Given your definitions, that makes sense. One of the points I was trying to make, though, is that “meaningless” is one of those words with several related but slightly different interpretations, and that a lot of the trouble in this thread seems to have come from conflicts between those interpretations. In particular, a lot of the people here seem to be using it to mean “lacks evidential value” without making a distinction between the cases you do.
As to which definition to use: I’d say it depends on what we’re looking at. If we’re trying to figure out the internal properties of the logical system we’re working with, it’s quite important to make a distinction between cata!trivial and cata!meaningless statements; the latter give us information about the system that the former don’t. If we’re looking at the external consequences of the system, though, the two seem pretty much equivalent to me—in both cases we can’t productively take truth or falsity into account..
Given your definitions, that makes sense. One of the points I was trying to make, though, is that “meaningless” is one of those words with several related but slightly different interpretations, and that a lot of the trouble in this thread seems to have come from conflicts between those interpretations. In particular, a lot of the people here seem to be using it to mean “lacks evidential value” without making a distinction between the cases you do.
As to which definition to use: I’d say it depends on what we’re looking at. If we’re trying to figure out the internal properties of the logical system we’re working with, it’s quite important to make a distinction between cata!trivial and cata!meaningless statements; the latter give us information about the system that the former don’t. If we’re looking at the external consequences of the system, though, the two seem pretty much equivalent to me—in both cases we can’t productively take truth or falsity into account..