Linguistic Foundations of Human Knowledge (An Old and Rare Book)

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Preface Understanding the nature of language has been an important pursuit in many fields of twentieth-century thought. While anthropologists agree that the chief distinguishing trait of human beings as different from non-humans is their ability to use vocally articulated symbols for communication, philosophers on their part have been suggesting that man's great achievements in intellectual fields have been solely due to his symbolic activity. Linguists have for a long time devoted themselves to an under- standing of this wonderful activity of man. To know more about this ability of man, they feel, it is first necessary to know more about human languages. The study of human languages as carried out by linguists for the last hundred years and more has revealed that the vocal symbols which man uses for communication get all their significance not from any divine sanction but "from the arbitrary imposition of men, "as Locke expressed it. Once they have been chosen by man for communication these symbols do not remain isolated. Wonderfully enough they organize themselves into the structural whole of a language.

One of the important results of this insight into the structural organizations of human languages has been the emergence of linguistics as a science which has become a bridge, so to say, between humanities and mathematics. Discarding the prescriptivism of traditional grammar and adopting empirical data- oriented descriptivism instead linguistics tried to reach the goal of structuralism by a semi-algebraic handling of its material. with the development of linguistics went the progress of another important discipline of modern times, viz., modern logic. Handling concepts by a kind of semi-algebraic symbolism logic broke the shackles of traditional Aristotelian philosophy and emerged as a mathematical theory of formal systems. It was not long before linguistics and logic united and the new unified discipline was named algebraic or mathematical linguistics.

**Contents and Sample Pages**