Abstract

The sub-title of this paper is not an apology, but is an “apologia”: the paper is an “essay” in the etymological sense, because, so far as I know, nothing better is possible in the present state of inquiry into the no-man's-land lying between official logic and official linguistics. In trying to write on logico-linguistics for years I have been saved from despair many times by the confession of an eminent mathematician: Professor E. T. Bell, in his little book The Queen of the Sciences, after a particularly difficult passage blurts out: “This sentence is riddled with inconsistencies. It is a fair sample of the difficulties of talking sense about the foundations of reasoning,—mathematical or other.” The present essay is emphatically concerned with ‘the foundations of reasoning’.