I suspect that Ngo believes there's an interesting "dimension" along which we can use to justify why fuzzy truth values may be more useful than binary truth values that is "orthogonal" to "vagueness", "approximation", etc., and Ngo chooses to label that dimension (sense vs) "nonsense". This may or may not align with one's intuition about…
I suspect that Ngo believes there's an interesting "dimension" along which we can use to justify why fuzzy truth values may be more useful than binary truth values that is "orthogonal" to "vagueness", "approximation", etc., and Ngo chooses to label that dimension (sense vs) "nonsense". This may or may not align with one's intuition about what the word "nonsense" means in a more general context. In essence, they are introducing a term that they intend to use in a limited technical sense for the purpose of their argument, and they are (implicitly) providing a definition for this term.
And so I'm worried that perhaps you have some pre-existing intuition of what the term "nonsense" might mean (which is fine, probably almost all English speakers do) and then you're getting stuck on this part of Ngo's argument because your intuition about what the word means doesn't match what you've inferred Ngo's definition to be. This part is "not fine" if your goal is to "understand" Ngo's argument.
I think it's analogous to a situation where a somewhat technical blog post (more formal than casual conversation but less formal than an academic paper) might say something like "I want to define the term 'sphere' to mean the set of all points equidistant from some other given point, regardless of the number of dimensions we are working in, and regardless of how we measure distance. So for example, in a 2D world where we use taxicab distance, a 'sphere' looks like a jagged-edged diamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry#/media/File:TaxicabGeometryCircle.svg "
In my analogy, the "right" thing to do, if the goal is to understand the argument that the blog post is presenting, is to just (temporarily) accept the definition the author chose, and see whether their argument makes sense when this definition is taken as an axiom. It's "not useful" to object "but that's not what a 'sphere' is!"
I suspect that Ngo believes there's an interesting "dimension" along which we can use to justify why fuzzy truth values may be more useful than binary truth values that is "orthogonal" to "vagueness", "approximation", etc., and Ngo chooses to label that dimension (sense vs) "nonsense". This may or may not align with one's intuition about what the word "nonsense" means in a more general context. In essence, they are introducing a term that they intend to use in a limited technical sense for the purpose of their argument, and they are (implicitly) providing a definition for this term.
And so I'm worried that perhaps you have some pre-existing intuition of what the term "nonsense" might mean (which is fine, probably almost all English speakers do) and then you're getting stuck on this part of Ngo's argument because your intuition about what the word means doesn't match what you've inferred Ngo's definition to be. This part is "not fine" if your goal is to "understand" Ngo's argument.
I think it's analogous to a situation where a somewhat technical blog post (more formal than casual conversation but less formal than an academic paper) might say something like "I want to define the term 'sphere' to mean the set of all points equidistant from some other given point, regardless of the number of dimensions we are working in, and regardless of how we measure distance. So for example, in a 2D world where we use taxicab distance, a 'sphere' looks like a jagged-edged diamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry#/media/File:TaxicabGeometryCircle.svg "
In my analogy, the "right" thing to do, if the goal is to understand the argument that the blog post is presenting, is to just (temporarily) accept the definition the author chose, and see whether their argument makes sense when this definition is taken as an axiom. It's "not useful" to object "but that's not what a 'sphere' is!"