In its specialized format as the infrastructure of all theoretical structurations of the world, language is essentially formal. The significance of formal languages lies in their capacity for what Catarina Dutilh Novaes terms ‘desemantifica…[^49]: The term ‘universe of discourse’ originates from Augustus De Morgan’s phrase universe of a proposition specifically meaning ‘the whole of some definite category of things which are under discussion’ but not at all ‘the totality of al…
Catarina Dutilh Novaes
philosopher · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Catarina Dutilh Novaes is a philosopher of logic and language whose concept of "desemantification and resemantification" appears in the course readings to explain how formal languages operate as infrastructures for theoretical world-building. Her work is invoked to account for the capacity of formal systems to strip away and reconstruct meaning, a process central to understanding how AI and computational systems mediate between abstract logic and interpretable output. While only a passing reference in these excerpts, her intervention bridges medieval logic traditions with contemporary formal and computational frameworks, enabling a genealogy of how meaning gets engineered through syntax.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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