Philosophy of ideal language

The philosophy of ideal language was a branch within analytical philosophy . The advocates of this direction were of the opinion that the colloquial language had deficits. It was declared that the colloquial language is imprecise and does not meet numerous demands of logic and is therefore not well suited for philosophy. The aim of revising normal language for philosophical purposes was pursued, including the possibility of replacing normal languages ​​with an “ideal” formal language . While the proponents of the philosophy of ideal language strived to improve natural languages , the philosophy of normal language limited itself to clarifying the everyday use of language.

history

Aristotle can be regarded as a forerunner of the philosophy of ideal language , who was one of the first to start analyzing language with the help of logical systems. Also Lull is sometimes together with Leibniz cited as representative (see logical machine ). The real founder of the philosophy of ideal language is Gottlob Frege , who wanted to realize this concept in his conceptual writing. Other important representatives are Bertrand Russell , who wrote the Principia Mathematica together with Alfred North Whitehead , Ludwig Wittgenstein in his early years, especially as the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , and Rudolf Carnap . Following this, the formal semantics developed through the work of Alfred Tarski , Alonzo Church and Richard Montague . The most famous Montague student is David Kaplan . Donald Davidson develops a truth-conditional meaning theory based on Tarski's theory of truth . The program of the pragmatic-logical "language reconstruction" of Erlangen constructivism , with which the names Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen are particularly connected, touches partly with these approaches.

literature

• Johannes Sinnreich (ed.): On the philosophy of ideal language . Texts by Quine, Tarski, Martin, Hempel and Carnap, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1972, ISBN 3423041137 .