La mobilità dei significati. Divagazioni sulla lingua comune e le sue presunte imperfezioni logiche

Philosophy has often shown a strong skepticism towards natural language which has been charged with ambiguity, imprecision, indeterminacy, vagueness, etc. In this essay, taking as our starting point the socratic-platonic attitude towards the so called words and meaning ‘mobility’, we shall analyze some of the ways in which this skepticism towards the imperfections of natural language displayed itself. We will mainly focus on the conception of language as a dress of thought, a conception that underlies the view of language, and of the relationship between logic and language, of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). In this perspective, we will look into the ideal of precision that guides their attitudes toward the indeterminacy of language and we will use Wittgenstein’s insights on the topic in the Philosophical Investigations as a way of keeping away from this ideal of language without thereby falling prey to vagueness and imprecision.