Logic in Natural Language: Commitments and Constraints

Abstract

In his new book, Logical Form, Andrea Iacona distinguishes between two different roles that have been ascribed to the notion of logical form: the logical role and the semantic role. These two roles entail a bifurcation of the notion of logical form. Both notions of logical form, according to Iacona, are descriptive, having to do with different features of natural language sentences. I agree that the notion of logical form bifurcates, but not that the logical role is merely descriptive. In this paper, I focus on formalization, a process by which logical form, on its logical role, is attributed to natural language sentences. According to some, formalization is a form of explication, and it involves normative, pragmatic, as well as creative aspects. I present a view by which formalization involves explicit commitments on behalf of a reasoner or an interpreter, which serve the normative grounds for the evaluation of a given text. In previous work, I proposed the framework of semantic constraints for the explication of logical consequence. Here, I extend the framework to include formalization constraints. The various constraints then serve the role of commitments. I discuss specific issues raised by Iacona concerning univocality, co-reference and equivocation, and I show how our views on these matters diverge as a result of our different starting assumptions.

Invariance Criteria as Meta-Constraints

“…Ultimately, the appropriateness of a system of constraints, as any system of logic, depends on the use it is intended for. Specifically, a system of semantic constraints can be used in empirical semantics to model logical consequence in natural language, or it can be used as a framework of commitments made by a reasoner (Sagi, 2020). It may be that these two uses (not to 7 exclude other possible uses) will pull us in completely different directions, but it may also be that they do not differ categorically in the conditions they require on constraints, rather only in emphasis and degree: while the former aims at empirical adequacy, the latter might entail a preference for coherence and robustness.…”

“… 20 In [27] I argue that isomorphism invariance is a pre-requisite for fixing a term in a manner faithful to its meaning in standard extensional model-theoretic semantics. …”