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What Nonsense Might Be

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Cora Diamond
Cora Diamond
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Extract

There is a natural view of nonsense, which owes what attraction it has to the apparent absence of alternatives. In Frege and Wittgenstein there is a view which goes against the natural one, and the purpose of this paper is to establish that it is a possible view of nonsense.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 56 , Issue 215 , January 1981 , pp. 5 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1981

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References

1 Moore is said to have used this example in Margaret Macdonald's notes to Wittgenstein's lectures, in the passage part of which is quoted below, p. 16. The reference to Moore's example is parenthetical, and may have been added by Miss Macdonald.

2 Prior defends such a view in ‘Entities’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 32 (1954), reprinted in his Papers in Logic and Ethics (Duckworth, 1976). Quine takes a similar position in Word and Object, p. 229. See also Haack, Robin, ‘No Need for Nonsense’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 49 (1971),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bradley, Michael, ‘On the Alleged Need for Nonsense’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 56 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 I have heard it objected that this cannot be done, for example because Edward Lear introduced the word as an adjective. Lear's use of the word in adjectival position may indeed make Moore's use of it grate on the ears of purists, but the word is still a nonsense word, and Moore's use of it involves no logical error.

4 Encyclopedia of Philosophy 5, 520.

5 Frege: Philosophy of Language (Duckworth, 1973), 62. Cf. also p. 32.

6 Grundlagen, x.

7 How exactly that sense of ‘meaning’ should be explained is a matter treated in one way by Frege in the Grundlagen, in another by him in his later writings and in yet another by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. I am concerned with features of the account common to the Grundlagen and the Tractatus, some of which are also present in Frege's later writings despite the identification of sentences with proper names. Throughout this paper I also assume that there is no problem about the kind of meaning which proper names have.

8 Pap, Arthur, ‘Types and Meaninglessness’, Mind 69 (1960), 47Google Scholar.

9 ‘Notes Dictated to G. E. Moore’, in Notebooks, 1914–1916, 107.

10 Unpublished notes taken by Margaret Macdonald of lectures on ‘Personal Experience’, Michaelmas 1935. The quoted passage is from the lecture of 24 October 1935; I have altered the punctuation and omitted a parenthetical remark (see note 1 above) which I believe is Miss Macdonald's.

11 ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, 1953), 39. Later in the same article, Quine says that with Frege the statement rather than the term came to be recognized as the unit accountable to an empiricist critique—as the unit of empirical significance in that sense in which, for Quine himself, the unit is the whole of science.

12 Dummett, op. cit., 3.

13 Hacker, P. M. S., in ‘Semantic Holism’ (in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, Luckhardt, C. G. (ed.) (Cornell University Press, 1979), 213–242),Google Scholar interprets Frege in an entirely different way. On his view, (1) Frege's remark about its being through the sense of the whole that the parts get their content renders it prima facie unintelligible that we should understand new sentences composed of known expressions (p. 221), and (2) the difficulty for Frege is resolved only when he later effectively replaced the doctrine that a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence by the idea that the sense of a sentence is made up of the senses of its constituent parts and is given by its truth-conditions (pp. 221, 225). While Hacker himself would reject a psychological account of meaning, his interpretation in fact rests on just such an account. He misses Frege's own reasons for thinking that one will identify the meanings of words with ideas if one takes the view that they have meaning outside the context of sentences, and he takes the reasons to depend on peculiarities of Frege's early theory of meaning (p. 218). This leaves him unable to see how Frege's argument applies to the account he himself gives.

14 I have discussed Frege's view in more detail in ‘Frege and Nonsense’, in Intention and Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G. E. M. Anscombe, Diamond, Cora and Teichman, Jenny (eds) (Harvester Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

15 See McDowell, John, ‘On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name’, Mind 86 (1977), especially p. 159,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Davidson, Donald, ‘Truth and Meaning’, Synthese 17 (1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.