'Sense' is a surprisingly hard category to pin down. We generally know what it means to 'make sense', but making sense of sense is itself tougher than it looks. After all, sense seems incorporeal - prima facie, it's not something 'extended' in the world like a chair or a body - and has strange temporal properties, like a 'happy' story turning dark at the last moment and retroactively changing the sense of what came before. So I wanna sketch out some aspects of sense that interest me, and see what comes of it.

The first way to get a handle on sense is by relating it to limits: to make sense of something is to limit the sense it can have. If I say 'don't do that', and you continue to do it, presuming you thought you understood what I said, you've made a mistake about the kind of limits I was trying to impose: 'Ooh, I thought you meant that, not that'. So a first approach to sense is as a constraint on possibility: of all the possible things I could have meant, this thin slice of sense is what I'm trying to impart. And one can always refine sense, or - in the other direction - make it more general: 'do something' (general) as opposed to 'kick the ball' (particular). One of these has a sense more general than the other.

This approach to sense nicely brings out its relational status: to say X always implies not saying Y. In this regard we can speak of the contrast space of sense. When the bank robber Willie Sutton was asked by a priest why he robbed banks, he was famously said to have replied: 'because that's where the money is'. At work here is the fact that Sutton changed the contrast space of the question, and thus, its sense: where the priest was asking why he robbed banks at all, Sutton cheekily took the question to the ask why he robbed banks rather than theatres or shops, etc. So sense is always relative to the contrast space which shapes it.

This wonderful story brings out another aspect of sense: the fact that it is intimately related with types or kinds. The priest was no doubt expecting a different kind of answer from Sutton, who changed the sense of the question by changing the expected category of answers; possible answers for Sutton included 'theatres', 'shops', and 'banks', where possible answers for the priest might have included 'because I'm poor', or 'because I was forced to'. So we have a refinement of our understanding of sense: sense is not just something that is more or less general or more or less particular (not just a constraint on a continuum of possibilities (degrees)), but a constraint on kinds of possibilities as well. Incidentally, a 'good sense of humor' relies on reliably swapping between contrast spaces in unexpected ways (as Willie did), short-circuiting between different senses of what is said or shown.

This brings me to the most important aspect of sense I want to bring out, which is the fact that sense is always motivated or responsive to contexts which makes the 'kind' of sense that it is. The sense of the priest's question is nowhere determined 'beforehand'; it is instead produced in the act of its use: the priest's on the one hand, Sutton's on the other; perhaps there are innumerable others. Sense is not (a) 'given', it is made, fabulated on the basis of what one aims to do with it: there is a pragmatics of sense which animates it and connects it directly to action and the world to which it responds. The upshot of this - and why it's the most important aspect - means that sense cannot be treated in isolation of that use; it is in fact not enough, as above, to treat sense as a matter of 'limitation': insofar as sense is responsive and motivated, it is also creative, a matter of genuine novelty.

Anyway, this is far from an exhaustive characterization of sense (someone will no doubt say something about Frege and reference...), but there you go.