CfP: Nonsense in Language and Thought
CFP: Nonsense in Language and Thought
Guest editor:
Krystian Bogucki (Polish Academy of Sciences)
Deadline for submissions:
the 31st of July 2026
Description:
Studia Semiotyczne (Semiotic Studies) invites submissions for a special issue of the journal. Papers should be written in English and prepared for blind review.
An interest in nonsense was a hallmark of the early analytic philosophy. Bertrand Russell (1908) thought that a theory of nonsense could help us avoid some daunting paradoxes in logic. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922, 1953) and Rudolf Carnap (1931) recognised nonsense as a fundamental concept for philosophical criticism. They claimed that much of philosophical discourse is defective in the most fundamental way: it is neither true nor false, it does not consist of thoughts and propositions ? it is nonsense. According to the early Wittgenstein, philosophers want to describe the nature of the world, thought, language and ethics, but they unwittingly fall into nonsense. The Tractatus was supposed to free us from this troublesome position by presenting a perspicuous notation. On the other hand, the later Wittgenstein claimed that we should compare deceptive philosophical images with our ordinary ways of thinking and speaking in order to avoid nonsense. Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday, so we must always remember the everyday use of concepts. For Carnap, propositions should be reducible to sense data and constructed according to the rules of logical syntax in order to be meaningful.
Later, the topic of nonsense was discussed by Alfred Ayer, Gilbert Ryle, Willard V. O. Quine, Arthur Prior, Richard Routley and Georg H. von Wright, among others. Since the late 1970s, however, the interest in nonsense has faded. Only recently, some important works have been published. The first important stimulus came from foundational works on theories of nonsense (Cappelen 2012, 2013; Camp 2004; Glock 2015; Magidor 2009, 2013). The second source of the revival of interest in nonsense was Wittgenstein scholarship on the austere and substantial conceptions of nonsense (Conant 2001; Diamond 1995, 2005; Glock 2004; Hacker 2003; Moore 2003; Sullivan 2003). Some works also examined the relation of nonsense to other phenomena (Gotham 2017, Keller and Keller 2021, Shaw 2015, Sorensen 2003).
The important questions to be addressed in the forthcoming volume are (to name but a few):
- What are the sources of nonsense?
- Are some parts of philosophical and non-philosophical discourse nonsense?
- What is the relation between nonsense and figurative speech?
- Is it at all possible to be wrong whether our own thoughts are meaningful?
We hope that the special issue of Studia Semiotyczne will further strengthen and deepen the scholarly interest in nonsense.
Theories of nonsenseIn order to submit the paper one is kindly asked to submit the manuscript by sending it to:
Nonsense and logical syntax
Nonsense and category mistakes
Nonsense and figurative speech (e.g. metaphor, metonymy)
Nonsense and fiction
History of the concept of nonsense (in particular Wittgenstein's and the Vienna Circle's views on nonsense)
Nonsense and understanding
Nonsense and illusions of sense
Nonsense and quantification
Nonsense and linguistics
Nonsense and ineffability
Nonsense, knowledge-how and knowledge-that
Logics of nonsense
Nonsense and semantic paradoxes
How to diagnose philosophical nonsense?
Metaphilosophical and methodological issues concerning nonsense
krystian.bogucki AT ifispan.edu.pl and studiasemiotyczne AT pts.edu.pl
All submitted papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed.
My source (and emphasis):
Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
