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The  Stuff of Thought

Q: How did you start out in music?
A: I started out crying.
From an interview with Bob Marley

"The sentence as a unit in prose style is best approached from the evolutionary standpoint suggested by Jespersen. The further back we go in the history of known languages, the more we find that the sentence was one indissoluble whole in which those elements we are accustomed to think of as single words were not yet separated. Jesperson says too, that we must think of primitive language ‘consisting (chiefly at least) of very long words, full of difficult sound, and sung rather than spoke’.

This supports the view I wish to advance as to the function of the sentence in prose writing. The sentence is a single cry. It is a unit of expression, and its various qualities—length, rhythm, and structure—are determined by a right sense of this unity."

Herbert Read
English Prose Style 

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The Metaphysics of Sentences

One of the weirdest things about your brain is the fact that sentences, born as a product of thought, emerge from you as real things in so far as they all have real properties of structure and content. That is to say, they exist in a realm somewhere between disembodied ideas and those strings of words we all produce on sound waves in the air or as marks on paper or as circuits on a chip. And yet, how these "things" are created eludes our understanding. We just seem to have some sort of magic filter somewhere in our brain that picks out real sentences from jumbles of words and casts the non-sentence material onto the junk heap of the incomplete or unintelligible. Single words (or names) are often proposed to be the basic blocks of language, but I think the sentence has the greater claim for this distinction. (Appanrently, Ludwig Wittgenstein thought so too, but he may have gotten that idea from Gotlieb Frege.)

We know a sentence when we see or hear (or even think) one, even as infants. No one taught us this. And no one has successfully explained how or even why this happens. It might as well  have come from outer space. This is important – important, at least, to the peculiar little world of this website. Because it helps to realize that you are playing with this weird gift every time you utter a sentence.

There are two ways of grasping the idea of a sentence. Both are more or less theoretical  depending on one’s perspective. Let me try to get at these two approaches to a sentence through the well-established terrain of mathematics. To do this you will have to, at least to begin with, force yourself to see a sentence, for convenience sake, as just a collection of numbers. There are an infinite number of numbers (1+1+2+3+4 . . . .) and there are an infinite number of sentences.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION 

Mathmeticians deal with all kinds of numbers – real numbers, whole numbers, negative numbers, imaginary number, surds, etc. But there is another distinction that is going to be useful here. And that is the difference between a number and a numeral. I could explain this, but I think I’d rather you hear it from a mathematician – or two. 

So with credit to Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, I quote from their now-legendary little book Godel’s Proof:

(p. 82 footnote)