Logic and Language

Human language is a mystery and is embedded in almost everything we do. Despite being mysterious and complex, it has been studied scientifically by philosophers from the Greco-Roman and documented era. What’s important for us to realize is that logic does not and cannot occur in a vacuum; it’s only within the arms of language that logic resides.

Note: Logic is used inside a language, and logic has a language of its own.

In this chapter, we’ll look at logic from both ends: logic in everyday language and logic as a language in its own right.

Everyday language

There are thousands of languages alive today, and many have gone extinct. But every language is a vehicle for the community of its speakers to sustain its social activities. In that sense, language has established uses, and its sentences have established grammatical forms. For instance, poets and visionaries use language to express themselves using imperative sentential structures. Philosophers can be expressive in a more interrogative fashion, while kings and commanders can be directive emphatically. There’s no simplistic one-to-one mapping between the usage of sentences and their grammatical form. The following space allows us to interact with some of the possibilities.