Philosophy Of Language Essays - Formal Sciences, Philosophical Logic

Philosophy Of Language Throughout its history mankind has wondered about his place in the universe. In fact, second only to the existence of God, this subject is the most frequent topic of philosophical analysis. However, these two questions are very similar, to the point that in some philosophical analyses the questions are synonymous. In these particular philosophies, God takes the form of the universe itself or, more accurately, the structure and function of the universe. In any case, rather than conjecturing that God is some omnipotent being, supporters of this philosophy expound upon another attribute habitually associated with the Man Upstairs: His omniscience. That particular word, omniscience, is broken down to semantic components and taken literally: science is the pursuit of knowledge, and God is the possession of all knowledge. This interpretation seems very rigorous but has some unfortunate side effects, one of them being that any pursuit of knowledge is in fact a pursuit to become as God or be a god (lower case "g"). To avoid this drawback, philosophers frequently say that God is more accurately described as the knowledge itself, rather than the custody of it. According to this model, knowledge is the language of the nature, the"pure language" that defines the structure and function of the universe. There are many benefits to this approach. Most superficially, classifying the structure and function of the universe as a language allows us to apply lingual analysis to the philosophy of God. The benefits, however, go beyond the superficial. This subtle modification makes the pursuit of knowledge a function of its usage rather than its pos-session, implying that one who has knowledge sees the universe in its naked truth. Knowledge becomes a form of enlightenment, and the search for it becomes more admirable than narcissistic. Another fortunate by-product of this interpretation is its universal applicability: all forms of knowledge short of totality are on the way to becoming spiritually fit. This model of the spiritual universe is in frequent use today because it not only gives legitimacy to science, but it exalts it to the most high. The pedantic becomes the cream of the societal crop and scientists become holy men. It's completely consistent with the belief that mans ability to attain knowledge promotes him over every other species on Earth, and it sanctions the stratification of a society based on scholarship, a mold that has been in use for some time. Now that we've defined the structure and function of the universe as knowledge, we must now further analyze our definition by analyzing knowledge itself. If the society is stratified by knowledge, there must be some competent way of measuring the quantity of knowledge an individual possesses, which means one must have a very articulate and rigorous notion of knowledge. At first glance, one would think that knowledge was simply the understanding of the universe through the possession of facts about it. This understanding creates problems, however, because it now becomes necessary to stratify knowledge, to say that this bit of information is inherently "better" than that one. This question was first answered using utility as a metric, but it became obsolete because utility is too relative. A new, more practical answer was eventually found: rather than measuring knowledge, we should measure intellect, the ability to attain knowledge. Even though this has the same problem of stratification, it's overlooked because philosophers believe that they know the best way to pursue knowledge. To them, the language of complete understanding is logical inference. If one can state a set of facts in the simplistic linear progression of statements using logical connectors, the information is in its most readily understandable form. The philosophers used this convention to rigorize mathe-matics, the rigorization process became associated with it, and logic suddenly became mathematical logic. The name stuck, as people refer to the process by that name to this day. The previous analytic development is the essence of the modern understanding of the natural universe. It starts from the fundamental belief in a deity and transforms it into this mathematical logic, a system of communication that according to our summation minimizes the number of justifiable interpretations, therefore standardizing the universe. There are some limitations to this approach, however. The rationale is, by its very nature, a logical development: it constructs a functional model of the pure language that is con-sistent (i.e., free of contradiction). Therefore, the pure language inherits any limitations of logic by definition?in other words, it assumes that the pure language is (a subset of) logic. Secondly, even though it's very rigorous in its approach, it