Accolades:
Convention T embodies our best
intuition as to how the concept of truth is used.
-- Donald Davidson
My lone dissent:
More boredom thou shalt never see
than Tarski’s Truth Convention T.
“Snow’s white” is true -- let’s get
this right --
if, but only if, snow is
white.
 |
| A.T., logician and skirt-chaser |
[Footnote]
When Tarski’s logical machinery is
used to provide languages with an interpretation, it should not be seen as giving us a definition of truth. [Emphasis in
original.] When used in this way,
it gives us a theory that, for each of the infinitely many sentences of the
language, assigns a condition that obtains if and only if that sentence is true
-- where truth is something we takes ourselves to understand antecedently,
without definition.
-- Scott Soames, Philosophical
Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), vol. II, p. 293
For a major empirical research program, investigating the validity of Convention T, click here.
~
A fellow dissenter:
See for example the panegyrics in
Wallace: “It may strike the reader
that Convention T is an astonishingly powerful intellectual device…”
(etc.) Wallace’s expressed
admiration for the achievements of modern logic is of course sincere, and I share it (not always for his
reasons). But these achievements
should not be used to terrorize the reader …
-- Saul Kripke, “Substitutional
Quantification”, in Evans & McDowell, eds., Truth and Meaning
(1976), p. 340
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