Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

• J.L. Austin once began a paper by listing specimens of sense and specimens of nonsense. I shall do the same.
• Specimens Of Sense
  1. His doctor told him he must not go on abusing his body that way.
  2. Anatomy is the study of the structure of the human body.
  3. Alice told James she hungered for his body.
  4. His body was covered with scars.
  5. The force of the explosion had nearly torn his limbs from his body.
  6. A brain might be removed from one body and implanted in another.
  7. The undertaker laid out Alfred’s body.
  8. I believe in the Resurrection of the Body ...
• Specimens Of Nonsense
  1. A person is [is not] identical with his body.
  2. It is reasonable for each of us to believe that thoughts and feelings are associated with other human bodies.
  3. A person might have [could not have] different bodies at different stages of his career.
  4. I might [could not] have had a different body from the one I have.
  5. There might [could not] be two persons inhabiting the same body.
  6. That poor girl in the hospital is really dead, even though the doctors are keeping her body alive.
  7. It is an open question whether, when I use the word I, I refer to my body or to some other thing.
  8. After the Resurrection, one will [will not] have the same body one has in the present age.
• My purposes in this paper are to explain in what sense of ‘nonsense’ I contend (A) — (H) are nonsense, to argue for the conclusion that (A) — (H) are nonsense, and to explain why my arguments do not lead to the absurd conclusion that (1) — (8) are nonsense.
• In what sense do I think (A) — (H) are nonsense? This claim, I admit, is a carelessly stated one. I do not mean that the English sentences displayed above are ‘nonsense’. To call a syntactically correct English sentence made of real English words ‘nonsense’ must be to claim that that sentence could not be used by someone speaking English to express a proposition, ask a question, issue a command, and so on. Or, at least, it must be to claim that that sentence could not be so used unless words were to change their meanings, or unless the user and his audience had established some special convention (“If I say, ‘The Absolute is subsumed under a continuum of porous variation’, I’ll mean ‘Orcutt is the spy’”). And I think that at least some among (A) — (H) are not ‘nonsense’ in this sense. Take (E), for example. This sentence might be used by an English-speaking interplanetary explorer to convey to the other members of his expedition, among whom no special linguistic conventions are in force, a fact about the distribution of population in a certain cluster of planetoids.
• So I am not calling sentences nonsense. What I mean is roughly this: typically when philosophers utter or inscribe sentences like (A) — (H), they are talking or writing nonsense.