This study looks to the work of Tarski's mentors Stanislaw Lesniewski and Tadeusz Kotarbinski, and reconsiders all of the major issues in Tarski scholarship in light of the conception of Intuitionistic Formalism developed: semantics, truth, paradox, logical consequence.

It is argued that a certain form of the view that the semantic paradoxes show that natural languages are "inconsistent" provides the best response to the semantic paradoxes. After extended discussions of the views of Kirk Ludwig and Matti Eklund, it is argued that in its strongest formulation the view maintains that understanding a natural language is sharing cognition of an inconsistent semantic theory for that language with other speakers. A number of aspects of this approach are discussed and a (...) few objections are entertained. (shrink)

The essays can be seen as addressing Tarski's seminal treatment of four basic questions about logical consequence. (1) How are we to understand truth, one of ...

This is a discussion of different ways of working out the idea that the semantic paradoxes show that natural languages are somehow “inconsistent”. I take the workable form of the idea to be that there are expressions such that a necessary condition of understanding them is that one be inclined to accept inconsistent claims (an conception also suggested by Matti Eklund). I then distinguish “simple” from “complex” forms of such views. On a simple theory, such expressions are meaningless, while on (...) a complex theory they are not. I argue that complex theories are incompatible with truth conditional semantics and that simple theories are only coherent when the inconsistent claims are metalingusitic attributions of meaning. I close with a discussion of the version of the simple metalinguistic theory I have defended in “Understanding the Liar” and other papers. (shrink)

(Beall ed. The Revenge of the Liar, forthcoming from Oxford University Press) > The main presentation of my approach to the semantic paradoxes. I take them to show that understanding a natural language is sharing a cognitive relation to a logically false semantic theory with other speakers.

Controversy has arisen of late over the claim that deflationism about truth requires that we explain meaning in terms of something other than truth-conditions. This controversy, it is argued, is due to unclarity as to whether the basic deflationary claim that a sentence and a sentence that attributes truth to it are equivalent in meaning is intended to involve the truth- predicate of the object language for which we develop an account of meaning, or is intended to involve the truth- (...) predicate of the metalanguage in which we develop an account of meaning. The former view is compatible with the truth-conditional theory of meaning for the object language, the latter is incompatible with it. However, the former view is also trivially true; hence we should endorse the claim that any form of deflationism worth being interested in is incompatible with understanding meaning truth-conditionally. (shrink)

Partly due to the influence of Tarski's work, it is commonly assumed that any good theory of truth implies biconditionals of the sort mentioned in Convention T: instances of the T-Schema "s is true in L if and only if p" where the sentence substituted for "p" is equivalent in meaning to s. I argue that we must take care to distinguish the claim that implying such instances is sufficient for adequacy in an account of truth from the claim that (...) doing so is necessary. The claim that doing so is sufficient is a common component of deflationary theories of truth, while the claim that it is necessary, though often assumed, must be denied by proponents of rival inflationary theories of truth. I discuss the clarification of the debate between these views of truth that results from distinguishing the necessity and the sufficiency claims, and examine the prospects for its resolution. (shrink)

In recent articles Fodor and Lepore have argued that not only do considerations of learnability dictate that meaning must be compositional in the wellknown sense that the meanings of all sentences are determined by the meanings of a finite number of primitive expressions and a finite number of operations on them, but also that meaning must be 'reverse compositional' as well, in the sense that the meanings of the primitive expressions of which a complex expression is composed must be determined (...) by the meaning of that complex expression plus the manner of its composition. I argue against the requirement of reverse compositionality and against the claim that learnability requires it. I consider some objections and close the paper by arguing against the related claim that concepts are reverse compositional. (shrink)

(Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 2007) > Another look at Bar-On, Horisk and Lycan’s criticism of deflationism. I claim that their argument turns on a simple confusion about definitions and thereby fails to establish that deflationism somehow requires meaning to be explained in terms of truth conditions.

Tarski’s Convention T is often taken to claim that it is both sufficient and necessary for adequacy in a definition of truth that it imply instances of the T-schema where the embedded sentence translates the mentioned sentence. However, arguments against the necessity claim have recently appeared, and, furthermore, the necessity claim is actually not required for the indefinability results for which Tarski is justly famous; indeed, Tarski’s own presentation of the results in the later Undecidable Theories makes no mention of (...) an assumption to the effect that the definition of truth implies the biconditionals. This raises a question: was Tarski in fact committed to the necessity claim in the important papers of the 1930s and 40s? I argue that he was not. The discussion of this apparently esoteric interpretive issue in fact gets to the heart of many important questions about truth, and in the final sections of the paper I discuss the importance of the T-biconditionals in the theory of meaning and the relation of deflationary and inflationary theories of truth to the semantic paradoxes. (shrink)

