jimrandomh comments on "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" - Less Wrong
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I define gibberish as "difficult to understand and entirely or almost entirely meaningless". I think Plotinus and Foucault are "difficult to understand and entirely or almost entirely false". A statement is meaningless if it either fails to follow rules of syntax, i.e. "Running the the snacks on quickly!" or semantics, i.e. "Green ideas sleep furiously."
The distinction is actually pretty important. If you know something is meaningless then you can move on, but you can't decide something is false without first considering the argument, obfuscated or not.
There is some middle ground when it comes to arguments about things that don't exist. The trinity argument (and probably Plotinus) appeals to something that doesn't exist and so it says things that would be meaningful if the holy trinity was real but can't really be evaluated since there is no such thing. Obviously there is no reason for you to care much about this argument. But I don't think Hegel, Foucault or Heidegger and the other usual suspects are talking about things that don't exist.
So you maintain that anything which follows a few syntactic and semantic laws cannot be gibberish? I disagree; text can have meaning and still be gibberish. Consider a sequence of words drawn uniformly at random from a dictionary, then slotted into a repeating template like (noun) (verb) (article) (adjective) (noun). The template ensures that no rules of syntax are violated. A few constraints on the vocabulary can ensure there are no egregious violations of semantic rules, like green ideas and furious sleeping. Restrict the vocabulary to a few hundred concrete words and you can even ensure that every sentence makes a testable prediction. But it's definitely gibberish.
Well there are a lot of semantic rules and plenty that we've haven't formalized. So I'm not convinced anyone now alive could write such a program. But I'm not a programmer so maybe someone has proved me wrong. However,iIf they were successful I don't think I would consider the result gibberish- especially if each sentence made a testable prediction. In this case wouldn't some of the predictions be true? If so then it is clear that your definition is not broad enough.
Thats troubling since I had already concluded your definition was too broad because it seemed to include important but complex and falsified scientific claims,