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Full Idea
I suspect that the original purpose of the notion of truth was to aid us in utilizing the utterances of others in drawing conclusions about the world,...so we must attend to its social role, and that being in a position to assert something is what counts.
Gist of Idea
The notion of truth is to help us make use of the utterances of others
Source
Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §5)
Book Ref
'The Nature of Truth', ed/tr. Lynch, Michael P. [MIT 2001], p.388
A Reaction
[Last bit compressed] This sounds excellent. Deflationary and redundancy views are based on a highly individualistic view of utterances and truth, but we need to be much more contextual and pragmatic if we are to get the right story.
| 13499 | Tarski reduced truth to reference or denotation [Field,H, by Hart,WD] |
| 10818 | Tarski really explained truth in terms of denoting, predicating and satisfied functions [Field,H] |
| 7615 | Field says reference is a causal physical relation between mental states and objects [Field,H, by Putnam] |
| 10817 | Tarski just reduced truth to some other undefined semantic notions [Field,H] |
| 10819 | Tarski gives us the account of truth needed to build a group of true sentences in a model [Field,H] |
| 10820 | In the early 1930s many philosophers thought truth was not scientific [Field,H] |
| 10825 | The notion of truth is to help us make use of the utterances of others [Field,H] |
| 10826 | 'Valence' and 'gene' had to be reduced to show their compatibility with physicalism [Field,H] |
| 10827 | Model theory is unusual in restricting the range of the quantifiers [Field,H] |