Topics Language

Question If I say that all faces are beautiful, the word "beautiful" is meaningless, because, as far as I can see, it only has meaning if something can be "ugly". Now what if I say that all music is perfect, does that make sense? I think not, but it's not as obvious why not. What if I say that all days are cold, does that make sense? It might, if there was some kind of independent standard of coldness, which all days complied with. I'm looking for some kind of rule which tells me what kind of sentences of the form all X is Y are meaningless and what kind of sentences are not. Is there a rule? Thank you.

Accepted:
July 11, 2006

Comments

It was a central goal of Logical Positivism to discover a criterion for meaningfulness. None was ever formulated that satisfied anyone for very long.

There are a couple more specific things to be said here. First, it would not follow that "All faces are beautiful" is meaningless even if, as you claim, "beautiful" was meaningful only if "something can be 'ugly'". For one thing, there may well be other things---feces, perhaps---that are not beautiful, and, as you state your claim, it isn't even required that something else should actually be ugly, only that something can be ugly. So it wouldn't even follow from that claim that "Everything is beautiful" is not meaningful, only that "Everything must be beautiful" was.

But I don't myself see why the meaningfulness of a word depends upon its applying only to some things and not to all things. On my view, though not on everyone's view, "exists" is a word that applies to everything. You might say that unicorns do not exist, so that the word "exist" does not apply to unicorns. But there aren't any unicorns, so they are not a counterexample. And that will be true of any apparent counterexample: If the word "exist" does not apply to something, then there aren't any of those things, so they aren't a counterexample. (There are, I should say, philosophers who would disagree with this reasoning: Richard Routley and Graham Priest are two.)

So I don't myself see that "All faces are beautiful" is meaningless, or even that "Everything must be beautiful" is.

By the way, it's probably not right to state this point in terms of what is meaningful. Your view isn't really that "Everything must be beautiful" ismeaningless. With me, you probably take that simply to be false: Fecesisn't beautiful, so not everything is beautiful, so not everything mustbe beautiful. It's tempting to say that your view is that "Everything must be beautiful" would bemeaningless if it were true. But how can something be both true and meaningless? Your view, rather, seems to be that not everything can be beautiful: that there must be something that is ugly. But now it should seem pretty bizarre how one could prove that there must be something that is ugly simply by abstract considerations connected with meaning.