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The Fallacy of Nonsense

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The Fallacy of Nonsense

Lewis Carroll was a professor of logic, writing among his well known works of fiction, treatises on the subject of logic and even a textbook, Symbolic Logic. “It is the function of logic to classify and formulate fallacious forms of argument as well as valid ones.” (Burks 367) So is it some of the functions of Carroll’s tales of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Presenting different puzzles, riddles, or what appears to be on the surface nonsense, Carroll in these books present many questions of logic and indirectly their solutions, challenging the ability of the reader to believe what has been presented. All his nonsensical puzzles can be either proved or disproved using some form of logic. “Not only is it not nonsense… it also contains, by implication, a great deal of excellent sense.” (Heath 51)

At one point in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a pigeon claims Alice to be a serpent, because serpents eat eggs, and Alice eats eggs. (Carroll A/T 47) The propositions would be then what is quantified in symbolic logic as universal, with the functional word “all”. Using the notation AE to represent the proposition “Alice eats eggs”, SE to represent “Serpents eat eggs”, concluding AS, “Alice is a serpent”, and “” to mean “therefore”, the argument is represented in simple terms as:

AE

}  AS

SE

In Symbolic Logic, Carroll represents this same argument as:

xm0

}(m being assumed to exist)  x’y’1

ym0

(Carroll SL 261) where x would represent Alice, y would represent ser...

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...es of Wonderland.” Nineteenth

Century Literature 41.2 (Sept 1986), 143-171.

Burks, Arthur W. “The Logic of Causal Propositions.” Mind 60.239 (July 1951), 363-382.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

Carroll, Lewis. Symbolic Logic. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1977.

Copi, Irving M. and Cohen, Carl. Introduction to Logic, Eleventh Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Corp. 2001.

Dewey, John and Bentley, Arthur F. “Definition”. Journal of Philosophy 44.11 (May 22, 1947), 281-306

Gardner, Martin. The Annotated Alice. New York: Book Craftsmen Associates, Inc. 1960.

Heath, Peter. The Philosopher’s Alice. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974

Houghton Mifflin Co. Webster’s II New Riverside Dictionary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1984
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