Chapter One – Glossary of Terms

Philosophy 202

ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE: A language that is designed for a special purpose; it can be a formal language, like FOL, or more akin to natural language, like Esperanto.

FOL: (Short for "First-Order Logic") The language of first-order logic, an artificial language (or family of languages) used in the symbolic sciences (e.g., computer science, electrical engineering, philosophy, linguistics, etc.) because of its clarity, rigor, and lack of ambiguity.

LOGIC: The discipline that concerns the structure and principles of reasoning, such as standards of rational argumentation and criteria of valid inference.

NATURAL LANGUAGE: A language that is or was used by people in the course of everyday life, such as French, Japanese, or Swahili.

SEMANTICS: The interpretation of a language with respect to a particular domain or world.

SYNTAX: A specification of the vocabulary of a language (e.g., constants, predicates, connectives, quantifiers, etc.) along with the rules for producing well-formed combinations of vocabulary elements.