The Preface to the Tractatus mentions Wittgenstein’s two main intellectual debts in the famous words, “I am indebted to Frege’s great works and to the writings of my friend Mr. Bertrand Russell for much of the stimulation of my thought.” (TLP,p. 3) The evaluative nuance is unmistakable. Wittgenstein’s personal debt to Russell was of course inestimable, and I would judge his intellectual debt to Russell was also greater than to Frege. To chart the intricacies of the relationship between the views of Russell and those of Wittgenstein would require a monograph. The influences and interactions in the case of Frege are of more manageable extent, though they also penetrate Wittgenstein’s whole conception of logic. I shall talk about two things only: firstly, the personal relationship between Wittgenstein and Frege, especially in the light of the recently discovered correspondence, and secondly, Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frege’s theory of truth and negation, which is the core of his attack on Frege’s conception of logic. There are many other aspects of Wittgenstein’s views on Frege which I shall not touch, but I think those I mention are among the most important.

Logics and languages

Frege and Wittgenstein, Truth and Negation

In 1985 Jerry Sadock offered a solution to the Performadox, a puzzle about performative sentences propounded in 1980 by Boer and Lycan. The present paper defends Sadock’s approach, particularly against a number of objections previously made by Lycan.

Sadock and the Performadox

https://link-springer-com-443.webvpn.jmu.edu.cn/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-94-007-6958-8_15.pdf

Philosophy of Language

The present paper is devoted to pragmatics, so I think it should be stressed at the very beginning that I myself simply do not know what exactly pragmatics is, and still worse — I am afraid nobody does. In fact, the dispute on the aims, methods, scope and limits of pragmatics started as early as in the late thirties, and continues up to now. The discussion is far from being concluded, and that is just why you can still find there in the literature opinions like this one, formulated by professional pragmaticists in the eighties — fifty years after: 
Pragmatics is one of those words (…) that give the impression that something quite specific and technical is being talked about when often in fact it has no clear meaning. (cf. Searle et al., 1980)
Well of course, those who want to be offered a purely technical and operational definition, would not be satisfied at all with either, say: pragmatics is the study of language use, which is too wide and obviously too vague, or — and even less so — with Montague’s one: pragmatics is the study of indexical expressions, which, in turn, is too narrow. But it might be doubted if such a definition is really necessary: we can all do quite well without being presented with any precise definition of the term ‘logic’, to give just one example. It will be much better then to follow Stalnaker’s (1970) advice and define pragmatics by simply pointing at its branches, so as to obtain, e.g.: pragmatics is the study of


speech acts


deixis


presupposition


implicature


discourse structure.

Early Systems of Formal Pragmatics

Let us look at a special type of context sensitive grammars, the so-called Definite Clause Grammars, or DCG, as described by Pereira and Warren (l980). The following question seems natural here: every context sensitive language be described by meeins of a definite clause grammar ? The question must be answered in the eiffirmative, as can be seen by simu­ lating Turing machines or better Markov algorithms by means of definite clause grammars. This means that the definite clause grammars have at least the same computational power as the grammars of Chomsky type 0. And hence theoretically speaking they can also handle languages of Chomsky type 1. If we focus on the question which practical methods have been developed to handle context sensitive languages by means of definite clause grammars or similar formalisms then the situation is much more unclear. It seems to be a problem with a considerable actual research effort. We may see the occuring of several new grammar types as the results of exactly this tendency, for instance Gapping Grammars in (Dahl & Abramson 1984, Dcihl 1984) eind Puzzle Grammars (Sabatier 1984). The next natural and fundamental question seems to be the following Does there exist any known problems within the languages that can be described by means of definite clause grammars ? It should be answered in the affirmative, actually there exist many problems. As an example we may look at possibly the most famous problem, the coordination problem. The text that we want to examine consists simply of the Danish sentence

/pdf/computational-linguistics-and-mathematical-logic-from-a-1ymd3hxlhl.pdf

Logics and languages

Citations

Frege and Wittgenstein, Truth and Negation

Sadock and the Performadox

Philosophy of Language

Early Systems of Formal Pragmatics

Computational linguistics and mathematical logic from a computer science point of view.

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