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From: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Fun with the semantics of paradox
Summary: A sequence of meaningless words.
Keywords: Undecidable, Ambiguous, Meaningless
Message-ID: <43765@linus.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jan 89 14:08:59 GMT
References: <1883@buengc.BU.EDU> <2996@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <905@ubu.warwick.UUCP> <7282@venera.isi.edu>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry Kort)
Organization: Neuro-Linguistic Deprogramming, Wordsworth, MA
Lines: 22

In article <7282@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP
(Stephen Smoliar) writes about the distinction between "meaningless
sentences" and "non-well-formed sentences":

 > This has been giving me trouble, too.  Another possible interpretation
 > is that "meaningless" refers to sentences that are not well-formed; 
 > but then, of course, they are not really sentences, in which case it
 > does not make sense to talk of their having truth values.

I guess the semanticists can have a field day with this one.  I tried
to avoid the problem by referring to "locutions" as candidates for
classification into the categories True, False, Undecided, Ambiguous,
and Meaningless.

I have no problem defining "sentence" to exclude meaningless sequences
of words.  But we still need a category in which to toss such junk.
Ordinarily, a locution (would-be sentence) is granted the dignity
of sentencehood (innocent until proven guilty).  But such civility
does not preclude the necessity of dealing with the occasional
utterance of nonsense.

--Barry Kort