Re: Is It True What They Say About Tarski?

Ian Goddard (igoddard@netkonnect.net)
Fri, 22 May 1998 12:32:13 -0400


Tony Hollick (anduril@cix.compulink.co.uk)

>(Apologies to Susan Masterman for 'borrowing' her title).
>
>I'm mildly surprised that more readers of this list are not fully
>familiar with logician Alfred Tarski's reconstruction of a commonsense
>Correspondence Theory of Objective Truth, utilizing a metalanguage,
>whereby we evaluate the truth content of formal statements concerning
>objective reality.

IAN: Thanks for the pointer, I found a
few pages on Alfred, this one is the best:

http://people.delphi.com/gkemerling/dy/t.htm#tars

in finding it I found a fantastic
philosophy dictionary on the web:

http://people.delphi.com/gkemerling/dy/index.htm

>This following example is a bit more complex than first appears -- it's
>deceptively simple -- sometimes there is more to the obvious than is
>obvious... >:-} ).
>
>Following Tarski, we may say:
>
>'The statement "le ciel est bleu" is true if --
>
>and only if --
>
>the sky is, in fact, blue.'
>
>Thus, we can examine and test the correspondence of statements with
>objective reality, with the metalanguage serving to avoid tautology,
>among other things.

IAN: "Tarskian truth" seems to be exactly
the case for a definable truth I was making.

Physical reality is true, and words are true
to the extent they map onto reality one-one.
This is also the natural notion of truth,
since a lie is a report about events in
the physical world that do/did not exist,
and thus do not map onto the physical world.

********************************************************
IAN Williams Goddard ------> http://Ian.Goddard.net
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Statements T r u t h A defines -A
a -A defines A
A: x is A b A -A
l T F A set is defined
-A: x is -A e F T by its members, thus
? ? A & -A contain each other.
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H O L I S M ---> http://www.erols.com/igoddard/meta.htm
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