12 ideas
10825 | The notion of truth is to help us make use of the utterances of others [Field,H] |
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. | |
From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §5) | |
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. |
10820 | In the early 1930s many philosophers thought truth was not scientific [Field,H] |
Full Idea: In the early 1930s many philosophers believed that the notion of truth could not be incorporated into a scientific conception of the world. | |
From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §3) | |
A reaction: This leads on to an account of why Tarski's formal version was so important, and Field emphasises Tarski's physicalist metaphysic. |
13499 | Tarski reduced truth to reference or denotation [Field,H, by Hart,WD] |
Full Idea: Tarski can be viewed as having reduced truth to reference or denotation. | |
From: report of Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972]) by William D. Hart - The Evolution of Logic 4 |
10818 | Tarski really explained truth in terms of denoting, predicating and satisfied functions [Field,H] |
Full Idea: A proper account of Tarski's truth definition explains truth in terms of three other semantic notions: what it is for a name to denote something, and for a predicate to apply to something, and for a function symbol to be fulfilled by a pair of things. | |
From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972]) | |
A reaction: This is Field's 'T1' version, which is meant to spell out what was really going on in Tarski's account. |
10817 | Tarski just reduced truth to some other undefined semantic notions [Field,H] |
Full Idea: It is normally claimed that Tarski defined truth using no undefined semantic terms, but I argue that he reduced the notion of truth to certain other semantic notions, but did not in any way explicate these other notions. | |
From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §0) |
10819 | Tarski gives us the account of truth needed to build a group of true sentences in a model [Field,H] |
Full Idea: Model theory must choose the denotations of the primitives so that all of a group of sentences come out true, so we need a theory of how the truth value of a sentence depends on the denotation of its primitive nonlogical parts, which Tarski gives us. | |
From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §1) |
10827 | Model theory is unusual in restricting the range of the quantifiers [Field,H] |
Full Idea: In model theory we are interested in allowing a slightly unusual semantics for quantifiers: we are willing to allow that the quantifier not range over everything. | |
From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], n 5) |
14961 | Clearly a pipe can survive being taken apart [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: There is at the moment a pipe on my desk. Its stem has been removed but it remains a pipe for all that; otherwise no pipe could survive a thorough cleaning. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Scattered Objects [1974], p.175) | |
A reaction: To say that the pipe survives dismantling is not to say that it is fully a pipe during its dismantled phase. He gives a further example of a book in two volumes. |
14962 | Bodies don't becomes scattered by losing small or minor parts [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: If a branch falls from a tree, the tree does not thereby become scattered, and a human body does not become scattered upon loss of a bit of fingernail. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Scattered Objects [1974], p.184) | |
A reaction: This sort of observation draws me towards essentialism. A body is scattered if you divide it in a major way, but not if you separate off a minor part. It isn't just a matter of size, or even function. We have broader idea of what is essential. |
3102 | Why don't we experience or remember going to sleep at night? [Magee] |
Full Idea: As a child it was incomprehensible to me that I did not experience going to sleep, and never remembered it. When my sister said 'Nobody remembers that', I just thought 'How does she know?' | |
From: Bryan Magee (Confessions of a Philosopher [1997], Ch.I) | |
A reaction: This is actually evidence for something - that we do not have some sort of personal identity which is separate from consciousness, so that "I am conscious" would literally mean that an item has a property, which it can lose. |
10826 | 'Valence' and 'gene' had to be reduced to show their compatibility with physicalism [Field,H] |
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. | |
From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §5) |
7615 | Field says reference is a causal physical relation between mental states and objects [Field,H, by Putnam] |
Full Idea: In Field's view reference is a 'physicalistic relation', i.e. a complex causal relation between words or mental representations and objects or sets of objects; it is up to physical science to discover what that physicalistic relation is. | |
From: report of Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972]) by Hilary Putnam - Reason, Truth and History Ch.2 | |
A reaction: I wouldn't hold your breath while the scientists do their job. If physicalism is right then Field is right, but physics seems no more appropriate for giving a theory of reference than it does for giving a theory of music. |