Intensional Logic and Natural Language
Barbara Hall Partee · Psychology Press eBooks · 2019
Intensionality is a central aspect of natural language. One goal in the development of logic is to construct a similarly precise and unambiguous language, but capable of expressing propositions from a much broader domain than just mathematics. Furthermore, the syntax of the various languages of formal logic differs in fundamental ways from the syntax of any known human language. The logician’s criterion for an adequate semantics of English is that it account for the truth-conditions of all of the infinitely many sentences of the language, and correctly predict entailment relations between sentences. For many linguists, the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of natural language most definitely are branches of psychology. When the linguist does semantics by mapping English sentences into an uninterpreted language, the assumption is that semantic representation will have some psychological reality. No natural human language has the properties of Leibniz’s ideal language.