Logicism in Formalizing Common Sense and in Natural Language Semantics

Abstract:  I briefly rehearse a general characterization of logicism that includes projects within philosophical logic, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. After a digression in which I survey work in natural language semantics that I claim is very relevant to common sense logicism, I describe a logicist project that attempts to formalize semantic relations among words in natural languages. Introduction This paper has three main goals. I will (1) advocate a more general account of logicism than the one that is current in philosophy of mathematics; (2) motivate a logicist program in an area of natural language semantics that turns out to be closely related to problems in the formalization of common sense; and (3) provide a brief survey of the research tradition in "natural language metaphysics." This tradition, which seeks to provide a broadly logical theory that will account for meaning relations in human languages, is probably best regarded as a subdiscipline of common sense logic...