How's research going? It's alright. I don't know very much about pragmatics, which could be accurately described as "linguistic philosophy". Linguistics is heavily based in logic - it's sort of like math, but with words. Philosophy is also - predictably - heavily based in logic. The study of pragmatics in linguistics focuses contextualizing language for both the speaker and the hearer using philosophy of language. I am basically reading about the logic of language - specifically how logical arguments construct context. As Dr. Green's research assistant, my job is to read articles and books about pragmatics and take notes on them, summarizing their arguments.
I've never taken a class on logic, which is therefore making this more difficult than it has to be. I basically failed every math class ever from algebra onwards, and therefore was not very pleased to find out I had a math requirement in college. I had the option of Finite Math or Logic. Figuring that I had at least taken Algebra variations something like 6 times, I would sign up for Finite Math and try really hard to not fail. (I scraped by with a C+. I was very proud of myself.)
I do have a basic idea of how sets work, and I know how to read syntactical analyses and I understand how surface vs deep structures work in language, but I don't know how to read logic problems. This is, of course, a major hinderance in progress. I have been reading about propositional logic and kind of staring blankly at proofs like (this is a real example taken from one of my texts):
1)
a. Sam wants Fido.
b. What Sam wants is Fido.
c. It is Sam who wants Fido.
2)
a. Wants (Sam,Fido)
b. λx(Wants (Sam,x))(Fido)
c. λx(Wants (x,Fido))(Sam)
3) It is Fido that Sam wants.
3a) λx(Wants (Sam,x))(Fido)
4) Who wants Fido is Sam.
4a) λx(Wants (x,Fido))(Sam)
Heather wants fewer parenthesis. But I am fairly certain that I am supposed to understand that these are varieties of ways to say that "Sam wants Fido", and they are perfectly clear in every context. Something that would not be clear (comparatively speaking to Sam & Fido) is "Noam likes bats" (What kind of bats? flying bats? baseball bats? an otherwise non-defined bat? What if 'bats' is an acronym for Bad Ass Tattoos? etc etc). I am either reading about logic, ambiguity, or both. This goes on for pages. The first article I read was 30 pages about how the sentence "I love you" is perfectly contextual and logically sound as it has a subject (I), a verb (love) and a referent object (you).
In case you were curious, all of it is this ridiculous. (The pragmatists would hate that sentence.) Although context is important because it tells us what is happening in the sentence so we can go on to presuppose and imply things accordingly based on what we understand to be true, the pragmatists are champs at stretching context a little bit too far - Bad Ass Tattoos? Come on now.
For the most part though, I do get it...it just takes some time. A lot of the logical arguments I'm given look a lot like the ones above, and they are pretty straightforward. It's when you give me symbols like ¬, ∀, ⊕, and ⊢ that I have no idea what you are talking about. I can't even guess what "∀x" would mean - I have been relying heavily on Wikipedia's Basic Logic Symbols page as a reference and hoping I am kind of right in my analysis. Maybe when I finish this research I will have a basic working knowledge of logic.
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