IDEAL LANGUAGE OF PHILOSOPHY

- Ideal language was an artificial language constructed with the help of modern logical
tools, especially those of predicate logic wherein its variables can be quantified.
- Since this language is modeled on symbolic logic, it is precise, non-ambiguous and
reveals a structure that is able to accurately represent the descriptions that language
makes.
- This language is contrasted with ordinary language which is seen as ambiguous, vague
and often misleading
- An ideal language, on the other hand envisaged a replacement of vocabulary that was
imperfect and imprecise with one that was logically perfect and precise. Logic was a kind
of universal language that could provide for the accuracy and certainty that was earlier
sought in epistemology.
- The turn towards language was an attempt to arrive at the world of experience through
language.
- Sharpening the instrument of language was like clearing one’s glasses for a better
perspective.
- in analytic philosophy, a language that is precise, free of ambiguity, and clear in
structure, on the model of symbolic logic, as contrasted with ordinary language, which is
vague, misleading, and sometimes contradictory.
- In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), the Viennese-born philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein viewed the role of language as providing a “picture of reality.” Truth was
seen as making logical propositions that correspond to reality. An ideal language was
thus seen as the necessary criterion for determining the meaning, or meaninglessness, of
statements about the world.
BERTRAND RUSSEL- According to Russell, it is the philosopher’s job to discover a logically
ideal language – a language capable of describing the world in such a way that we will not be
misled by the accidental, imprecise surface structure of natural language. As Russell writes,
“Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words
of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract.
From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Ludwig
Wittgenstein emphasized creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be
free from the ambiguities of natural language that, in their opinion, often made for philosophical
error. During this phase, Russell and Wittgenstein sought to understand language (and hence
philosophical problems) by using formal logic to formalize the way in which philosophical
statements are made.
Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism in his Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus (German: Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921). He thereby argued
that the universe is the totality of facts and not things: actual states of affairs and that these states
of affairs can be expressed by the language of first-order predicate logic. Thus a picture of the
universe can be construed by means of expressing atomic facts in the form of atomic
propositions, and linking them using logical operators. Wittgenstein's Tractatus was composed as
an elaborate work of philosophical irony ("nonsense"). In other words, he was demonstrating
how such a way of thinking is absurd.