Logic and Logics in Natural Language
Michael Glanzberg
"We live in a sea of logics, of many sorts, including sub-classical logics, sub-structural logics, extensions of classical logic, and so on. What sorts of logics can we find in natural language, and to what extent can our own languages be a guide to what the right logic is? Building on earlier work, this paper argues that natural language does not provide us with any logic directly. Even so, looking at natural language and idealizing appropriately can lead us to many logics, of many sorts. This paper goes on to argue that there are limits to what logics we can find in this way, and that some sub-structural logics will fail to emerge from a good idealization process, even though they are closely related to forms found in natural language. Hence, we can find many logics if we look at language, but there are some hard limits to what we can find."
