11 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) |
| 20769 | Sphaerus he was not assenting to the presence of pomegranates, but that it was 'reasonable' [Sphaerus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: When Sphaerus accepted pomegranates from the king, he was accused of assenting to a false presentation, to which Sphaerus replied that what he had assented to was not that they were pomegranates, but that it was reasonable that they were pomegranates. | |
| From: report of Sphaerus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.177 | |
| A reaction: He then cited the stoic distinction between a 'graspable' presentation and a 'reasonable' one. This seems a rather helpful response to Dretske's zebra problem. I like the word 'sensible' in epistemology, because animals can be sensible. |
| 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. |
| 7607 | Nagarjuna and others pronounced the world of experience to be an illusion [Nagarjuna, by Armstrong,K] |
| Full Idea: Many later Buddhists (after Nagarjuna, c.120 CE) developed a belief that everything we experience is an illusion: in the West we would call them idealists. | |
| From: report of Nagarjuna (teachings [c.120]) by Karen Armstrong - A History of God Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This is just one step beyond Plato (who at least hung onto the immediate world as an inferior reality), and is presumably intended to motivate meditators to break out of the misery of existence into a higher realm. Personally I am against it. |