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May 17, 2005
Dear Morty,
At the end of this post about Tarski, I was wishing that I knew what drove him to reject the analytic/synthetic distinction. Fortunately, in the comments, Juhani remembered a letter from Tarski to Morton White, in which Tarski lays out his reasons. I have managed to track it down, so here, for anyone with J-stor access, is a link to the letter.
At the beginning of the letter, Tarski remarks that he does not have much to say beyond what he has already said "in my article on logical consequence and in the recent one on truth (notice, in particular, my remarks in S14.)" Morton White tells us that these two articles are "On the Concept of Logical Consequence" and "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics" (jstor) respectively. I was surprised by this, since I know these two articles reasonably well, and I had no suspicion, until I spoke to Bernard Linsky last week, that Tarski rejected the analytic/synthetic distinction.
Section of 14 of "The Semantic Conception of Truth" is the beginning of the "polemical" part of the paper, and it contains five major paragraphs. In the first Tarski declines to claim that his semantic conception of truth is the only right one, saying that he has no wish to contribute to debates over whether it is the right conception of truth, since the question makes no sense. In the second paragraph two he writes:
Disputes of this type are by no means restricted to the notion of truth. They occur in all domains where - instead of an exact, scientific terminology - common language with all its vagueness and ambiguity is used; and they are always meaningless, and therefore in vain.
In paragraph three he recommends a course of action:
we should reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are confronted, not with one concept, but with several concepts which are denoted by one word; we should try to make these concepts as clear as possible, (by means of definition, or of an axiomatic procedure, or in some other way); to avoid further confusions we should agree to use different terms for different concepts; and then we may proceed to a quiet and systematic study of all the concepts involved, which will exhibit their main properties and mutual relations.
In paragraph four he notes that in the case of truth, some people recommend the pragmatic conception, or the coherence conception.
Then in the final paragraph of section 14 he says that none of those conceptions has been stated sufficiently clearly, but that that may change, and then, when we have several clearly stated but different conceptions of truth, we should invent new terms to express them:
Personally, I should not feel hurt if a future world congress of the "theoreticians of truth" should decide - by a majority of votes - to reserve the word "true" for one of the non-classical conceptions, and should suggest another word - say, "frue," for the conception considered here. But I cannot imagine that anyone could present cogent arguments to the effect that the semantic conception is "wrong" and should be entirely abandoned.
What is there in here that is in tension with the analytic-synthetic distinction? Nothing very much, on a casual reading and there is plenty that is unQuinean (definitions giving the meanings of words, "axioms" that look very like meaning postulates, the study of concepts and the view that nothing could show his view of the meaning of "true" to be wrong.) I'll come back to this in another post and see if I can reconstruct anything like a plausible argument against the analytic/synthetic distinction.
Posted by logican at May 17, 2005 04:11 PM
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Comments
That is odd. I don't know if it's necessarily "un-Quinean", though. Quine was OK with stipulation. In the terminology of Quine's "Carnap and Logical Truth", Tarski here is saying that there is no fact of the matter about what the correct "discursive definition" of 'true' is, but that we can give the term any "legislative definition" we like -- and that giving such definitions and studying them is a better use of our time than trying to figure out what 'true' means in ordinary English. Wouldn't Quine have agreed? Still, I can't find anything in "The Semantic Conception of Truth" to suggest that Tarski would have agreed with Quine's reasoning (which is certainly not easy to follow) that because statements that start out as legislative definitions may come to be regarded as false, there are no truths-by-convention.
Posted by: Juhani at May 18, 2005 11:04 AM