Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Jan Werszowiec Plazowski, Marek Suwara
- thesis of semantic character of the connection between the language and the
world (3)
Formalisation postulates add the following:
- syntactical correctness is enough to conclude truth or falsehood of a given
sentence (4)
- semantics can be realised through a class of possible models of the set of
sentences (5). Such a class can, in particular, contain the model corresponding
to the actual world, which, when the sentences refer to experimentally measured
quantities, can be tested at laboratories.
Formal approach to language, from system theory point of view, is a reduction,
which always should be verified according to its ability to restore the original system
functions. While such reduction is able to preserve the intuitive distinction between true
and false sentences, it is not able to restore the informational content of natural
language. The reason is, that semantic context of sentences lies not only in ontological
assumptions, which itself was a kind of a nightmare for all analytical researchers, but
also in the usefulness of information carried by the sentences. Such usefulness, seen
mostly in its psychological aspect, could not have been accepted by analytical
philosophy. That “psycholophobia”, however, made studying the contextual aspect of
sentences almost impossible.
2. System theory approach
Any natural language is a system, which, only in some particular cases, can be reduced
to formal, logical structure. As an example one can take the first order logic in
mathematics, which is enough to explain structures realised as groups for example.
Failure to support arithmetic of natural numbers, Goedel’s incompleteness theorem,
show limitations of such reduction. In general, any reduction of a system is an
idealisation, which is only partially appropriate.
Reduction of a natural language to its formal structure deprives the language of its
dynamical character consisting, for instance, in changes of meanings along the linguistic
practice. Discussing such changes, would be an interesting task, however tedious and
time consuming. An inspiring idea is the evolutionary approach, which, hopefully, would
build an objective framework for understanding both the “flow” of meanings and new
words/phrases formation.
Unfortunately, we are so used to reductionism, that it seems impossible to treat any
question concerning systems without a reduction. Reductions help us to treat the
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