Information Theory and Logical Analysis in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The present article proposes an Informational-Theoretic interpretation of logical analysis applied to natural language in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Natural language is characterized by descriptive definitions in order to compress information according to empirical regularities. However, notati...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Philosophia Vol. 51; no. 1; pp. 217 - 254
Autor principal: Lopes, Felipe Oliveira Araújo
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Mar2023
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:The present article proposes an Informational-Theoretic interpretation of logical analysis applied to natural language in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Natural language is characterized by descriptive definitions in order to compress information according to empirical regularities. However, notations fitted to empirical patterns do not explicitly reflect the logical structure of language that enables it to represent those very patterns. I argue that logical analysis is the process of obtaining incompressible and uniformly distributed codes, best fitted to express the possible combinations of facts instead of eventual empirical regularities. That implies mutual translatability between different representations of the same facts, which justifies the possibility to decompose natural language and to rebuild it in mathematized ideographical languages, such as physics. Logical analysis decomposition process, then, results in a reductionism that sets the basis for conceptions of logic and language not only in Tractatus, but also in Some Remarks on Logical Form, which, in turn, is shown to be unattainable in Philosophical Remarks. That posterior book introduces a fragmentation of linguistic systems and analytical methods that can no longer be interpreted under computation theory alone.