The Logic of Sense - Five

Notes taken while reading the 5th chapter of "The Logic of Sense"

Fifth Series of ... sense

Sense = The frontier between denotation and expression.

When i designate an object in a proposition, i suppose the sense is understood (is already there).

1st Paradox: (of sense)
The paradox of regress (Frege's Paradox) ... I can never state the sense of what i am saying ... but that sense of what i have said can be the object (can be designated by) another proposition. The sense of that proposition, in turn, cannot state its own sense, yet another porposition is needed ... and on and on.

underlined ... "the infinite power of language to speak about words"

The sense of a proposition about a state of affairs can be denoted by another proposition ... a regression when trying to talk "about" ... Frege's Paradox (per names) ... infinite proliferation of entities (senses, as entities, subsist, not exist).

Frege's Paradox is also Carroll's Paradox as expressed by the meeting of Alice and the Knight (Through the Looking Glass) when they talk about the song 'Haddock's Eyes'.

Also used by Carol when Alice is talking to the Duchess in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ... the Duchesses use of the "and the moral of that is ..." regression.

Underlined ... Duchess quote ... "You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk."

{Aside - When speaking of poetry i like to tell students, by way of misquoting the Duchess, "take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself." The Duchess actually says the opposite, that taking care of the sense and let the sound take care of itself.}


2nd Paradox: (of sense)
The Paradox of sterile division (Stoic's Paradox)

If one tries to get around Frege's Paradox by division, the result will be sterile.

Example ... usage of "God is". ("to be" usage commonly entry here). The phrase may try (may succeed?) in having its own sense, but is sterile.

Underlined ... "All the way down [from the Stoics] to Husserl, there resounds the declaration of a splendid sterility of the expressed, soming to confirm the status of the noema ..."

The notion of sense forces either the path of regression or sterility.

Sense is indifferent to affirmation or negation ... so ...


3rd Paradox: (of sense)
The Paradox of Neutrality

... sense is not passive and not active

Example ... "God is" and "God is not" have the same sense.

This is parallel to examples from the early chapters about the likeness of the statments "becomming larger" and "becomming smaller". If time is neutral, these statements mean the same thing, its just a matter of which direction we point time's arrow.

Sense does not affirm or deny the truth of propostiions. Therefore propositions that differ only in truth claims have the same sense.

Deleuze parallels sense and essense ... in the same way that the universal and the particular might be the state of some essense (in Aristotelian thought) without expressing essense fully, so to sense might be a state of propositions and denotations without being expressed fully by either.

Sense is indifferent to ... universal and sigular, general and particular, and affirmation and negation.


4th Paradox: (of sense)
The Paradox of the Absurd.

Propositions which designate contradictory objects have no denotation ... they are absurd.

Examples ... the circular square of the white patch of black.

... but they have a sense. They are not nonsense.

This is Meinong's Paradox.