"The ideal language is an interpreted syntactic scheme" (Gustav Bergmann).
"If an ideal logical language could be constructed, we would have a grammatically correct version of the universe" (Bertrand Russell).
The Ideal Language in Analytic Philosophy
In analytic philosophy (the philosophy based on the analysis of language), there are two streams:
That of ordinary language.
Ordinary language philosophers believe that the study of language (in its multiple uses) is perfectly adequate for philosophical analysis, and that philosophical discourse is ordinary discourse about ordinary language. This current is represented by several Oxford philosophers (whose leaders were Gilbert Ryle, and J.L. Austin), so it is also often referred to as "Oxford philosophy". This current is represented, in addition to Ryle and Austin, by George Edward Moore, the second Wittgenstein (that of Philosophical Investigations), W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Peter Strawson, Richard Rorty and Jean-François Lyotard.
The idealist (or ideal language).
For idealist philosophers, ordinary language is not suitable for philosophical analysis, because of its ambiguity, so an ideal language is necessary. Philosophical discourse is a discourse on ideal language.
Historically, Frege's The Conceptography (Begriffsschrift) and Wittgenstein's Tractatus are the references of idealism, along with the philosophy of logical atomism of Russell and early Wittgenstein. Both authors assume that there is a parallelism between the formal or structural structure of language and reality.
Frege is considered the founder of analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein is the initiator of the "linguistic turn" in philosophy, by placing language as the central element of philosophy. Russell is considered "the second father" of analytic philosophy.
Within the idealist current, in turn, there are two tendencies:
The reconstructionist.
It tries to purify the ambiguities, irregularities and deficiencies of ordinary language, to reconstruct a scheme of ideal language that serves as a support and foundation for clarifying, analyzing and solving philosophical problems.
Gustav Bergmann (one of the youngest members of the Vienna Circle) is the most prominent representative of this ideal language trend. His position is idealist-reconstructionist.
The formalist.
It tries to create a new ideal language, of a formal type, with a logical structure that reflects the ultimate categories of reality. To search for the formal ideal language is to investigate the ontological structure of the world. The ideal language would represent reality in a precise and perfect way.
Rudolf Carnap (one of the leading representatives of the Vienna Circle) stands out in this current. He is an idealist-formalist philosopher.
Both tendencies (the reconstructionist and the formalist) can be, in turn, pragmatists, i.e., ideal language can also serve as ordinary language. But the fact is that it is difficult to find an ideal language pragmatist.
Frege's Conceptography
Frege was the pioneer in the search for an ideal, essential, transcendental language. With his Conceptography, he attempted to construct an ideal logical language. Frege chose logic because he believed in its universal character. There is only one logic. Logic cannot be restricted to a particular domain. Logic pervades everything.
Frege is the founder of analytic philosophy, which reached its highest articulation in Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
Russell's and Wittgenstein's logical atomism
According to logical atomism, logical analysis can reveal the fundamental atoms that exist in language and reality. In this sense, Russell and early Wittgenstein were searching for the ideal language. Russell defined ideal or "logically perfect" language as that in which its grammatical form coincides with the logical form.
Whitehead's ideal language
Russell and Whitehead were the authors of Principia Mathematica (PM), a 3-volume work published between 1910 and 1913, in which they attempted to formalize mathematics from the point of view of logical axiomatic formalism.
According to Whitehead, language, besides being a tool of communication, enables philosophers to gain knowledge of ultimate reality. Language is the tool of philosophy, but ordinary language has several problems:
It is superficial, artificial. It hides the deep reality. It is ambiguous, imprecise, without exact meanings.
It simplifies reality by using abstractions, turning pluralities into singularities. Language describes an abstract world. Whitehead conceived of philosophy as "a critique of abstractions," a notion introduced in his "Science and the Modern World" (1925). Nature is self-contained, closed to the mind. We make abstractions, which are necessary for daily life and for the development of science, but we must go beyond abstractions; we must look for the metaphysical.
