Most philosophers have been more or less skeptical about formalizing natural languages, and thus allowing the use of formal logic to analyze and understand them, although some, including Alfred Tarski (1901 - 1983), Rudolf Carnap (1891 - 1970), Richard Montague (1930 - 1971) and Donald Davidson (1917 - 2003), have developed formal languages, or formalized parts of natural language, for investigation. Some, like Paul Grice (1913 - 1988), have even denied that there is a substantial conflict between logic and natural language.
However, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Ordinary Language Philosophy movement, whose main proponents were P.F. Strawson (1919 - 2006), John Austin (1911 - 1960) and Gilbert Ryle, stressed the importance of studying natural language without regard to the truth-conditions of sentences and the references of terms. They believed that language is something entirely different to logic, and that any attempts at formalization using the tools of logic were doomed to failure. Austin developed a theory of speech acts, which described the kinds of things which can be done with a sentence (assertion, command, inquiry, exclamation) in different contexts of use on different occasions, and Strawson argued that the truth-table semantics of the logical connectives do not capture the meanings of their natural language counterparts.