Abstract
It is now a quarter of a century ago that Wolfgang Stegmüller wrote his monograph ‘Das Wahrheitsproblem und die Idee der Semantik’ (1957) which dealt with Tarski’s and Carnap’s foundational work in the field of semantics. While this book is about the definition of the basic semantical concepts in artificial formal languages there is an article written a year earlier (1956) in which Stegmüller addresses himself specifically to the relation between logic and natural language. Here he gives a logical analysis of the standard structural expressions in language that are still of primary concern for current semantics: quantifiers, pronouns, articles, etc. The motives for such an analysis at that time were mainly philosophical: the aim was to expose the misconceptions and pitfalls of traditional philosophy arising from the disregard of various systematic semantic ambiguities in everyday language. Or as Stegmüller puts it:
Über sie [i.e. einige nicht triviale Fälle von Vagheit in der Alltagssprache] Klarheit zu gewinnen, ist schon deshalb von außerordentlicher Bedeutung, weil Unkenntnis über sie zu schwersten philosophischen Verirrungen fähren kann, nämlich entweder der Unterlassung von berechtigten Fragestellungen, oder, was weit häufiger vorgekommen ist, der Formulierung von falsch gestellten Fragen, denen gegenüber man dann nur die Wahl hat, entweder überhaupt keine oder nur sinnlose Antworten zu geben.
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Link, G. (1983). Logical Semantics for Natural Language. In: Hempel, C.G., Putnam, H., Essler, W.K. (eds) Methodology, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7676-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7676-5_14
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