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Esar comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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Suppose I have two different non-meaningful statements, A and B. Is it possible to tell them apart? On what basis? On what basis could we recognize non-meaningful statements as tokens of language at all?
Connotation. The statement has no well-defined denotation, but people say it to imply other, meaningful things. Islam is a religion of peace!
Good answer. So, if I've understood you, you're saying that we can recognize meaningless statements as items of language (and as distinct from one another even) because they consist of words that are elsewhere and in different contexts meaningful.
So for example I may have a function "...is green." where we can fill this in with true objects "the tree", false objects "the sky" and objects with render the resulting sentence meaningless, like "three". The function can be meaningfully filled out, and 'three' can be the objet of a meaningful sentence ('three is greater than two') but in this connection the resulting sentence is meaningless.
Does that sound right to you?
OTOH, there is no reason to go along with the idea that denotion (or empirical consequence) is essential to meaning. You could instead use you realisation that you actually can tell the difference between untestable statements to conclude that they are in fact meaningful, whatever warmed-over Logical Positivism may say.
It's not useful to know they are meaningful if you don't know the meaning.
I wouldn't agree with this. Knowing whether or not something is meaningful is potentially quite a lot of information.
You do know the meaning. Knowing the meaning is what tells you there is no denotation. You know there is no King of France because you know what "King" and "France" mean.
Why would you want to?
See this.
Not sure how this is relevant, feel free to elaborate.
What an odd thing to say. I can tell the difference between untestable sentences, and that's all I need to refute the LP verification principle. Stipulating a defintion of "meaning" that goes beyond linguistic tractability doens't solve anything , and stipulating that people shouldn't want to understand sentences about invisible gorillas doens't either.
Seems like we are not on the same page re the definition of meaningful. I expect "invisible gorillas" to be a perfectly meaningful term in some contexts.
I don't follow that, because it is not clear whether you are using the vanilla, linguistic notion of "meaning" or the stipulated LPish version,
I am not a philosopher and not a linguist, to me meaning of a word or a sentence is the information that can be extracted from it by the recipient, which can be a person or a group of people, or a computer, maybe even an AI. Thus it is not something absolute. I suppose it is closest to an internal interpretation. What is your definition?
I am specifically trying not to put forward an idiosyncratic definition.
How are you encoding the non-meaningful statements? If they're encoded as characters in a string, then yes we can tell them apart (e.g. "fiurgrel" !== "dkaldjas").
Why do you want to tell them apart?