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by TheOtherHobbes 1921 days ago
The problem isn't that it's possible to un-overload natural language - it's that the overloading is unconscious. In reality there are different meta-languages of relationships and assumptions built into natural language at every level of use and sophistication.

Formalisation will not fix this. It's just as likely to bake the unconscious assumptions into a formal language as to remove them.

Philosophy done well can un-overload those assumptions, but done badly it can also provide rhetorical frameworks for perpetuating assumptions that should really be questioned.

1 comments

FWIW, I once read a claim that someone had found ca 30 different meanings of 'paradigm' in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both works might represent good practice of philosophy.