ONT Re: Effective Logical Formalism -- Literature Notes
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ELF. Literature Note 5
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John,
I'm going to put this in my file to look at later,
as I'm struggling to maintain my beachhead on the
Island of Lbase, but maybe you could give a guide
to the perplexed by explaining how the subject of
truth got to be lumped under the head of semantic,
and who it was that most notoriously lumped it so,
and why.
Jon Awbrey
John Sowa wrote:
>
> One point I'd like to emphasize is the title of Tarski's
> original paper on model theory:
>
> Tarski, Alfred (1933) "Pojecie prawdy w jezykach nauk dedukcynych,"
> German trans. as "Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten
> Sprachen," English trans. as "The concept of truth in formalized
> languages," in Tarski (1982) pp. 152-278.
>
> Tarski explicitly said that he was not trying to represent
> the concept of truth in natural languages, but he wavered on
> that issue in many ways. Following is a later paper (1944),
> in which he elaborates the implications of his approach:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/logic/tarski.htm
> The Semantic Conception of Truth
>
> Following is a quotation:
>
> The most natural and promising domain for the applications
> of theoretical semantics is clearly linguistics -- the empirical
> study of natural languages. Certain parts of this science are
> even referred to as "semantics," sometimes with an additional
> qualification. Thus, this name is occasionally given to that
> portion of grammar which attempts to classify all words of
> a language into parts of speech, according to what the words
> mean or designate. The study of the evolution of meanings in
> the historical development of a language is sometimes called
> "historical semantics." In general, the totality of investigations
> on semantic relations which occur in a natural language is
> referred to as "descriptive semantics." The relation between
> theoretical and descriptive semantics is analogous to that
> between pure and applied mathematics, or perhaps to that between
> theoretical and empirical physics; the role of formalized
> languages in semantics can be roughly compared to that of
> isolated systems in physics.
>
> But one point that Tarski and most logicians, including Pat Hayes,
> do not emphasize is the importance of a theory of reference as
> a prerequisite for a theory of truth. For the "formalized
> languages" that Tarski addressed, the entities under discussion
> were already collected into well defined sets: a set of
> individuals D and a set of relations R defined over D.
>
> The questions that model theory addresses were well understood
> by Aristotle, Ockham, and Peirce, among others. They are
> certainly important, but equally important, if not more so,
> are the questions of how to identify, enumerate, and refer
> to the entities and relations in the sets D and R. What are
> the entities and relations in D and R? How many are there?
> Which, if any, is designated by any particular symbol?
>
> Although I think Quine's vision was rather limited in many
> ways, I give him credit for recognizing the limitations
> of model theory:
>
> The notion of possible world did indeed contribute to the
> semantics of modal logic, and it behooves us to recognize the
> nature of its contribution: it led to Kripke's precocious and
> significant theory of models of modal logic. Models afford
> consistency proofs; also they have heuristic value; but they
> do not constitute explication. Models, however clear they be
> in themselves, may leave us at a loss for the primary, intended
> interpretation.
>
> Bottom line: Model theory is important, but it only solves
> one part of the problem. The other parts are of the utmost
> importance for ontology.
>
> John Sowa
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