ABSTRACT
This chapter considers an elementary example indicating how the assessment of adequacy of a formalization can proceed in a particular case. If the formalization of a statement leads people to render an intuitively incorrect reference argument as having a valid form within the chosen formal language, then this formalization of the statement is not even a candidate for an adequate formalization. If a certain formalization of a statement leads them to recognize more of the arguments that are intuitively correct and fall into the intended scope of the logical language as correct due to their logical form rather than an alternative one, then the former is-other things being equal-a better candidate than the latter. The procedure of selecting the preferable (tentatively adequate) formalization would yield more reliable results the larger and more varied the set of sample arguments is. A kind of bootstrapping penetrates the whole enterprise of logical formalization.
