Publication details

Is Logico-Semantical Analysis of Natural Language a Translation?

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Authors

RACLAVSKÝ Jiří

Year of publication 2010
Type Chapter of a book
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Description The aim of semantical analysis of natural language L is to present expression-meaning pairs. One must surely use certain expression to present any meaning, thus it seems that logical semantics consists in providing translation of expressionsL onto expressionsAL of semantician's artificial language AL (which is a sublanguage of L). However, the meaning of expressionAL should be then explained similar way, by its translation in AL'. An infinite regress of translations arises. To solve the puzzle I propose to distinguish between the analyzed language L and our modeling explicative language AL, whose expressionsAL are meaningful in L only when occurring in suppositio conceptualis, whereas expressionsL are meaningful in L only in suppositio usualis. Their meanings differ a categorical way, so they are not mutually intertranslatable. The matter is natural because the role of explicative language is conceptual - it serves for modeling, thus it cannot have the same semantical character as L.
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