Was Frege the first to claim that natural language is logically inconsistent?

Question

Gottlob Frege claimed that natural language was logically inconsistent. After him, most academics seem to have bought the idea, most prominently Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Tarski and Peter Strawson.

My question is: Was Frege the first self-proclaimed logician to claim (publicly) that natural language is logically inconsistent?

Thank you for any scholarly reference.

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Nota

Clearly, there is one intemperate user here. Presumably the downvoting of my otherwise perfectly interesting question is for qualifying Frege, Russell, Carnap, Tarski and Strawson as "self-proclaimed logicians". Yet, this is factually true. Some people don't like the real world and take refuge in their imagination. It doesn't work.

When you write authoritatively on logic, as all these people did, you implicitly but clearly define yourself as a logician. There is no harm in this, but we all keep our own opinion as to who is what exactly, and my informed opinion is that these people didn't understand logic and so were not really logicians. Given this, I cannot possibly countenance calling them "logicians", at least not without the appropriate caveat.

Edit Some posters here deny that the academics I mentioned have said that natural language was logically inconsistent, so here is what Richard L. Epstein says:

XXII. The Liar Paradox

But Alfred Tarski, 1933, held that any language that contains predicates and words that can be used to formulate a liar paradox will necessarily be inconsistent. In particular, any ordinary language such as English, he argued, is inherently inconsistent, for it contains the predicate ‘— is true’ and the means to name its own sentences.

-- Richard L. Epstein, Classical Mathematical Logic (2006)

Published by Princeton University Press

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400841554.437

Google Books' blurb on Richard L Epstein:

Richard L Epstein received his B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He held a post-doctoral fellowship in mathematics and philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and was a Fulbright Fellow to Brazil and a National Academy of Sciences Scholar to Poland. He is the author of "Propositional Logics" and, with Walter Carnielli, "Computability". He is now the Head of the Advanced Reasoning Forum.

Answer 1

I'll jot down a brief answer with a view to expand on it later.

The natural language is logically inconsistent/semantically opaque/ambiguous and the like, in essence, add up to the idea and question of perfect language. Though the views and ideals gathered under the heading of perfect language may seem quite divergent one from another, however, they are intrinsically connected by the nature of language —this point requires to be argued separately, so I shall not delve into it.

The most comprehensive history of the subject, so far as I'm aware, is The Search for the Perfect Language (as the title of its English translation) by Umberto Eco. The contents of the book that I've inserted below may give an idea about the roots and the extensiveness of the subject (though it touches upon the undertaking of formal languages slightly).

Eco marks the beginning of the project of a perfect language with Dante (p. 34):

The first occasion on which the world of medieval Christianity had to confront a systematic project for a perfect language was the De vulgari eloquentia (hereafter DVE) of Dante Alighieri, written presumably between 1303 and 1305.

Dante's text opens with an observation which, obvious though it may be, is still fundamental for us: there is a multitude of vulgar tongues, all of them are natural languages, and all are opposed to Latin - which is a universal but artificial grammar.

But it must be Raymond Lull to be the first that sought a non-natural solution (p. 53):

It was among the Franciscans that all of the earlier strands converged in his Ars magna, which Lull conceived as a system for a perfect language with which to convert the infidels. The language was to be a universal; it was to be articulated at the level of expression in a universal mathematics of combination; its level of content was to consist of a network of universal ideas, held by all peoples, which Lull himself would devise.

No doubt it is Leibniz who occupies an exceptional place in the course the idea takes.

The other notable publications I can cite are Renaissance Truths: Humanism, Scholasticism and the Search for the Perfect Language by Alan R. Perreiah and Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language (as the title of its English translation) by Paolo Rossi.

The papers "Logic and the Myth of the Perfect Language" by Marco Carapezza and Marcello D’Agostino and "The Language of Thought as a Logically Perfect Language" by Andrea Bianchi focus on the formal language aspect that begins with Leibniz.

Answer 2

The term 'consistent' and the predicate 'is consistent' is normally applied to theories - considered as well-defined sets of propositions (assertions of fact or theorems) that are assumed (or proven) to be true.

Natural languages are not sets of propositions. So, it makes no sense to claim that they would be inconsistent. (By the same token, it also does not make sense to claim that they would be consistent.)

