Joseph Almog

Logic and the world

And indeed that is how most of us, “professionals”, have come to conceive of logic: nothing chains it to the banalities of what things there are and how things are. Logic is free. As against this lordly vision, a minority of thinks have felt that nothing could be that free, not even logic. In the very same year in which Russell articulated the lordly vision, Wittgenstein was already asking us pointedly:

Is Natural Semantics Possible?—Ordinary English, Formal Deformations-cum-Reformations and the Limits of Model Theory

The essay is dedicated to the memory of Jaakko Hintikka and Hilary Putnam, two logically inventive philosophers who, nonetheless, showed deep judgment in bringing to the fore the limits of reducing natural languages to formal languages, via the use of logical forms and model theory. Writing in parallel ecologies, the two proposed rather similar “limitative” theses about the popular logical-form-cum-model theory methodology.