Ramblings 2

There is no merit in writing obscure, elliptic, terse, sinuous, cryptic philosophical prose. It may seem that you are showing that you are more intelligent and quicker than the reader but you are in reality just lacking courtesy and expressing a need to hide the substance of your arguments. 

When we translate a text in one language into another language, what exactly are we doing ? Is translation linguistic activity ? What do we say or who do we talk to when we write or translate ?

Formal systems represent linguistic expressions. We should be able to transform a linguistic expression into a formal expression, apply the formal rules and then translate back and obtain something acceptable. Formal semantics represent what linguistic expressions mean.  Formal semantics must consist of mathematical structures. Syntactic constructions can be mirrored in operations on such structures. The structures capture how meaning is built up.

A formal semantics must have reflection-into-self, intensionality. You can't escape the fact that we can talk about senses and references, hence senses can themselves be references. That the reference of sentences are states of affairs or equivalence classes of such.

While there are some good philosophical points in Bealer's Quality and Concept  our approach and views are quite distinct from those of Bealer.  Rather they follow the tradition of Leibniz, Bolzano, Frege, Husserl and more recently the work of Guillermo Rosado Haddock and Claire O. Hill.  The work of Edward Zalta exemplifies what a project of an axiomatic philosophy can look like.