It contains hidden assumptions about the nature of reality. One of these is the "substantial" character of reality, that is, the assumption that the ultimate components of reality are substances that have properties. This substantial character of reality is implicit in the "subject-predicate" structure of ordinary language, which leads to the conclusion that all propositions of language are substances (subjects) with qualities (predicates). Moreover, this assumption is corroborated by the way we perceive the world, which is also substance-oriented.
For Whitehead, the ultimate reality of acts and relations of perception are events, rather than substances. Reality is dynamic because in every event there is activity, even in the phenomena of perception, for there is activity in the perceiver and in the perceived. The fundamental building blocks of the universe are events, something that modern physics seems to corroborate, for nothing is at rest, everything moves, everything is active, everything is "alive", from electrons to galaxies.
Therefore, the task of philosophers is to go beyond appearances (substances) to get to the true essence of reality. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on the search for an ideal language that reflects the essential or deep reality. The characteristics of this ideal language would be the following:
It should be based on a categorical scheme that reflects the true structure of reality, including its dynamic nature.
It must be based on the concept of "expression", a representation of signs and symbols. The analysis of such signs and symbols is a more fundamental task than the analysis of words. Expression is "the fundamental sacrament".
It must go beyond the conceptual analysis of ordinary language. One must make a "metaphysical analysis," generalize concepts and go beyond abstractions to new conceptualizations: neologisms [perhaps Whitehead was referring to archetypes of supreme level of abstraction]. "All epistemological difficulties at bottom are nothing but metaphysical difficulties in disguise."
It must have a clear semantics, without ambiguities. And a logical form (syntax) to achieve a precise language that allows to reach a complete metaphysical knowledge.
This metaphysical ideal language will not be able to replace ordinary language.
Carnap's formal ideal language
For Rudolf Carnap −one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Circle− all philosophical questions are questions of language. The task of philosophy is the analysis of the logic of language. "Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science, for the logic of science is nothing but the logical syntax of the language of science" [Carnap, 2010].
In "Der logische Aufbau der Welt" (The Logical Construction of the World, 1922-1925) [2003], he proposed to construct a logical system of objects and concepts, such that all concepts are derived from a fundamental core of primitive concepts.
This was Carnap's first major work, but he later opted for physicalism: one can only speak of the unity of the language of science if all scientific (empirical) terms refer to observable physical objects, properties or relations, or can be reduced to them by explicit or conditional functions. The unity of science must be realized through physics. A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for achieving this unity is to have a unified language.
Carnap was a strong advocate of the unity of science. A necessary, though not sufficient, condition for achieving this unity is to have an ideal language of a formal kind, a language with logical syntax. This ideal language would be restricted only to science; it could not be used as ordinary language.
Bergmann's reconstructionist ideal language
For Gustav Bergmann, philosophical questions are questions of language. He believed in the existence of an ideal language scheme, which should have the following characteristics:
Philosophical.
It should be an idealization of natural language, with semantic features reflecting the ultimate categories of reality. With the ideal language the categorial structure of the world could be discovered, for these categories must be reflected in the structural properties of the ideal language. This ideal language should serve to reinterpret philosophical problems from a new, deeper and more essentialist perspective; and to help clarify and resolve the old questions of philosophy, such as, for example, the question of universals. And all this with the informal discourse of ordinary language.
Complete.
It must be applicable to all areas of our experience, that is, everything can be expressed in it.
Logical.
It must be deduced from the analysis of ordinary language, with the help of formal symbolic logic. However, the ideal language is not a logically perfect language, but merely an aid scheme for solving philosophical problems.
Syntactic.
It must be a syntactic scheme composed of signs (or symbols) and relations between them.
Not pragmatic.
It cannot be a spoken language that would replace ordinary language, since it is only a philosophical language scheme.
According to Bergmann, Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mahtematica (PM) is an example of an ideal language, but he suggests that there may be more than one ideal language.
