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.