Indefinite Extensibility in Natural Language

Laureano Luna, Sherwood J. B. Sugden
2013 The Monist  
The Monist's call for papers for this issue ended: "if formalism is true, then it must be possible in principle to mechanize meaning in a conscious thinking and language-using machine; if intentionalism is true, no such project is intelligible". We use the Grelling-Nelson paradox to show that natural language is indefinitely extensible, which has two important consequences: it cannot be formalized and model theoretic semantics, standard for formal languages, is not suitable for it. We also
more » ... out that object-object mapping theories of semantics, the usual account for the possibility of non intentional semantics, doesn't seem able to account for the indefinitely extensible productivity of natural language.
doi:10.5840/monist201396211 fatcat:4c6oowi6hbfvvg2oc7yfpezebi