This is a discussion of different ways of working out the idea that the semantic paradoxes show that natural languages are somehow “inconsistent”. I take the workable form of the idea to be that there are expressions such that a necessary condition of understanding them is that one be inclined to accept inconsistent claims (an conception also suggested by Matti Eklund). I then distinguish “simple” from “complex” forms of such views. On a simple theory, such expressions are meaningless, while on (...) a complex theory they are not. I argue that complex theories are incompatible with truth conditional semantics and that simple theories are only coherent when the inconsistent claims are metalingusitic attributions of meaning. I close with a discussion of the version of the simple metalinguistic theory I have defended in “Understanding the Liar” and other papers. (shrink)

A central component of ordinary thought about language is that things like English, Japanese and so on exist and that expressions of these languages mean things in them. A familiar philosophical take on this is that communication between speakers is something that happens in such languages and that happens because expressions have meanings in them: one communicates by means of English sentences because these sentences mean something in English. Opposed to this sort of philosophical common sense are two closely related (...) lines of thought. The first, commonly associated with Chomsky (e.g. 1986) and with Weinrich’s famous quote that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” is that natural languages are too poorly individuated to do the explanatory work the “commonsense” view requires of them, and are certainly too poorly individuated for serious study of language, or of its role in communication and behavior. For serious purposes, something better defined is required. This first thought leads directly into the second, on which any notion of a language suited for serious study should also bear a closer relationship to the attitudes and abilities of the individual speaker then a nebulous construct such as English could. If whatever meaning an uttered sentence has is determined by relatively “local” facts about the speaker, her intentions and beliefs, and the context of the utterance, language promises to be more closely tied to the speaker, and, one might think, better individuated for it. A move to treating the speaker’s idiolect (or even the idiolect at a time relative to conversational partner) as basic for the study of language is thus motivated both by both individuative and explanatory demands on the notion of a language. On this view, commonly associated in one way with Grice (e.g. 1989) and in another with Davidson (e.g. 2005), but shared by many others, shared languages are simply irrelevant to the determination of meaning, ordinary and philosophical prejudice to the contrary notwithstanding. I find the argument that shared language is irrelevant to the determination of meaning most persuasive in the following form.. (shrink)

It can seem a truism that to understand a language is to know what its expressions mean.

This dissertation defends the truth-conditional theory of meaning and the inflationary theory of truth it requires by explaining how truth-conditions could play an explanatory role in the account of the proper use of a language while being nevertheless metaphysically "lightweight" properties of sentences instituted by the way these sentences are used by the speakers of a language. Following the common division of approaches to truth into deflationary and inflationary, the dissertation begins in Chapter One with a discussion of currently advocated (...) deflationary theories. A general characterization of deflationism is developed that focuses on the deflationist's explanation of why certain attributions of truth-condition to the sentences of a language are assertible. This basic, meaning-theoretic deflationary commitment is distinguished from the metaphysically deflationary idea that truth is somehow not "robust" in the way that traditional inflationary theories take it to be. Chapter Two then argues that meaning-theoretic deflationism is best characterized by a less-noticed commitment to the claim that it is sufficient for adequacy in a theory of truth that it imply the attributions of truth-conditions discussed in Chapter One. In Chapter Three the relation of these basic deflationary commitments to the also common deflationary claim that meanings attributed with locutions like the English "means that", meanings that, in Hartry Field's phrase, "encapsulate truth-conditions" is considered, and it is argued that this latter view is actually not compatible with deflationism. ;Chapter Four examines the most prominent sorts of inflationary theory and finds them wanting. Chapter Five then discusses in a general way how a better inflationary theory could be developed; the central ideas are that truth-conditions play an explanatory role in the account of certain embedded uses of sentences, and that truth-conditions should be understood as instituted for sentences by the way that speakers use them. In Chapter Six the relevant sort of use is explained. The result is a view that is meaning-theoretically inflationary, in that truth-conditions play an explanatory role in the account of meaning, but metaphysically deflationary. (shrink)

I defend the “settist” view that set theory can be done consistently without any form of distinction between sets and “classes” (by whatever name), if we think clearly about belief and the expression of belief—and this, furthermore, entirely within classical logic. Standard arguments against settism in classical logic are seen to fail because they assume, falsely, that expressing commitment to a set theory is something that must be done in a meaningful language, the semantics of which requires, on pain of (...) Russellian paradox, a more powerful set theory. I explore the consequences of this response to the standard argument against “classical logic settism” for our notion of belief, and argue that what is revealed is that representationalist theories of belief cannot be right as long as it is possible to believe that every set is self-identical. (shrink)

Attempts to argue that the disquotational theory of truth is somehow self‐refuting have appeared largely unchallenged in the literature for some time now. Focusing on presentations by Anil Gupta and Crispin Wright, I contend that such arguments only undermine a view that nobody endorses. This done, I explain why it is fruitless to focus, as these arguments do, on deflationary accounts of the expressive function of the truth‐predicate. I then suggest a strategy for arguing against disquotationalism and other forms of (...) deflationism that focuses rather on the explanatory role of truth in accounts of meaning, in particular on the way that the theories of meaning compatible with deflationism handle embedded uses of sentences. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

New Essays on Tarski and Philosophy contains newly commissioned essays on the philosophical aspects of the work of Polish logician, mathematician and philosopher Alfred Tarski. Topics covered include Tarski's relations to other Polish figures, e.g. Lesniewski and Kotarbinski, the Vienna Circle, and other figures such as Hilbert and others who studied the foundations of mathematics and logic at the time. The volume also includes essays interpreting and criticizing Tarski's views.

