Topic: GENERAL LOGIC
Truth-Definitions and Definitional Truth
By Douglas Patterson
Putnam, Etchemendy, Heck and others have criticized Tarski’s definitions of truth on the grounds that they turn what ought to be contingent truths about the truth conditions of sentences into logical, mathematical or necessary truths. I argue that this criticism rests on the misguided assumption that substitution in accord with a good definition preserves logical, mathematical or necessary truth. I give a number of examples intended to show that substitution in accord with good definitions need preserve none of these. The paper should be of interest not only to students of Tarski, but to anyone interested in definition and analyticity, and it includes some discussion of the contingent a priori, logicism, the nature of applied mathematics, and early Wittgensteinian doctrines about showing and saying.
Source: Online Papers in Philosophy
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 08:33 BST
