[FOM] expressive power of natural languages

[Arnold Neumaier]

On 12/01/2011 06:32 AM, W.Taylor at math.canterbury.ac.nz wrote:
>
> Surely you're going to have to put *some* restriction on natural language
> for this to make sense? English (with a truth predicate, which natural
> English most certainly does) is known to be inconsistent, (Russell set),
> so is in some sense of every possible order.

How is it that we can define within an inconsistent language such as 
English all terms that a typical logic textbook needs before it can 
state its subject matter precisely - in a way that it can count as a 
valid description and ''foundation'' of this subject matter (else why 
would it precede the subject matter in a logic book)?

It seems as if inconsistency in irrelevant parts of a theory has no 
bearing upon what is being described in a selected subset of it.