Artificial Extensions of Natural Language
Jody Azzouni · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2013
The history of the emergence of artificial languages is sketched. It’s shown how our experience of natural language makes the invention of artificial languages possible. The emergence of artificial language-tools in informal-rigorous mathematics, in logic, and in the sciences generally, is described. The proxy-methods by which we use ordinary language statements to proxy for formal artefacts is also described. It is not so much that those who are adept at formal languages actually use them in the way that natural languages are used. That really is not possible. Instead, such languages are treated as if they are being used. Either we use other natural-language statements to stand in for them, or we explicitly study them. The sociology of common knowledge and its basis in the experience of speaking a public language is probed.