nonsense, nonsense stories, mock languages—these and many other types—all can be created in varying degrees of unintelligibility. Nonsense syllables, for one, are an exception; making nonsense syllables that would be more nonsensical and unintelligible than others is a difficult task to contemplate. The rare exception proves the rule, though, and nonsense of most types conforms to Zeno’s precept.
Lewis Carroll touched on the notion of shades and degrees of nonsense. In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice encountered the disputatious Red Queen. The Queen’s conversation went on as follows:
“When you say ‘hill,’” the Queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”
“No, I shouldn’t,” said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last; “a hill can’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense—”
The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”60
Sir Arthur Eddington, a great astronomer and physicist of the twentieth century, discussed what he dubbed the physicists’ “problem of nonsense.” Eddington granted that it may be nonsense for physicists to assert that realities exist beyond the laws of physics. Yet, Eddington added, it is even more nonsensical for physicists to deny that such realities exist. According to Eddington, then, the weighing and comparing of different shades of and degrees of nonsense does have a place in science.
Nonsense Sometimes Comes True
Nonsense is neither true nor false, but new truths emerge from it. Sentences that would be unintelligible nonsense in one era might be intelligible, and even true, in a different era. For example, consider the sentence “All four of John’s grandparents perished in a ship that sank long before his mother or father were born.”
In 1900 this sentence would have been considered unintelligible nonsense. Then came discoveries such as DNA, mapping the human genome, genetic engineering, cloning and technology for retrieving objects from shipwrecks deep beneath the sea. Nowadays, therefore, the situation presented in the sentence is intelligible, and reproductive biotechnology might someday even make a sentence like that true. Since 1910 new knowledge has been discovered of connections in nature that turned a previously nonsensical sentence into a meaningful, intelligible sentence.
Consider the sentence “Two men got married to each other at city hall today.” Again, in 1900 in the United States, this sentence would have been unintelligible nonsense. In fact, I specifically remember similar sentences being used as examples of self-contradictory nonsense in graduate philosophy seminars in the mid-1960s. Then came the gay rights movement and court cases and changes in Americans’ attitudes toward homosexuality. Nowadays, therefore, the sentence is intelligible, and sentences like that are true in cities in the United States every day.
Galileo’s claim that Earth circled the sun along with Venus, Mars, and Jupiter seemed not false but unintelligible to most people in his time. Galileo’s claim implied that Earth is one of the heavenly bodies, like Venus and Jupiter, but that was unintelligible nonsense because Earth is clearly down here!
In other words, nonsense is not necessarily a permanent state. The apparent meaninglessness and unintelligibility of a sentence may be a function of changeable external circumstances, such as a lack of knowledge. The principle that nonsense comes in degrees helps us comprehend some cases of nonsense’s transmutation into truth.
Ancient alchemy was the forerunner of today’s science of chemistry. Alchemy arose in the Hellenistic period when Greek philosophy, with its rational principles, encountered traditional Egyptian technologies for making materials. Early alchemists took it for granted that strange-sounding, meaningless, unintelligible words could emanate magical powers. They were nonsensical magical words like we considered in the previous chapter. Alchemists were looking for just the right combinations of nonsensical magic words to set mysterious forces into motion. Supposedly those mystical forces would somehow interact with the physical materials used in an alchemical procedure. The purpose of uttering the nonsensical formulas over the physical materials was to transmute less desirable substances into more desirable ones.
Numerative nonsense—unintelligible, meaningless language modeled on numbers and mathematical terminology—also appears in some early alchemical writings. Strangely evocative formulas like “the five overcomes the three” occur in writings by alchemists, yet the writings contain no clue as to what the number words supposedly enumerate. The alchemists’ words do not convey coherent thoughts to the mind.
In alchemy, then, multiple types of nonsense ran in tandem with observable physical processes. Occasionally an alchemist would stumble onto a useful discovery, and gradually alchemists learned more and more about material substances and chemical reactions. Then, in the sixteenth century, Paracelsus said that alchemists should pursue the practical goal of making medicines rather than trying fruitlessly to make gold. In the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle wrote The Skeptical Chymist. Although it is somewhat ambiguous and vague by today’s standards, Boyle’s book is largely intelligible. In the eighteenth century, Lavoisier gave the science a mathematical language and a sound experimental basic in his Elements of Chemistry. When reading ancient alchemical writings, Paracelsus, Boyle, and Lavoisier in sequence, alchemical, magical, and numerative nonsense seems gradually to morph into intelligible scientific truth. Nonsense gradually transmuted into intelligible truth by degrees over the many years of chemistry’s history.
Nonsense May Be Implicated in Some Basic Concepts of Science
Science seems to tolerate nonsense better than theory would indicate. In science nonsense is a strongly negative quantity. After all, science signifies reason and truth, while nonsense is a hallmark of irrationality. Paradoxically, though, science has put up with a seemingly unintelligible concept of time for many centuries.
Some scientists have concluded that an essential aspect of the conventional concept of time is unintelligible nonsense. For example, reflective of early twenty-first-century scientific thinking, in New Scientist Marcus Chown has said,
At super-high energies, like those believed to have occurred in the earliest moments of the big bang, time loses all meaning.
