----- Original Message ----- From: Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, July 30, 2001 12:25 AM Subject: Re: Ethical foundations of the left
For what Tarski says to be true -I guess this must be some meta use of "true" lol---there must be added something like "in English" but this seems to make Tarski's theory rather uninformative about truth in general and also make truth a predicate of sentences in specific languages. Tarski notes his own indebtedness to Aristotle and regards his semantic theory as a modern reconstruction of what is right in Aristotle. Aristotle said that it is true to say of what is that it is and of what it is not that it is not. This seems to be a much better formulation than anything Tarski ever did.
"Snow is white" is true in English if and only if snow is white but
"Der Schnee ist weiss" is true in German if and only if snow is white...excuse me if I got the German wrong..
and so on.. sentences are always sentences of some language and hence Tarski does not get any general formula for truth.. except "X'" is true in L if and only if X==where "X" is a sentence in L. but not otherwise..
Cheers, Ken Hanly
> applied to a theory of truth. The (utterly standard) theory of truth I
jsut
> sketched is a 20th century notion, basically a version of Davidson's
> application of Tarski to natural language, taht could not have been
> formulated before Frege's development of mathematical logic in the late
19th
> century.
>
> Habermas is beyond this. We can no longer talk about truth
> >in a >representationalist way, the truth we have takes the form of
> >propositional >statement about the world.
>
> Can't we? See if you can stop me. What could truth be if not an accurate
> represention of theworld? As Tarski teaches, "Snow is white" is true if
and
> only if snow is white.
>
> They only have meaning in the sense of >validity.>