Logic and Semantic Analysis

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of logic and semantic analysis. The use of logic anticipates the place for semantic analysis in a cognitive science of language and the world mediated by mental representations. Semantic analysis interprets linguistic meaning in terms of something fundamentally nonlinguistic: relationships in the real world. Logic offers more than an analogy for doing semantics for natural language. Logic is a tool that makes semantic analysis easier to do, to present and to understand. It allows being precise about the ontology that the semantics presupposes—what knowledge of different kinds of entities and relationships best explains human ability to use language. It allows hooking up that ontology precisely with the syntax. And it allows using the mathematics of logical consequence to describe the semantic relationships among sentences. This chapter discusses how formalism can be exploited (especially first-order logic but also higher order logic and intensional logic), both to craft particular analyses more precisely and to think more generally about what analysis is. It presents Quine's view of meaning as a theoretical interpretation of a speaker's present dispositions to assent to, or to dissent from, utterances in context. Concepts relate to doing semantic analysis by analogy to logic are explained in detail.