3.5 Meaningful and meaningless in logic

All judgments are divided primarily into meaningful and meaningless. Only after this meaningful judgments can be divided into true and false. A meaningless proposition is obviously neither true nor false, it lies outside the "kingdom of truth." Entering into contact and seeking understanding, no one will use meaningless expressions that do not carry any content.

It is obvious that to see the meaning in everything, or, on the contrary, to catastrophically narrow its area is both erroneous and dangerous.

This “presumption of meaningfulness” is an important condition for communication. But such a presumption constantly displaces the meaningless from the sphere of attention and makes see some secret meaning, even where his pet.

It always seems that the intuitive notions of senselessness that we have are quite enough to detect and identify even the most subtle and veiled of its varieties. This confidence is not always, however, justified. The line between meaningful and meaningless is sometimes so shaky and indefinite that the past experience of recognizing meaningless is not able to help us.

Another common, but needing to clarify, opinion about a meaningless one is that it is something random and rare. In language, and ns only in it, everything seems to be penetrated and filled with deep meaning and you just need to be able to open it. Even inanimate nature sometimes seems to be spiritualized and something that speaks its own incomprehensible to the uninitiated language.

Senseless, of course, exists, but in its limited sphere. In addition to misunderstanding only as people’s misunderstanding of each other, there are also cases of absolute or close misunderstanding due to the lack of meaning as a real basis for understanding. If the meaningless interpretation is broad enough, to take into account the heterogeneity and uncertainty of his field, stretching from the usual "nonsense", "nonsense", "absurdity" and "nonsense" to exotic "nonsense" and "abracadabra", reflect on the diversity of the functions it can perform in the language communication of people, it can even be said that the meaningless is not such an extreme rarity.

Only statements are meaningless, as well as meaningful. Separate concepts, such as “book”, “the highest mountain peak”, “round square”, have a certain content, but they do not pretend to describe or evaluate something. Of these, you can make a statement, but in themselves they are not statements, and they can not be said that they are meaningful or meaningless.

The expression "Pushkin lived in Rome" describes a certain situation and is meaningful. True, we know that the poet never lived in Rome and this statement is false. But the phrase “If it rains, the tram” also claims to be a description, but this claim is clearly hanging in the air. There are no situations with which this expression could be compared to pi in the real, pi in any, the most sophisticated, fictional world.

Senseless is an unsuccessful attempt to speak out about the world. So unsuccessful, that in general any connection with him is cut off. Something similar would have happened if the high jumper had run away and suddenly jumped in length, or if the weightlifter had pushed his barbell in the manner of the nucleus. You can, of course, jump in length in the sector for high jumps and push the barbell into the distance. Physically this is feasible, but in terms of the accepted rules of the competition is a clear violation. Sports judges ns would understand such a "game in another game."

Mindless is always a conflict with the rules, going beyond the attitudes governing the communication of people with the help of language, and thus a breakdown of understanding and communication.

Another important point. Meaningfulness is not the same as truth, but meaninglessness is falsity. Only meaningful statements are true or false. Senseless is not true and not false. There is nothing to compare him with in reality, to say whether it corresponds to it or not.

To understand the meaning of a statement is to know in which situation it will be true and in which situation it will be false. The meaning sets the conditions for the truth of the utterance, and if we are not able to associate the utterance with such conditions, it is meaningless for us. Thus, the statement “If it rains, the tram” is meaningless, since it is impossible to imagine a situation in which it would turn out to be true or false.

Understanding of the meaning is connected only with the possible state of affairs, it does not give knowledge about their actual position. Everyone understands the meaning of the statement “There is life on Mars”, i.e. a possibility is known that can confirm it, and a possibility that can disprove it. But knowledge of how things really are with life on Mars, while no one has