Probabilistic reasoning is possible in a formal setting; It produces a probability distribution over answers. To ground probabilistic logic itself I'm not aware of much progress beyond the initial idea of logical induction[0].
> This takes for granted a formal setting, which is what I'm questioning in any of these 'real world' contexts.
A formal model of semantics would likely be a low-level physical representation of possible states augmented with sound definitions of higher-level concepts and objects. I don't think humans are capable of developing a formal semantics that would work for your sentences (it's taken us hundreds of years to approach formalization of particle physics), but I think that an automated prover with access to physical experiments and an LLM could probably start building a more comprehensive semantics.