The Challenge of an Ideal Language
Although the idea of developing an ideal language (schematic or formal and which must perforce be simple) is perfectly intelligible, many philosophers and logicians doubt that such a language can ever be achieved. We can highlight two main reasons:
No ideal language has ever been developed to date.
Russell and Whitehead's PM could be considered an ideal language, but it is mathematical-logical, not philosophical. Moreover, the formalization they achieved was limited and done in a rather complex and laborious way. Frege's conceptography is what has come closest to an ideal language, although it is not satisfactory because it is a graphical (two-dimensional) language of complex notation and because of its exclusively logicist approach.
To arrive at the ideal language one must first investigate the ontological structure of the world, a task that is of a higher (or deeper) nature. Until this philosophical investigation is completed we will never be able to discover the ideal language.
This second reason is the fundamental, the most powerful. It is not possible to approach the profound with superficial tools. The profound cannot be formalized because it would be a contradiction in terms. This difficulty of approaching the deep with the superficial was already revealed by Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem, in which he demonstrated the limitations of formal axiomatic systems, such as the PM system. The generalization of Gödel's theorem is that "the deep cannot be formalized". Pretending to apply logic (a superficial tool) to investigate the deep, cannot succeed. And, therefore, PM cannot be considered an ideal language, because it does not contemplate the deep.
The problem of the ideal language is the same as the problem of the formalization of semantics: the problem of the deep-surface connection.
MENTAL as Ideal Language
The Solution
The solution to the ideal language challenge is surprisingly simple, and it is the only one possible. It is based on distinguishing, effectively, the two levels: the deep (the unmanifested) and the superficial (the manifestations). and accessing the point where both are connected: the archetypes of consciousness, which are the universal semantic primitives of MENTAL, which are also philosophical categories.
Characteristics of MENTAL as an ideal language
Philosophical language.
If we philosophize, it is because we speak an ordinary language that is imperfect. From this point of view, there is a gap or tension between ordinary language and essential reality. This tension disappears with MENTAL (and with all ideal language). Ideal language is a philosophical language because it allows us to philosophize by placing us at a level where natural, deep philosophy is done without effort, without tension, so that traditional, superficial philosophy disappears. MENTAL is a philosophical language; language and philosophy are unified.
Archaeotypal language.
MENTAL is a language based on primitive concepts, as Carnap demanded. Primitive concepts that are archetypes. MENTAL uses neologisms, novel concepts such as: particularization, generalization, evaluation, etc. that constitute the supreme level of abstraction.
Language of consciousness.
MENTAL is a language of consciousness because it is based on the integral union of pairs of opposites. MENTAL is based on universal semantic primitives that are analytic and synthetic in nature. Russell, with his logical atomism, used only analysis, so he failed in his ideal language.
Symbolic language.
Whitehead intuited that the key to an ideal language lay in signs or symbols, rather than words. The signs/symbols of MENTAL represent the primitives, the archetypes of consciousness, the abstract universals.
Abstract language.
Whitehead regarded abstraction as a drawback to be overcome in ordinary language. But abstraction is precisely the way to knowledge of deep reality, which is necessarily abstract. Moreover, language is not metaphysical because the metaphysical is not expressible, it is ineffable. But the abstraction used in MENTAL is of supreme level, in the line of Whitehead's neologisms.
Dynamic language.
MENTAL is dynamic, a characteristic demanded by Whitehead, for every expression is evaluated. A special case is when an expression is self-evaluating; it is static. And it contemplates events, but not only events; it contemplates many types of expressions (functions, categories, rules, procedures, structures, etc.).
Scientific language.
Although MENTAL has humanistic (philosophical and psychological) characteristics, the language is purely scientific, a language applicable to domains where formal language is needed (formal sciences). MENTAL, because of its abstract character, is not a substitute for ordinary language. Nevertheless, its philosophy of "universal semantic primitives" is valid to elaborate an international auxiliary language.
Language of possible worlds.
MENTAL, as an ideal language, transcends reality. The relationship between language and reality is asymmetrical, since language is broader than reality, being able to refer to possible worlds.
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