By: Shawn

Shawn — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 04:22:34 +0000

I think you are right that the list of things the author gave do not separate natural and formal languages. The post seems a little unclear on an important point. From the post, his point seems to be that mathematics tends to be done in natural language supplemented with some more formal symbols. Some of the symbols have a conventional use and meaning, and if one doesn’t use them one has to look them up to make sure one gets them right (just like the Japanese phrases one used to know but doesn’t any more). Some of them even have standard pronunciations. The important point is how this makes math a natural language as opposed to what Vendler (I believe) would call a scientific sublanguage, a fragment of the larger language with a more specialized vocabulary and maybe even additional syntactic forms that are allowed cause, while otherwise awkward, they have been used in the smaller community. Since I like a math background, I might be missing something important in his post. It seems like if math is in any sense a natural language, then it would be a dialect or sublanguage of a real natural language. Or, why even view it as a language at all? Didn’t Brouwer say math wasn’t a matter of language but of mental construction? (Just throwing that out there.)

Comments on: Mathematics as a Natural Language

By: Shawn