There's no way to prove a text is meaningless

Negation: There is a way to prove a text is meaningless 0 0 0

0 Arguments

0 Citations

1 Consequence

2 Mentions

Arguments

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Opposing Arguments

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Consequences

Argument #6709ec9c 1 0 2

If it is true that...

People often stay quiet when things are hard to understand, even if they suspect they're nonsense 1 0 2

and

There's no way to prove a text is meaningless 1 0 2

Then it must be true that...

Most people who suspect philosophy is a waste of time study other subjects instead 1 0 2

Mentions

Paul Graham/How to do Philosophy

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Related Propositions

Committing to a specific sequence of words in writing requires more precision than speaking, where tone and context can carry meaning 1 0 2 There is no satisfactory proof for the existence of a supernatural being 1 0 2 It's hard to distinguish something that's hard to understand due to unclear writing from something that's hard to understand due to complex ideas 1 0 2 There's a market for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven 1 0 2 Though a writer starts by knowing what he means, the reader doesn't 0 0 1 For pragmatic, utilitarian purposes, watermarking media is neither necessary or sufficient 0 0 1 Doing real-world things to establish that authors didn't exist or the events did not happen is both a lot of work and itself highly unreliable 0 0 1 Synthetic media has no truth or semantics to begin with 0 0 1 In trying to watermark synthetic media, we don't need to worry about preserving its truth or semantics 0 0 1 Watermarking generated media with an error-ensuring code would fail to preserve the its truth or semantics 0 0 1