From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!psuvax1!wupost!emory!dscatl!gwinnett!depsych!rc Tue Nov 26 12:31:02 EST 1991
Article 1451 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Is semiotics an "informal logic"?
Message-ID: <P3oPBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 20 Nov 91 13:09:36 GMT
References: <1991Nov19.235721.5652@husc3.harvard.edu>
Lines: 56

zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

> In article <36XNBB3w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> 
> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:
> 
> >Frankly the whole enterprise of formal semantics, to the extent
> >that I understand it, seems wrong. Language is a dialectical
> >structure, or at least a structure based on binary oppositions of
> >various kinds at the various levels: phonological, syntactic and
> >"semantic."  How can ideas from a non-dialectical system --
> >mathematics and logic seem to be more like "mechanisms" than
> >"structures" -- be applied without modification to a dialectical
> >system?  The statements "5 > 2" and "It was hotter yesterday than
> >it was Saturday" have only a superficial resemblance.  The notion
> >">" has a precise meaning while the idea of "hotter" is a
> >comparative built on a binary opposition (hot vs. cold) and
> >inherently fuzzy.
> 
> As said Alonzo Church, "Principia Mathematica" is as much a part of English
> language as "Paradise Lost".

I hate to ask for yet another reference since I've been following
up so many -- some in private e-mail that seem most relevant to
what I am actually doing, but is there as simple text -- say
something written as a remedial for poorly prepared undergraduates
(I'm serious, NB: no smiley face) -- that presents the
"Anglo-American" or "formal semantics" (since it isn't really
Anglo-American, stemming apparently from the German Frege and the
Pole Tarski) or "logical analytic" view of logic and language?

I wish I knew, for example, what a "model-theoretic" view was.  It
doesn't seem to mean a "model" in the usual sense of "minimal
virtual reality" (such as the models of Spitfires and
Messerschmitts our friends made as kids).  In fact it seems to
mean the opposite of "model" in the usual sense, so far as I can
gather from context.

It feels as if there has been a huge soiree to which I haven't
been invited.  Everybody seems to be familiar with a set of ideas
which are quite alien to me.  For example, Church's statement that
_Principia Matematica_ is part of the English language just sounds
silly.  To a structuralist, in the sense of real basic notions of
language propounded by Saussure, natural languages are very
different from mathematical and logical systems, which may well
arise out of language (but may not, in any meaningful sense) since
they also are a system of signs, but natural languages are a
product of a species-specific _faculte de langage_ while
mathematics is so universal that we can beam pulsed signals into
space with reasonable confidence that even silicon-based or
antimatter creatures will understand them.

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


