Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously...interpretations of Chomsky's famous statement.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously...interpretations of Chomsky's famous statement.

Ozymandias Ramses II seems to prefer using the phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" (or some variation, as I don't remember if that is the "exact" phrase he uses) to describe things which are semantically nonsensical, even if grammatically correct. Usually when discussing things like theological non-cognitivism which would be if someone said that the statement made no sense and therefore could not have a truth value of attached to it...but If one wanted to make that phrase semantically correct, could there be (at least) two ways of doing it?

1) By use of polsemy such that each word has more figurative meaning and can be re-interpreted in some other way, that doesn't change the over all meaning of the word, but only how the contextually or semantically the words operate with in the phrase.

2) Adhere to the Bertrand Russell approach that any sentence that is not true for what ever reason, is false...so if we said colorless green ideas with "ideas" being the operative noun and colorless green just being descriptors then it simple boils down to ideas don't sleep, since ideas are just concepts in a mind, but they do not have the ability to sleep, therefore the sentence is not true and therefore is false. So a propositional value could be attached that sentence. So here a theological non-cog could still attach a F value as the sentence is no longer meaningless to them in the sense of not being able to have a truth value attached to it (even if still semantically nonsensical)... it is just false because it is not true.

Thoughts?

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