Gary Childress wrote:
And if that is the case, how would "sense" and "nonsense" be respectively defined?
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Let's take it literally!
Most of logics, at least informal or verbose one invite us in considering premisses at the plural, to let us construct some inferences, at least two, the last being the conclusion.
Some singular premise in such is rare, and I think consider rather one sentence containing two (premisses) separated with a coma.
This told, a premise does not necessarily contain an implication. This is why they are most often plural (no sense is given with a simple - even true - proposition).
A particular counterexample, is the sophism, as:
-"Earth is spherical",
-"An orange is spherical";
-->"So, the earth is an orange".
The notion of sophism
is not a subjective prejudice a priori
Effectively, in this counterexample, the two "hypothesis" (rather than constituting a real premise because of what follow)
converge to a common (shared) property. But the "conclusion" does not conserve the "sense" (or the direction) of the second hypothesis.
Explicitly, an orange has something of a more general property, what obviously is not reversible, knowing that (if an orange is necessarily (with some admitted approximation) spherical), the proper general concept of spherical, nominating, the sphere is not necessarily an orange, and not even orange in colour.
The conclusion "respect" the sense of the first hypothesis, but does not conserve the sense of the second.
-A rectified possible example, were:
-The Earth is spherical,
-The sphere, when projected, is a circle,
-The circle cannot be the subject of an exact square approximation,
-So we cannot know exactly the measurement of the Earth's periphery.
-The contestation I would oppose against Wittgenstein, is that he consider only the results in a sense, what ignore totally the truth of the sense itself as a general processus.
-To illustrate my reflexion, I will show you some notions I have as a computer learner:
The most popular language about modeling is UML 2, said "Object oriented". Many programmer use this. But it is only a language, and not a method.
The real method over UML, is Unified Process.
So if Wittgenstein was living nowadays, his thought would lead to say if some intermediate results - punctual models - are true, but would not consider if, typically, their order, if their ordination is true.
And that can lead to a disaster, because we were believing that the results were true, while their sense was void !!
This is why I believe that Wittgenstein is mistaking.