Abstract

Though, at first sight, logical formalization of natural language sentences and arguments might look like an unproblematic enterprise, the criteria of its success are far from clear and, surprisingly, there have only been a few attempts at making them explicit. This paper provides a picture of the enterprise of logical formalization that does not conceive of it as a kind of translation from one language (a natural one) into another language (a logical one), but rather as a construction of a 'map' of (a piece of) the 'inferential landscape' of the natural language. The criteria that appear to govern the enterprise are labeled as those of reliability, ambitiousness, transparency and parsimony. These criteria, it is argued, do not provide for an excavation of a ready-made logical structure, but rather help us achieve a "reflective equilibrium" between the normative authority of logic and the answerability of logic to a natural language