"From the medieval development of Aristotle's logic through Leibniz's Characteristica Universalis through Frege and Russell and up to the present development of symbolic logic, it could be argued that exactly the reverse [of Jacques Derrida's argument] is the case; that by emphasizing logic and rationality, philosophers have tended to emphasize written language as the more perspicuous vehicle of logical relations. Indeed, as far as the present era in philosophy is concerned, it wasn't until the 1950s that serious claims were made on behalf of the ordinary spoken vernacular languages, against the written ideal symbolic languages of mathematical logic. When Derrida makes sweeping claims about "the history of the world during an entire epoch," the effect is not so much apocalyptic as simply misinformed."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
John Searle, "Word Turned Upside Down." New York Review of Books, Volume 30, Number 16 · October 27, 1983.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gottlob_Frege
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"'Facts, facts, facts,' cries the scientist if he wants to emphasize the necessity of a firm foundation for science. W…"
"It really is worth the trouble to invent a new symbol if we can thus remove not a few logical difficulties and ensure…"
"A judgment, for me is not the mere grasping of a thought, but the admission of its truth."
"Ein Philosoph, der keine Beziehung zur Geometrie hat, ist nur ein halber Philosoph, und ein Mathematiker, der keine p…"
"If the task of philosophy is to break the domination of words over the human mind [...], then my concept notation, be…"
"This ideography is a "formula language", that is, a lingua characterica, a language written with special symbols, "fo…"
"I hope I may claim in the present work to have made it probable that the laws of arithmetic are analytic judgments an…"
"Nur im Zusammenhange eines Satzes bedeuten die Wörter etwas. Es wird also darauf ankommen, den Sinn eines Satzes zu e…"
"Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it …"
"If I compare arithmetic with a tree that unfolds upward into a multitude of techniques and theorems while its root dr…"