Information in Natural Language

conception of linguistic information is characterised by the rise of ‘meaning proper’ in the wake of the development of modern logic, mainly through the work of Frege, Russell, and early Wittgenstein. One of the hallmarks of Frege’s philosophy of logic is his anti-psychologism: in order to give logic its proper due, he claims, we need to separate it from ‘psychology’, i.e., we need to distinguish the subject of logic, viz., the systematic explication of the validity of inference, from the empirical study of actual judgements and actual reasoning. In his logical theorising Frege developed his position gradually. In the Begriffsschrift Frege () he distinguishes between judgement and content, noting that the content of, e.g., an hypothetical judgement cannot be expressed in terms of the judgement of the antecedent and that of the consequent, but has to be defined in terms of their respective contents. However, he does still formulate his logic using a separate sign, the ‘judgement stroke’, for the judgement as such. Later on, he states that only the content of a judgement, but not the actual act of judging that content as true (or false, or plausible, or . . . ), plays a role in the normative theory of valid deductive reasoning. As Frege states in ‘Der Gedanke’, which dates from : logic is concerned with the ‘laws of truth’, and these laws can be regarded also as the ‘laws of thought’, but not in the sense of laws covering ‘general features of thinking as a mental occurrence’. His argument, characteristically concise, is that ‘error and superstition have causes just as much as correct cognition’ and a study of actual thought would need to treat them on a par with correct judgement and valid reasoning, which contravenes the true task of logic. Rather than being a description of how we actually think and that no interesting insights were developed along the way. Cf., Robins () for an overview. Seuren () is an example of an approach that is not purely historical, but attempts to connect the development of linguistics with modern systematic theories. . Which is not to say that it can not be, and has not been, challenged. Cf., e.g., (Dummett, , page ) for a dissenting opinion from an anti-realistic point of view. . A point concisely expressed by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, where, referring to the Begriffsschrift he remarks parenthetically in .: (‘Frege’s “judgement stroke” “|−” is logically quite meaningless)’. . Cf., Frege (–); quotations are taken from the English translation by Peter Geach in Frege ().