Regimentation and Paradox
Jody Azzouni · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2006
A regimentation of a designated section of ordinary language replaces that designated section with a piece of engineered artificial language, not in the sense of giving speakers a different language to use, or speak in, but more narrowly, of giving normative constraints on inferences, and other logical matters, that speakers should acknowledge on the basis of statements they've committed themselves too. The purpose of this chapter is to present systematically sentential vehicles with computationally transparent and tractable inferential properties, and to supply a mathematically tractable semantic theory for such items. It's easy to confuse regimentation with an empirical study of natural languages. Under such a misapprehension, one presumes that if a regimented idiom operates the way an idiom in a natural language does, then the syntax and semantics of the regimented idiom may be attributed to the natural-language idiom.