A Plea for Automated Language-to-Logical-Form Converters

This has been made available gratis by the publisher. This piece gives the raison d'etre for the development of the converters mentioned in the title. Three reasons are given, one linguistic, one philosophical, and one practical. It is suggested that at least /two/ independent converters are needed. This piece ties together the extended paper "Abstracts from Logical Form I/II," and the short piece providing the comprehensive theory alluded to in the abstract of that extended paper in "Pragmatics, Montague, and 'Abstracts from Logical Form'" by motivating the entire project from beginning to end.