A response to Professor Barbara H Partee's May 1, 2013 article[1] titled:

On the history of the question of whether natural language is illogical

Curiously professor Partee's article cites the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege on logical language but fails to give an account of their work's unceremonious demise by Kurt Gdel's famous 1931 Incompleteness Theorem. As you may know, Gdel demonstrated in this brief paper modern mathematics can neither prove or disprove a statement or its negation. Thus giving end to the late nineteenth century's fever dream of systematization (Thomas Gradgrind be damned): Many logicians believe Gdel's incompleteness theorems struck a fatal blow to David Hilbert's second problem, which asked for a finitary[d] consistency proof for mathematics. (Wikipedia)[2] My reading of this failure of theoretical mathematics imagines the collective mathematical community, having one and all fallenbowled over by a concussive forcecollectively standing up, brushing themselves off, determine to get on with the practical application of mathematics. In place of their totalizing aspirations, essentially a return to business as usual. In other words setting limitationsaxiomatic systems constrained by starting and boundary conditions beyond which the axiom's rules do not apply. So much for the overachieving Icarus. As you may know, for the community of scholars who trace their lineage to Saussure, Peirce, et al. the concept of language as a system of oppositions is termed Structuralism (also referred to in this article). And in 1965 structuralism was reputedly dealt its death blow by Derrida's essay "Structure, Sign and Play in the Language of the Human Sciences" presented at the conference held at Johns Hopkins University titled "The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man"(Wikipedia)[3]. As professor Paul Fry says in his Theory of Literature, ...this extraordinary crossroads event for people thinking about theory in the United States did effect an almost overnight revolution away from structuralism... (p 124.3) [4]

For those not literary scholars let me share my favorite example describing one of Derrida's arguments also from professor Fry : "According to Roland Barthes in an essay called 'The Eiffel Tower': [Guy de] Maupassant often ate at the restaurant in the tower even though he didn't particularly like the food. 'It's the only place,' he said, 'where I don't have to see it.'(p 126.2) To put this another way a contradiction arises out of a written work when the criticism, in this case seemingly architectural, works to take a position above or outside of the work. In a theory of meaning where meaning is derived from binary oppositions one must go to ever greater heights leading to the problematic question of what is the greatest height? The furthest opposition? How then can one speak of a definitive meaning of a "text" when the meaning of our own position, that which we occupy right now, is unavailable to us in an oppositional system? The variety of responses in the literary community are too many and too subjective to account for here. Needless to say the scientific aim of the theory of Structuralism experienced its fate thirty-four years later and in a similar coup de grace. Just as professor Partee suggests in the conclusion of her article, "An important, if obvious, moral of the story is that the question of whether natural language is logical...is a theory-dependent matter." what works depends on which axioms and boundaries you subscribe to. However you say this its a compromise, I should like to say to Icarus, had he lived, you should keep trying but don't quit you day job[5]. History proved feathers were not the solution for heavier-than-air flight. So its clear to me the limits of theory have their grounding in practical concessions. So it is with the full capacity of the written word. Now, the recent news (June 2013) on the NSA's PRISM Surveillance Program[6] for spying on Americans is disturbing. Our federal government is collecting statistics on the phone activities of every American citizen regardless of right or reason. The sheer volume of data requires machine automation to process the data. In light of the limits imposed by undecidability problem and invalidation of the structuralist aspiration for a scientific theory of meaning on human thought, what can a machine really uncover? Limited to whatever assumptions as a starting point and the boundaries they set for themselves, who's to say the real 'black hats' are not simply operating outside these bounds? But for many Americans the most troubling concern is the enemy within who can't think they're putting the liberty of of law abiding citizens[7] in jeopardy.

[NOTES] [1]: http://hiphilangsci.net/2013/05/01/on-the-history-of-the-question-of-whethernatural-language-is-illogical/ [d] finitary. "In mathematics or logic, a finitary operation is an operation that takes a finite number of input values to produce an output, like those of arithmetic. Operations on infinite numbers of input values are called infinitary." (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finitary) [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del %27s_incompleteness_theorem#Meaning_of_the_first_incompleteness_theorem [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_Sign,_and_Play_in_the_Discourse_of_the_Hum an_Sciences [4]: Fry, Paul H. Theory of Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. [5]: Of course it helps if you're like the Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto SantosDumont and you're rich. Bertrand Russell was rich, too. [6]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) [7]: The most troubling example of the abuse of civil liberties has been for me the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_DNA_Index_System) allowing law enforcement to collect DNA from anyone arrested for a felony and some misdemeanor crimes. How does someone not convicted get off the list? +