Cogito ergo sum Logic and rhetoric |
Key articles |
General logic |
Bad logic |
“”It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, |
—William Shakespeare's Macbeth[1] |
An argument by gibberish is one that relies on nonsense, inscrutable words, or impenetrable jargon, i.e. gibberish. An argument by gibberish is a formal fallacy and is a type of non sequitur. Because the argument by gibberish is nonsensical, it may also try to rely on an appeal to emotion by verbal inflection, shouting, or use of emotive phrases (e.g., "Hell, I was born here!") that are tangential to the argument.
The form of the argument by gibberish is:
For example:
The argument by gibberish differs from word salad in that word salad may or may not be part of an argument. However, word salad can form one or more of the premises/conclusions of arguments by gibberish. The statements may fail in having incoherent premises/conclusions (meaning it may be non-sequitur/unsound).
If one wants people to understand them, one must balance complexity and precision: complex language can increase our specificity, but it can also hamper it. Writers of gibberish deliberately increase complexity to minimize specificity. They hope that by obscuring their arguments: (a) the audience won't realize that they have nothing to say, or (b) that the audience will think that it is just not clever enough to understand the argument. Writers who wish to avoid gibberish will increase complexity only when there is a marked (and necessary) increase in precision.
Since an Argument by Gibberish is, in fact, gibberish, some argue that it isn't technically applicable to call it a "fallacy" per se. One wouldn't call the angry shrieking of a rabid squirrel "fallacious," for example.
“”There ain't no way that nobody is going to leave this town! Hell, I was born here and I was raised here… and goddamn it, I'm going to die here! And no sidewinder, bushwhacking, hornswoggling… cracker croaker, is going to ruin my biscuit-cutter!"
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—Gabby Johnson from the film Blazing Saddles |
Or in syllogistic form:
“”The church is exceptionally endowed also with items of architectural interest. You will note that our chantry displays the crocketted and finialled ogee, which marks it as very early perpendicular. The bosses to the pendant are typical. And I always say that my west window has all the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily any of the concomitant crudities of his period.
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—Parson Henry D’Ascoyne from the film Kind Hearts and Coronets[2] |
“”There is no teacher on Earth qualified to teach Nature's Harmonic Simultaneous 4-Day Rotating Time Cube Creation Principle, and therefore, there is no teacher on Earth worthy of being called a certified teacher.
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—Time Cube |
—TempleOS[3] |
—QAnon drop #155[4] |
SMOG (simplified measure of gobbledygook) is a tool for assessing the complexity of language, and from its use, one is better prepared to judge if a piece of text is gibberish or not. SMOG measures the reading level required to understand a text based on the number, on average, of syllables per word.
An example of a text analyzed by SMOG from the heights (or depths, depending on one's skepticism of postmodernism) of cognition comes from Deleuzian philosopher Dr Alberto Toscano:
The criticism of our time… is indissociable from an investigation and experience of its transcendental field(s), of the (impersonal) tendencies and haecceities which traverse it, as well as the potentialities, utopian ones perhaps, with which our present can be composed. This 'geological' aspect of 'total critique' is essential to a dislocation of the present as atrophy and stultifying repetition of doxa.[5]
SMOG grade of 18.97=post-graduate degree required.[6][5][7]