A short discussion of whether or not an error theorist of understanding should construe understanding in terms of belief. This is a comment on a discussion between Dean Pettit and Steven Gross.

Review of Douglas Patterson. Alfred Tarski: Philosophy of Language and Logic.

Douglas Patterson argues that the best way to respond to the semantic paradoxes that arise in natural language is to take natural language semantics to be (explosively) inconsistent. According to Patterson, to understand a natural language is to share with others cognition of a false semantic theory. Patterson’s main argument runs as follows. English is expressively rich. So, the first sentence occurring in this review could be.

Argumentation, which can be abstractly defined as the interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion, is an important skill to learn for everyday life, law, science, politics and business. The best way to learn it is to try it out on real instances of arguments found in everyday conversational exchanges and legal argumentation. The introductory chapter of this book gives a clear general idea of what the methods of argumentation are and how they work as tools that can (...) be used to analyze arguments. Each subsequent chapter then applies these methods to a leading problem of argumentation. Today the field of computing has embraced argumentation as a paradigm for research in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Another purpose of this book is to present and refine tools and techniques from computing as components of the methods that can be handily used by scholars in other fields. (shrink)

This book provides an argumentation model for means-end reasoning, a distinctive type of reasoning used for problem-solving gand decision-making. Means-end reasoning is modeled as goal-directed argumentation from an agent's goals and known circumstances, and from an action selected as a means, to a decision to carry out the action. Goal-based reasoning for argumentation provides an argumentation model for this kind of reasoning, showing how it is employed in settings of intelligent deliberation where agents try to collectively arrive at a conclusion (...) on what they should do to move forward in a set of circumstances. The book explains how this argumentation model can help build more realistic computational systems of deliberation and decision-making and shows how such systems can be applied to solve problems posed by goal-based reasoning in numerous fields, from social psychology and sociology, to law, political science, anthropology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and robotics." -- Back cover. (shrink)

This monograph poses a series of key problems of evidential reasoning and argumentation. It then offers solutions achieved by applying recently developed computational models of argumentation made available in artificial intelligence. Each problem is posed in such a way that the solution is easily understood. The book progresses from confronting these problems and offering solutions to them, building a useful general method for evaluating arguments along the way. It provides a hands-on survey explaining to the reader how to use current (...) argumentation methods and concepts that are increasingly being implemented in more precise ways for the application of software tools in computational argumentation systems. It shows how the use of these tools and methods requires a new approach to the concepts of knowledge and explanation suitable for diverse settings, such as issues of public safety and health, debate, legal argumentation, forensic evidence, science education, and the use of expert opinion evidence in personal and public deliberations. (shrink)

Douglas Wadle celebrates the juxtaposition of art and science while examining music's influence on humanity's understanding of our place in the universe. Tracing the millennia-old love affair between music and science, Wadle chronicles the surprising ubiquity of musical training among history's greatest thinkers. He shines a spotlight on the intertwining stories of pattern and form and how they complement one another in our search for creativity and insight. Einstein's Violin relies on extensive research to tell the story of how (...) music impacts the pattern recognition software in our brains, facilitating more creative problem solving. Without digression into technical treatise, it focuses on the historical stories that best display music's beautiful interaction with mind and universe"--Back cover. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

This reader-friendly book examines philosophies and philosophers using an engaging, non-condescending approach that speaks to you at your level.

An award-winning author explores how the world works in our age of "continuous now" Back in the 1970s, futurism was all the rage. But looking forward is becoming a thing of the past. According to Douglas Rushkoff, "presentism" is the new ethos of a society that's always on, in real time, updating live. Guided by neither history nor long term goals, we navigate a sea of media that blend the past and future into a mash-up of instantaneous experience. Rushkoff (...) shows how this trend is both disorienting and exhilarating. Without linear narrative we get both the humiliations of reality TV and the associative brilliance of The Simpsons. With no time for long term investing, we invent dangerously compressed derivatives yet also revive sustainable local businesses. In politics, presentism drives both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. In many ways, this was the goal of digital technology--outsourcing our memory was supposed to free us up to focus on the present. But we are in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus on trivia. Rushkoff shows how we can instead ground ourselves in the reality of the present tense. (shrink)

_Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers._ Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of (...) energy and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of _pistis_, “persuading-and-being-persuaded,” in Aristotle and _zhi_, “governing-and-being-governed,” in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess’s “ecosophical” deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle. (shrink)