GYJF [Get Your Juices Flowing] — a Summation of the Challenge
An effort to answer the question in the title is made first by examining the three-value logic of two natural language phrases, “Oh My God” and “This Makes Sense.” This leads to rejection of truth-value as representationally sufficient when the goal of evaluating utterances is sense-making or categorization.
Next the phrase “This Makes Sense” is analyzed so as to articulate persistent hurdles in efforts ontological or otherwise to ground natural language validation and modification. What is shown is that Frege’s sense, reference, and identity characterized each separately as valid operators are what anchors natural language. With this, the utility defined as true-sense is first visited.
Finally, a spatial configuration of three-value logic is presented and evaluated that does not represent as a truth table. Rather its eight 3-bit binary combinations represent through inverse point symmetry of values, resulting in no exclusion of null (000) or logical negations the way paradox-bound three-value logic truth tables do.
True-sense reveals the complex bivalent function of anchoring and inverse symmetry shows that additional useful constraints and shared sensibilities are possible. Indefinite turn-taking, at odds with true-sense, but seemingly necessary given natural language’s associative and relational properties and need to modify, in the same way organisms adapt to their environment, is dislodged as a necessary condition. While turn-taking necessarily both expands and mires the associative and relational structures of natural language, in light of anchoring through true-sense, representational capacity is demonstrated to be something else.
Resolving ambivalence serves purposes such as sense-making and categorization and is a useful activity for natural language modification. Representational capacity viewed as reference-neutral complex bivalence accounts for true-sense and anchoring such that natural language modification may not be susceptible to game-play vagaries. Defining true-sense anchors in logical terms, it is possible to conceive of natural language repair whereas difficulty in trusting natural language representational capacity currently persists.
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The puzzle part to hold as you read and interpret further is that the framework explored herein intersects, though likely not in ways you expect, the disciplines of linguistics, semantics, philosophy, logic, machine learning, cognitive science. Secondarily, it will evoke for some semiotics (such as catastrophe theory), group dynamics (such as transaction systems model of collective intelligence), developmental psychologies, and communication (such as paraspsychological and interspecies). Be careful not to get attached to particular thinkers or theories as you go. In the end, you arrive at your answer — an enhanced sense, really — regarding the question, first, “how are the sense true” and only then “Might true-sense anchors repair the representational capacity of natural language?”
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“How Are the Senses True,” a short three-part series by Jesuit priest Pierre Bouscharen published in 1927, challenged a number of philosophical “vagaries” that vex investigations of semantics even today [1]. His observations and reasoning in applying “how” to the senses, as in the complex perceptual and relational experience of an individual, beg two larger and still open questions. How sense is made in the first place and how it seems both true and not true that the truth of sense itself is a groundless state.
The title of this article is itself a question. The connection to Bouscharen’s inquiry is that, with a decent answer we may lift out of the groundless state and achieve new capacities one can only imagine are there without its non-existence.
The representativeness of semantics notwithstanding, in the modern communication landscape the need for sense in its widest connotation has more than withstood - it has been amplified by - the test of time. Senses meet data, still mysteriously, such that realism, idealism, and perception triumvirate. The logical landscape is endless and complex approaching senses and data. Those reasoning long ago about intuitional logic in maths anticipated much that would be relevant of such an amplification.
To meet the challenge, I provide herein reasoning whereby true-sense anchoring is shown as an undeveloped potential dormant within three-value logic. Since it is complex and novel and I have limited space, my goal will simply be to present the framing and various schema required to grasp it. The wider implications, of which there are many, will focus on the general intent of and potential for representational capacity and repair.
I begin by blending a rudimentary form of truth-value that employs Frege’s relational categories of sense, reference, identity with Peircean three-value logic [2,3]. Generally, Frege’s postulated truth-value explicates certainty of sense and reference within natural language utterances, and three-value logic employs truth tables.
I develop a blended schema that accounts for generation of sensible meanings then another that is an altogether different way of combining the same truth three-value binary combinations to achieve a complex, anchored dually bivalent schema. It provides a wide range of logical formulations, including language representations, commiserate with nature defined broadly such as Miguel Espinoza provides for in A Theory of Intelligibility [4].
Rather than the meanings of utterances, valid in a given context or not, valuable in a given context or not, as the basis for the recontextualization that is a hallmark of representational phenomena in general and linguistic phenomena in particular, I posit that utterances are grounded in true-sense to the degree they have representational capacity that is free from bivalent logic traps and mirrors an experience of “I” in context constrained only by perceptual realities. So as to be useful in performing the function of anchoring, the formulation of true-sense distinguishes such a definition of anchoring from idealistic internalism. Though Espinoza does not use the phrase true-sense nor present a specific schema for repair, for instance, applying the ultimate natural category to natural language, he does deftly challenge Putnum’s internalism and suggest reliance on natural language functional capacity in hopes of supplanting it when he observes:
We cannot treat understanding a sentence as knowing its truth conditions… The idealism inscribed here is evident when there is ontological disagreement among our best descriptions: the internalist has only a conventional way of making a decision since for him there is no fact of the matter [4].
It is through true-sense that natural language utterances are anchored, that is, realistically grounded in representational capacities beyond the utterer. As well, whenever truth conditions are idealized, novelty and innovation (convention-bucking) are implied and at times quite useful to less common (or even rationally perceptible) purposes of and capacities for understanding. Computationally, the connotation of an effective capacity of natural language that is enhanced by true-sense suggests that much capacity lies untapped, waiting for us to enhance personal and relational agency through natural language true-sense anchors.