This little piece by netfriend Richard Harter, who apparently predates coal, serves to demonstrate that philosophers really aren't clever enough at thinking up counterexamples...
The sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", was presented by Chomsky, as a great example of a series of words strung together randomly. Not only is it grammatical according to the lexical classification, and non-sense on a semantic level. Or so goes the claim. But is the claim correct?
A green idea is, according to well established usage of the word "green" is one that is an idea that is new and untried. Again, a colorless idea is one without vividness, dull and unexciting. So it follows that a colorless green idea is a new, untried idea that is without vividness, dull and unexciting. To sleep is, among other things, is to be in a state of dormancy or inactivity, or in a state of unconsciousness. To sleep furiously may seem a puzzling turn of phrase but one reflects that the mind in sleep often indeed moves furiously with ideas and images flickering in and out.
So what is the poet telling us? (One assumes that the quoted line is from the work of a poet working in a medium of studied precision and ambiguity. Or rather, as we shall see...) Very simply the poet seems to be saying that new ideas, not yet sharply defined, circulate in the unconscious, rapidly altering at a furious rate.
One is left then with a question. Why is this nice bit of poetic imagery cited by its author as a quintessentially meaningless sentence? Here we have an exquisite bit of irony. The author evidently has a turn for poetry, a turn which he turns his face against. And the hidden face, the denied self, has taken its revenge. The scientist has called on his creative self to exhibit a bit of nonsense. The poet denied has replied with a sentence, apparently meaningless, which is no such thing when listened to with an attentive ear. And yet consider; this sentence is a very intellectualized production - it is indeed "colorless". It was, we suspect, a new idea, a variant of a possibility, still new at the very moment of production, one occurring by chance in the froth of the unconscious.
In short, the cited sentence was a colorless green idea that had slept furiously.
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:) That was very funny indeed!
Posted by: Flaky | November 27, 2007 5:12 AM
Very good. Meaning is such a personal thing, isn't it? Reminds me of the words to the famous rock song Stairway To Heaven, which everyone says are nice-sounding but meaningless fluff (although the author hasn't commented). But I've analyzed them and find them to be quite meaningful and poetic. Strange to realize that now in my classical dotage, and not in my guitar-banging days.
Posted by: jeff | November 27, 2007 12:41 PM
I also once thought of a "meaning" for CGISF, just as an exercise (though Harter, of course, is much funnier), which translates roughly as: "Certain environmental proposals, though deemed uninteresting and to be ignored, keep on coming up in discussion" (consider that in the context of a political news story headline).
My version relies heavily on metaphor and intentional irony, but it shows that "meaning" is heavily context-dependent, hence not easily reducible to a set of rules, as grammar is. Almost anything grammatical (and lots of things that aren't) could have a semantic content in some (possibly contrived) context.
Posted by: Eamon Knight | November 27, 2007 1:36 PM
And then of course there are jokes with double meaning, and metaphors, and poetry. In "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening", is Robert Frost talking about suicide, or not?
I think it could also be argued that "meaning" is a subset of qualia. When you suddenly grasp or comprehend an idea, it can be a memorable experience in your consciousness, in the same way that the smell of coffee, and all of its instant associations, have personal "meaning" to you - it is an experience impossible to capture in its entirety, in formulas or words.
Posted by: jeff | November 27, 2007 2:32 PM
Leonard Bernstein, in his Harvard Lectures in 1974, uses exactly that sentence not as an example of "meaningless"-ness, but as an example of how a poetic surface structure can be derived from a deep structure through Chomsky's transformational grammer. In other words, one starts with the true, complete meaning, transform that into prose (most often through the process known as deletion), then transform that prose surface structure into a metaphorical surface structure we call poetry, using exactly the same transformations that created the prose conversational structure.
As more aspects of the structure and original meaning are deleted, more ambiguity arises, but the great irony is that as this happens, the poets expressive power increases.
Chomsky doesn't directly deny this power, it actually became a part of his later work. But at the time he invented that meaningless sentence, his primary focus was on prose and conversational language, not on art.
As such, the author of the excerpt kinda missed the point. It was never meant, at the time Chomsky presented it, to be called poetry. The context was on the directness of language, not the ambiguity of poetry and the power of our interpretive mind to resolve the ambiguities rather than discard them. The very fact that the author above went to that poetic level (and *assumed* that poetic level was the intent) effectively supports Bernstein's point, that our minds MUST reach for that poetic interpretation.
Posted by: Joe Shelby | November 27, 2007 4:16 PM
Must our minds reach for that poetic interpretation? Given the original context of Chomsky's sentence it never occurred to me to try to seek one, despite having quoted it a few times myself. Or I possibly understood the futility of trying; it's been a while. Harter gets points for self-reference.
Aside from that... "predates coal?" Please---nothing that makes me think of Ed Conrad can be good.
Posted by: John Vreeland | November 27, 2007 7:19 PM
John, for that clever bit of analysis you deserve a copy of Pooh and the Millenium by John Tyerman Williams, a solemnly tongue-in-cheek analysis of how Winnie the Pooh, exemplifies the wisdom of the ages in new-age woo-fields and old-time claptrap, sort of in the style of "The Gospel according to 'Peanuts'."
Posted by: Monado | December 2, 2007 10:24 PM