Abstract

The point of formalisation is to model various aspects of natural language. Perhaps the main use to which formalisation is put is to model and explain inferential relations between different sentences. Judged solely by this objective, a formalisation is successful in modelling the inferential network of natural language sentences to the extent that it mirrors this network. There is surprisingly little literature on the criteria of good formalisation, and even less on the question of what it is for a formalisation to mirror the inferential network of a natural language or some fragment of it. This paper takes some exploratory steps towards a quantitative account of the main ingredient in the goodness of a formalisation. We introduce and critically examine a mathematical model of how well a formalisation mirrors natural-language inferential relations.