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Full Idea
'Valence' and 'gene' were perfectly clear long before anyone succeeded in reducing them, but it was their reducibility and not their clarity before reduction that showed them to be compatible with physicalism.
Gist of Idea
'Valence' and 'gene' had to be reduced to show their compatibility with physicalism
Source
Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §5)
Book Ref
'The Nature of Truth', ed/tr. Lynch, Michael P. [MIT 2001], p.391
| 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] |