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Wolfgang Pauli is often credited with coining the phrase "not even wrong." However, the concept of nonsense obviously predates this. In debate, opponents may sometimes dismiss theories as being "not even wrong", to imply that the theory is not well-formed in some sense, and so cannot be debated (since it does not follow the rules of debate).

Taking our language of discourse to be first-order logic, it is relatively easy to check a "statement" for syntactical errors. Contradictions are actually hard to find. Is there another sense in which a statement can be "not even wrong"? Either way, how can we go about checking whether a statement is "not even wrong"?

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    "Not even wrong" is too vague to start talking about how you test for it. The first step is to analyze what sorts of statements this vague description would apply to. Commented yesterday
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    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong -- The point is that the statement is obviously so far from reasonable. either in premises or logic, that it isn't worth the effort to demonstrate the problems with it.
    – keshlam
    Commented yesterday
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    The following is a whole blog on Pauli's saying "Das ist nicht einmal falsch" (not even wrong). Several physicists are asked and they report different answers about the context. Of course no earwitness is stil alive. But Pauli's comment is meant as the severest form of his kind of criticism.
    – Jo Wehler
    Commented yesterday
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    I can't figure out what he meant by that phrase. As best as I can recall, he was referring to a young physicist's paper on relativity (?). Pauli was not known for his humility, but everybody loved him. God bless his soul.
    – Hudjefa
    Commented yesterday
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    Davy Crockett is sometimes credited with saying, "That don't even make good nonsense" which is probably not philosophically equivalent but is somewhat related. I have the impression that "not even wrong" was a similar sort of joke.
    – Wastrel
    Commented 17 hours ago

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With formal languages, we say that only statements produced according to the syntactical rules have sense.

In natural language it is not so easy: we may produce syntactically correct statements that are nonsensical, i.e. meaningless.

See Chomsky's well-known example: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

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    Your Chomsky reference reminded me of the funny example of two statements that are each simultaneously nonsensical as well as perfectly sensible, depending on how you choose to interpret each: "Fruit flies like a banana. Time flies like an arrow." The sensible interpretation of the first makes nonsense of the second, and vice versa (but at least it's funny:).
    – eigengrau
    Commented 18 hours ago

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