None of the mathematicians, logicians and philosophers mentioned in the question ever claimed that a natural language is identical to a set of propositions or even that it could be reduced to such a set. None of them ever claimed that natural language as such is inconsistent or that a natural language is inconsistent (in the above sense of logically consistent). I dare to claim this, even though I have, of course, not read all of their work, because such a claim would simply be silly and absurd; if the OP provides a reference that convincingly refutes this, I will stand corrected and humbly admit that I was wrong.

In The Semantic Conception of Truth Tarski, analyzing the paradox of the liar, speaks of the "inconsistency of semantically closed languages" (basically defined as formal languages in which the paradox of the liar would be expressible) and he considers the question whether or not "everyday language" should be seen as semantically closed (and thus inconsistent). He writes:

The languages (either the formalized languages or — what is more frequently the case — the portions of everyday language) which are used in scientific discourse do not have to be semantically closed. This is obvious in case linguistic phenomena and, in particular, semantic notions do not enter in any way into the subject-matter of a science; for in such a case the language of this science does not have to be provided with any semantic terms at all. However, we shall see in the next section how semantically closed languages can be dispensed with even in those scientific discussions in which semantic notions are essentially involved.

Immediately followed by these crucial, careful observations:

The problem arises as to the position of everyday language with regard to this point. At first blush it would seem that this language satisfies both assumptions (I) and (II), and that therefore it must be inconsistent. But actually the case is not so simple. Our everyday language is certainly not one with an exactly specified structure. We do not know precisely, which expressions are sentences, and we know even to a smaller degree which sentences are to be taken as assertible. Thus the problem of consistency has no exact meaning with respect to this language. We may at best only risk the guess that a language whose structure has been exactly specified and which resembles our everyday language as closely as possible would be inconsistent.

Answer 3

Logical inconsistency (or if you prefer logical incoherence) can be said of propositions, arguments, or claimants, but it is not said widely or generally said of natural languages. Under the Saussurean notion of langue and parole, language is roughly divided into its imputed grammar and lexicon (langue), which is a description of its syntax and meaning, and its use by speakers (parole). The logical aspect of the language maybe described by the logical semantics of the langue, but the langue itself does not assert, and therefore, strictly speaking does not apply truth conditions to constructs.

For there to be logical inconsistency in a language, that requires a speaker construct propositions and assign them truth values, and is generally called assertoric force in the philosophy of language. Thus having two propositions P1 and P2 contradict each other makes the language logically inconsistent, or having arguments A1 and A2 contradict each other makes the language logically inconsistent, or having a person accept A1 and A2 given their contradictory claims makes the language logically inconsistent, but these are concrete instances of language use, and thus means the aforementioned use of 'language' has the sense of parole and not langue.

There are still some thinkers who maintain such a thesis anyway. Such a position is called trivialism. From WP:

Trivialism is the logical theory that all statements (also known as propositions) are true and that all contradictions of the form "p and not p" (e.g. the ball is red and not red) are true. In accordance with this, a trivialist is a person who believes everything is true.

While clearly a radical and minority position, according to the article, it was considered briefly perhaps by Aristotle himself. From the article:

Luis Estrada-González in "Models of Possiblism and Trivialism" has interpreted Aristotle's Metaphysics Book IV as such: "A family of arguments between 1008a26 and 1007b12 of the form 'If trivialism is right, then X is the case, but if X is the case then all things are one. But it is impossible that all things are one, so trivialism is impossible.' ... these Aristotelian considerations are the seeds of virtually all subsequent suspicions against trivialism: Trivialism has to be rejected because it identifies what should not be identified, and is undesirable from a logical point of view because it identifies what is not identical, namely, truth and falsehood."

As such, it would seem that some considerations of natural languages as inherently inconsistent would go back to the Ancient Greeks.

Answer 4

natural language is logically inconsistent?

I think it is a mistake to look at this question literally.

The language and the written word create inconsistencies in our understanding of reality. They have a power to turn lies into truth, to create fiction that self fulfills into reality. Fictional writing is the biggest threat to traditional philosophy.

Answer 5

Well, come to think of it there are inconsistencies in (the English) language at the orthographical level.

For example,

"Argue" (R-GYU) vs. "tongue" (TUNG).

The plural of "mouse" is "mice", but the plural of "house" is not "hice"

The past tense of "talk" is "talked", of ""paint" is "painted", but that of "run" is "ran" and "go" is "went".