Logic of Nonsense ~ The Power of Nonsense
I have discovered a hidden collective cognitive flaw that impairs our ability to think cogently about some very fundamental problems of science, philosophy, and religion. I am a psychiatrist and professor of philosophy and logic. During my almost fifty-year career, I have examined a glitch that is practically built into the way we think. When Aristotle c
odified logic twenty-three hundred years ago, he left a gap, an area of incompleteness that compromises our ability to think rationally about important questions that don’t fit easily into the literal frame of language. Linguists describe the language on a spectrum of intelligiblity from the highly literal to the figurative to the unintelligible or nonsensical. We do very well in thinking about literal, true, or false statements. However, when it comes to figurative language, most of our thinking takes place on the preconscious level of the mind. We do even worse with language that is nonsensical or unintelligible. Nonsense, or unintelligible language is confined almost entirely toe the unconscious domain of thought. Nonsense, deliberate nonsense is all around us, but we hardly notice it. Nonsense is a vital structural component of popular songs, humor, cartooning, and advertising. Inadvertent nonsense occurs in numerous medical conditions including delirium, various intoxications, sever stress during life threatening emergencies, and psychoses. Yet whether nonsense is deliberate or inadvertent, it has the same underlying structure. Either way, nonsense exerts its strange powers over our minds largely out of conscious awareness. I have developed an intensive educational program that awakens a dormant power of the mind by setting out the internal logic of meaningless, unintelligible length university courses on nonsense to students of psychology, philosophy, logic, and literature. Student response to this course has been overwhelmingly positive. Students who took the course spontaneously reported it improved their critical analytic and creative thinking skills. In autumn of 2013, I plan to introduce this course to students at two private high schools for bright college bound students. I expect that this weill prove to be of real benefit to these students when they attend college. Teaching the program to elementary and secondary school students will I believe, help raise the level of critical thinking in our own country. I have found that almost everyone, Americans, Europeans, and Orientals, alike harbor four major conceptions about nonsense. These deeply entrenched misconceptions have heretofore been virtually immune to rational connection. Together, they cause a collective cognitive deficit that is a hidden source of error in the reasonings about some important questions in many field of inquiry. Specifically, these misconceptions are as follows:
Nonsense is inherently bad and undesirable.
“Nonsense” is a pejorative term and many people have an almost visceral, negative reaction to it. In reality, however, nonsense is almost exclusively a good thing. For example, scat singing, and doo-wop songs, which bring delight to millions of people, are composed of nonsense.
2. Nonsense is associated with nonexistence, unreality, and chaos. The prefix “non-” confuses people. They assume that nonsense is the absence of meaning and has no actual existence in itself. In reality however, nonsense is a more complex phenomenon than ordinary meaningful language. Nonsense is in effect, a supervenient forum of language which has is own rationally discernible structure and the internal rules which nonsense operates, we can expand our minds and open new pathways toward comprehending many previously unanswered questions.
3. Nonsense is the same as falsehood. Many people use the word “nonsense” as though it were equivalent to “false” but this is a major mistake. In fact, to say that a statement is false pesupposes that it has an intelligible meaning and hence is not nonsense. Although that may sound like pedantic hair-splitting, the reality is otherwise. Understanding the distinction between nonsense and falsehood is indispensable for thinking logically about numerous mysteries on the frontiers of knowledge.
4. Nonsense is unknowable, unfathomable, and utterly beyond the scope of reason and logic. In fact, however, nonsense has now yielded its secrets to rigorous rational analysis. Surprisingly, unintelligibility itself is a rationally, comprehensive phenonmenon. Understanding why that is so unleashes previously unknown cognitive capacities of the mind. For more than two thousand years, we have assumed that nonsense is an Indecipherable, illogical, irrational, quanity. Now we know that nonsense is a complex domain of language and the mind that operates by its own internal rules and principles. For example, I have identified over seventy distinct types of nonsense. To receive updated information on my "Logic of Nonsense" seminar, send a
Subject Request: "Logic of Nonsense" Conference Updates" to
Email address: [email protected]
The program will take place at the Contemporary Hotel at Walt Disney World, Florida
"LOGIC of NONSENSE" Conference
January 17, 18, 2014
Contemporary Hotel at Walt Disney World, Florida.
