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Unifying foundations – to be seen in the phenomenon of language. (English) Zbl 1056.03006

The increasing fragmentation of science into a multitude of disciplines is compatible with a unifying understanding of science. The author pleads for unifying the foundations of science with the help of his holistic conception of language as a whole of complementary description–interpretation processes (p.138). With this he tries to overcome the standard distinction of language into syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Language in its complementaristic understanding refers to holistic situations where this fragmentation of language into parts does not succeed. This conception is based on a “linguistic realism” according to which the “real world”, intended “to refer to a world that exists independent of us human beings and our languages, in this very intention is a complementaristic conception within the language in which it is conceived as such” (p.166).
Linguistic complementarity is discussed in and applied to a wide range of fields, among them the axiomatization of infinity and basic interpretations of the notion of set for discussing the interpretation problem, informal logics and induction in extended logics, and L.Wittgenstein’s representability statement in TLP 4.12 as a conception for a language–world connection that can be overcome by the holistic conception of language.

MSC:

03A05 Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations
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