Science writer Amanda Gefter has stated,
This, of course, raises the question of what came before the big bang and how long it lasted. Unfortunately, at this point basic ideas begin to fail us; the concept “before” becomes meaningless. In the words of Stephen Hawking, it’s like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole.
And they contrast sharply with Isaac Newton’s words in stating his theory of classical mechanics, that “absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.”
Newton’s physics was the crowning achievement of science and the epitome of reason from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, yet the notion of the flow of time enshrined in Newton’s classical mechanics is unintelligible nonsense from the standpoint of twenty-first-century physics. Here we see again how what is thought of as intelligible or unintelligible may shift dramatically as science acquires new knowledge.
The more things change, though, the more they stay the same. Some ancient Greek philosophers questioned whether time is intelligible, and the question has been debated intermittently ever since. “What came before the big bang?” has a previous incarnation in “What was God doing before he created the universe?”
St. Augustine replied that the question itself is meaningless nonsense, arguing that God brought time into being at the Creation, along with everything else. Accordingly, since time began at the Creation, to ask what happened before the Creation is unintelligible.
St. Augustine faced the same objection from rival philosophers in his era. They insisted that time is infinite, with no beginning and no end, hence that there obviously was a time before God created the world. Debates about the intelligibility of time seem to be an enduring theme of organized rational knowledge, including science.
Scientists generally acknowledge that there is a major problem concerning nonsense at the very center of twenty-first-century physics. Namely, physics’ two most successful theories generate nonsense when they are combined. Furthermore, the problem is widely known, and scientists put up with the astonishing paradox as a matter of course, as described in 2013 by Jacob Aron in New Scientist:
Our two best theories for describing reality are quantum mechanics and general relativity. So far, however, attempts to combine the equations in these disparate theories have produced nonsensical answers.
In sum, an element of nonsense seems to be tolerated in science as a practical matter. Ideological principles that would seemingly exclude nonsense entirely from science are suspended. Apparently, science has no choice but to abide some amount of nonsense, even in basic concepts such as time.
Nonsense Sometimes Serves as a Placeholder in the Search for Rational Knowledge
A singer who forgets some of the words of a song may fill in the gap with improvised nonsense syllables and rescue the performance. Similarly, scientists sometimes fill in gaps in scientific knowledge with nonsense, even knowing that it is nonsense, as a temporary stand-in for truth. For instance, unintelligible nonsense is produced by combining the equations of quantum mechanics with the equations of general relativity. However, the nonsense is tolerated for the sake of the enormous amounts of knowledge the two theories produce separately. I dub this kind of situation “placeholder nonsense.”
Placeholder nonsense holds a place open in language and mind, in lieu of secure knowledge concerning a subject. Nonsense is put in as a placeholder, anticipating that someday it may be replaced by confirmed truth and sound knowledge. In that respect then, placeholder nonsense is an aspirational form of thought and language looking forward toward eventual new truth. Martin Gardner described how Arthur Eddington attributed that very status to nonsense in physics.
“Jabberwocky” was a favorite of the British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington and is alluded to several times in his writings. In New Pathways in Science, he likens the abstract syntactical structure of the poem to that modern branch of mathematics known as group theory. In The Nature of the Physical World, he points out that the physicist’s description of an elementary particle is really a kind of “Jabberwocky”—words applied to “something unknown” that is “doing what we don’t know what.” Because the description contains numbers, science is able to impose a certain amount of order on the phenomena and make successful predictions about them. Eddington wrote:
By contemplating eight circulating electrons in one atom and seven circulating electrons in another, we begin to realize the difference between oxygen and nitrogen. Eight slithy toves gyre and gimble in the oxygen wabe; seven in nitrogen. By admitting a few numbers, even “Jabberwocky” may become scientific. We can now venture on a prediction; if one of its toves escapes, oxygen will be masquerading in a garb properly belonging to nitrogen. In the stars and nebulae, we do find such wolves in sheep’s clothing, which might otherwise have startled us. It would not be a bad reminder of the essential unknownness of the fundamental entities of physics to translate it into “Jabberwocky”; provided all numbers—all metrical attributes—are unchanged, it does not suffer in the least.61
Nonsense also apparently functioned as a placeholder for Francis Galton as he wrestled with solving problems in his mind. Galton (1822–1911) was an influential scientist who contributed to fields as diverse as meteorology, geography, genetics, statistics, and psychology. He also invented identification by fingerprints.
Galton was habitually introspective. He paid close attention to his inner process of thinking about problems. Galton said that he never thought in ordinary words. Sometimes, though, he would experience an accompaniment of nonsense words in his mind as he was deep in thought, working at solving problems. He said that experiencing the nonsense words was just “as the notes of a song might accompany thought.”62
To summarize, nonsense is an integral factor in reason and the pursuit of truth. Nonsense is neither true nor false, yet nonsense comes in degrees and sometimes transmutes into new truths. Nonsense seems to be built into some basic concepts of science, such as time, and therefore nonsense serves as a placeholder in the search for knowledge.
Nonsense interacts dynamically with reason in the quest for knowledge, and we have developed a body of systematic knowledge about nonsense itself. Can we apply rational knowledge about nonsense to speed up the process of acquiring knowledge alone or point it in promising new directions? Those are questions for the future. In the meantime, we will look at some implications and applications of the rational principles of nonsense developed thus far.