Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

We achieve this by developing languages (or quasilanguages) whose expressions wear their inferential roles more or less on their sleeves.

The paradigmatic cases of such 'inferentially explicit' languages are, of course, the languages of logic.

In some simple artificial languages there can be truth without meaning; in a universal natural language comprising an infinite number of truths this is, however, not possible.

Thus the criterion of analyticity in terms of state-descriptions serves only for languages devoid of extralogical synonym-pairs, such as 'bachelor' and 'unmarried man': synonym-pairs of the type which give rise to the "second class" of analytic statements.

The custom has consequently arisen of combining both sorts of economy by forging in effect two languages, the one a part of the other.

They are best viewed not as adjuncts to one language but as correlations between two languages, the one a part of the other.

The notion of analyticity about which we are worrying is a purported relation between statements and languages: a statement S is said to be analytic for a language L, and the problem is to make sense of this relation generally, for example, for variable 'S' and 'L.'

The point that I want to make is that the gravity of this problem is not perceptibly less for artificial languages than for natural ones.

The problem of making sense of the idiom 'S is analytic for L,' with variable 'S' and 'L,' retains its stubbornness even if we limit the range of the variable 'L' to artificial languages.

For artificial languages and semantical rules we look naturally to the writings of Carnap.