Séminaire PhilSci

À cette occasion, nous aurons le plaisir d’écouter : 

Ilenia Amitrano (Université de Sienne), qui fera un exposé (exceptionnellement en anglais) intitulé : "(Counter)sense, nonsense, and Grammaticality. A Husserlian perspective".

Résumé : By examining the architecture of natural language, one observes that the domain typically labelled as the realm of “nonsense” encompasses a wide range of expressions which, although grammatically well-formed (Chierchia 2013; Pistoia-Reda 2024), fail to meet an essential condition for meaningfulness, namely, access to a propositional content that is potentially capable of expressing something true or being interpretable within the traditional framework of referential semantics. This analysis will focus on case studies involving expressions such as “Square circle”, showing that, upon closer inspection, such constructions may possess sense, despite conveying contradictory or ontologically impossible content.

Husserl (1900-01) identifies a deeper stratum of constraints on meaning, one that is independent of historical contingencies and grounded instead in a priori laws governing the ideal domain of meanings (Bar-Hillel 1957), concerning their interdependence, connection, and transformation. These laws determine what can logically coexist within a linguistic structure capable of bearing sense. On this view, the grammatical rules of well-formedness operative in natural languages appear as more or less systematic and differentiated manifestations of these transcendental principles of sense. This contribution aims (i) to delineate the linguistic boundaries within which the conferral of sense to linguistic sounds occurs, and (ii) to identify the criteria that mark the threshold between meaningful, absurd, and nonsensical linguistic structures.