Colourless green idea sleeping furiously.
What does that mean?
This morning’s post Suicide: Why Not?, sparked jpj to observe that even those who say they don’t believe in meaning search for it – for example, in song lyrics.
It reminded me of something I heard on the All In The Mind podcast this week:
I think the big phenomenon that really fascinated [Gertrude Stein] about the brain was language, and she conducted language experiments in [William] James’s lab. I first started thinking about Gertrude Stein when I learned about Chomsky. And of course Chomsky demonstrated the deep structure of language with one of his famous examples about a colourless green idea sleeping furiously. For him this demonstrated how you could construct sentences which were nonsensical, which referred to nothing in the real world — and yet they were still grammatical. And Gertrude Stein actually came to a similar epiphany after some of her experiments in James’s lab where she tried to ‘write without thinking’, as she put it. And yet what struck her about those experiments was even when she came up with the strangest sentences, they meant nothing, they were still grammatical; she was still writing in the conventional structure of language. And that really got her thinking about what held our language together, why it was so hard to write about nothing, to write a completely meaningless sentence. And so these are the questions which I think really informed so much of her prose, which is famous for its difficulty….
I think Gertrude Stein in her work was in a sense raging against this innate structure. She was constantly trying to write a sentence with no meaning at all, to be completely linguistically abstract. And yet I think she was always frustrated by no matter how meaningless her sentences were the mind naturally imposed meaning on them, that we naturally parse sentences into sentence, object, verb, et cetera. And so they weren’t meaningless, and so we did make sense of them somehow. And so at the end of her career she eventually gives up and talks about how she now realises that it’s impossible to write a meaningless sentence because the mind naturally imposes meaning onto the sentence.
How amazing is that! Why are we so hard-wired to look for meaning? Share your thoughts.