ORDINARY EXPRESSIONS HAVE NO EXACT AND SYSTEMATIC LOGIC. SOME REMARKS ON STRAWSON'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO LOGICAL THEORY

• Authors: Dumitru Mircea
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The general slogan in the title of this paper (which is taken from Strawson 1952, 57) gives a general, but nevertheless accurate, expression of Strawson's view concerning the nature of formal logic per se in relation to natural language. What is at stake here is the extent to which the formal methods and the formal semantics of contemporary symbolic logic can render the meanings of natural language expressions. Strawson sets up an agenda for logical theory, which, although rather dated for a logic text, is what one naturally expects from an introduction to elementary formal logic and a systematic analysis of certain crucial meta-logical concepts, most notably entailment. However, the author own reading is that Strawson's approach to logic makes a lasting contribution to understanding the inner workings of natural language through his critical discussion of the limits of the formal renderings of the semantics of natural language expressions via canonical first-order notations. One can recognize in this critical attitude towards the limits of formal methods a consistent generalization of Strawson's own strategy from his critical response to Russell's theory of descriptions. In the paper author focus on certain examples which illustrate the general slogan that characterizes Strawson's views on the nature of logic in connection with ordinary language and talk.

Keywords

EN

LOGICAL ANALYSIS; LOGICAL THEORY; NATURAL LANGUAGE; SEMANTICS

Discipline

• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 542-551
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Dumitru Mircea

• Mircea Dumitru, Facultatea de Filosofie, Universitatea din Bucuresti, Splaiul Independentei 204, Bucuresti, Sect. 6, Romania; www.klemens.sav.sk/fiusav/organon

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10SKAAAA074814