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 | | From: | Lester Zick | | Subject: | Re: Epistemology 101 | | Date: | Tue, 28 Dec 2004 19:06:21 GMT |
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 | On 28 Dec 2004 08:29:56 -0800, "Jeff Rubard" in
comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>
>Neil W Rickert wrote:
>>
>> "robert j. kolker" writes:
>> >Neil W Rickert wrote:
>>
>> >The semantic theory of truth has as its generalcase for a given
>language:
>>
>> >'P' is true if and only if P
>>
>> That's empty. It says nothing. It is merely an internal consistency
>> theory for certain types of expression.
>
>What is being stated are the necessary and sufficient conditions for
>the predicate "is true". It just so happens that in most cases the most
>interesting case of the equivalence (Convention T) is that a sentence
>is true if and only if it is true (metalinguistic concerns enter in
>that one side of the definition consists of a structural-descriptive
>name for the sentence).
". . . is that a sentence is true if and only if it is true . . ."
The ratio of the meaning of this particular statement to the sequence
of words is undoubtedly 3.14159 . . .
>> >Its inventor, philosopher-logician Alfred Tarski , thought of it as
>>
>> And therefore Tarski was an idiot, for proposing such a vacuous
>theory.
>>
>> But wait. Tarski did no such thing.
>>
>> Tarski was dealing with a theory of truth for *formal* languages.
>> And the part stated is only a portion of his theory. It is the
>> consistency requirement, so that where P is expressible in both the
>> formal language and natural language (or a meta language), then it
>> would have the same truth conditions in both.
>>
>
>The semantic definition of truth can be used as a theory of truth for
>natural languages (see Donald Davidson's much-attended-to work), and in
>both cases the truth-conditions for the object language are given *in*
>the metalanguage (if truth-conditions need to be given for the
>metalanguage, you set up a meta-metalanguage, etc.) But it is still
>explicitly a correspondence theory (and if you think it's so vacuous,
>you're welcome to attend to the difficulties inherent in word-world
>relations).
>
>--
>Jeff Rubard
>http://opensentence.tripod.com/
>Essays on theory, politics, and culture
>
Regards - Lester
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