| The purpose of this essay is to advance and defend a theory on the notion of logical form as a representation of the structure of the meanings of natural language sentences. Central to this defense is an examination of Russell's 1905 theory of descriptions. Following an investigation of the different ways in which this theory has been applied (for instance, in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophical psychology), it is argued that there is a modified application of this theory that can be defended as a substantive contribution to a general theory on the semantics of natural language. This general theory proposes that linguistic meaning be treated as determined by grammatical form on the supposition that the syntactic compositionality inherent in the forms of sentences involving descriptive phrases is systematically commensurate with the compositionality inherent in the structures associated with their meanings. The result is a theory of descriptions which, while largely abandoning the view that natural language grammatical form is misleading, remains consonant with the general spirit of the Russellian program by proposing to build structure into the language of logic as a way of rendering perspicuous our knowledge of the logical forms of natural language sentences.; Following recent developments in linguistics, it is argued that semantic interpretation applies at an abstract level of analysis that linguists call "Logical Form." A systematic procedure is then articulated for transforming the sentences of natural language into structures that facilitate a direct mapping onto the formulas of a logical grammar. This grammar consists of a non-standard second-order logic with restricted quantifiers, lambda abstracts for complex predicates, and nominalized predicates. In the process of applying this logical grammar to natural language, an inter-linguistic, comparative approach is adopted that looks to other natural languages such as Chinese. It is shown, for instance, how the system here developed yields logical forms for sentences in Chinese involving intensional contexts. Such sentences reveal interesting idiosyncrasies in connection with the semantics of predication and identity, and this forces us to rethink many of our assumptions about the relationship between grammatical form and logical form. |
