ABSTRACT
A logical language is a language without style, a language purged of the coloring, nuance, rhythm, metaphor, rhetoric that mark an individual voice. These effects, characteristic of poetic or literary language, produce a series of private idioms particular to each speaker, and must not be allowed to interrupt the commonality of a language in which truth can be expressed. It is to this conviction that Gottlob Frege returned after the failure of the formalization that would have produced stable objects for logic. Frege makes no pretense of describing ordinary thought or communication. His critics, Frege explained, “find that my conceptual notation does not correctly represent mental processes; and they are right, for this is not its purpose at all. The impersonality Frege saw as one of the great benefits of logical language. Mechanisms could be expected to intervene as useful aids in all areas of activity.
