Evergreen problem, in old school shape

“...The evaluation of arguments presented in a natural language should have been one of the major worries... of logic since its beginnings. However,... the actual development of formal logic took a different course. It seems that... the almost general attitude of all formal logicians was to regard such an evaluation process as a two-stage affair. In the first stage, the original language formulation had to be rephrased, without loss, in a normalized idiom, while in the second stage, these normalized formulations would be put through the grindstone of the formal logic evaluator.... Without substantial progress in the first stage even the incredible progress made by mathematical logic in our time will not help us much in solving our total problem”

Y. Bar Hillel, Argumentation in natural language, 1970