Gil Sagi - Logicality in Natural Language

Talk by Gil Sagi (Haifa) on logicality in natural language

In a recent article, Michael Glanzberg claims that there is no relation of logical consequence in natural language (Glanzberg, 2015). The present paper counters that claim. I shall discuss Glanzberg’s arguments and show why they don’t hold. I will then present a positive account, which uses the logical framework ofsemantic constraints (as in (Sagi, 2014)) and the criterion of invariance under isomorphisms (as in (Sher, 1996)) to characterize logical consequence in natural language. Finally, I shall use a theory of Glanzberg’s (2014) to delineate the relation of logical consequence in natural language. If one takes this theory on board, I conjecture that logical consequence is precisely the subject matter of contemporary semantic theories for natural language.