The elucidation of these global parameters [of being]... is absolutely necessary if one wishes to understand how our intellect operates through language, by means of language. It's a very ambitious task, but sufficiently interesting that one ought to run the risk of being reproached for being too ambitious. — Rene Thom, in Parables, Parabolas, and Catastrophes
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.
Related Resources
Nesting and Channeling of Semantic-Syntactic Information
Natural Language Repair | Role of Anchors
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The puzzle: the framework explored herein interweaves, 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.