The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said, after reading a “scientific” paper, “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!” (“That is not only not right, it’s not even wrong!”)

The phrase “not even wrong” has since come to refer to ideas that are so malformed that they cannot even be assessed.

Here’s an example: you and I can disagree about the composition of the moon. I could argue that the moon is made of green cheese. You could reply that the moon is made of rock. It’s possible that one (or both) of us is wrong, and experiments and observations could resolve this. We can have a legitimate disagreement.

In contrast, imagine that I argued that the moon was made of green cheese and you countered by saying that the moon was made of lamps(|}hamster16z#. One of us (me) could be wrong. But it’s meaningless to say that your statement is “wrong” because your statement is meaningless. We’ve transcended disagreement; we’re not even speaking the same language.

Now, I’ve got lots of opinions about lots of stuff. I’m perfectly happy to argue with people about these opinions. But there are certain things I can’t begin to oppose because they’re not even wrong.

Here are some of those things:

1. The Earth is 6,000 years old.

We can disagree about the existence of a creator God. We can disagree about which God it might be. But we can’t disagree about the accuracy of radiometric dating without disagreeing about fundamental properties of matter. At this point, we would stop speaking the same language.

2. Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.

Not even wrong.

We can disagree about Sarah Palin’s values. We can even disagree about whether or not an educated person who shares those values is qualified to be president. But we can’t disagree about whether or not Sarah Palin is qualified to be president unless the word “qualified” (or, I suppose, “president”) means something different than what we already agree it means.

3. We know the Bible is true because it is the word of God.

This is an example of a logical fallacy known as petitio principii – “begging the question.” To beg the question is to assume as true the thing that you’re trying to prove.

Disputing this claim is not an argument against the existence of God, or even the truthfulness of the Bible. It is entirely possible for the Bible to be true and for it to be the word of God. But it is not even wrong to claim that we know that the Bible is true because it says so. A statement constructed in this way is not an argument. It is meaningless.

4. George W. Bush never lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

On May 23, 2009, George W. Bush gave an interview for Polish television in which he stated the following:

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.
(source)

At the time this statement was made, the Defense Intelligence Agency had already issued a report stating that the found laboratories were “almost certainly intended” for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons (source). To date, Bush’s claim has never been retracted or qualified. In fact, the quote’s link above leads directly to Bush’s official web archive.

We can disagree about whether or not the Iraq war was justified. We can even disagree about the broader aims of the war on terror. But we simply can’t disagree about whether the above quote is a lie unless the word “lied” means something different than what we already agree it means.

The point of Wolfgang Pauli’s statement was that disagreements are fine, but that they can’t even exist unless both sides of an argument are at least in the same ballpark.

The problem with a lot of current political discourse is that it doesn’t even rise to the level of discourse. What passes for a “position” is often just incoherent drooling that happens to use some of the same words found in actual ideas. These arguments, and their advocates, are not even wrong.