The trouble with Harrison's 'the trouble with Tarski'

Philosophical Quarterly 49 (196):376-383 (1999)
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Abstract

In ‘The Trouble with Tarski’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (1998), pp. 1–22, Jonathan Harrison attacks ‘Tarski‐style’ truth theories for both formalized and natural languages, on the grounds that (1) truth cannot be a property of sentences; (2) if it could be, T‐sentences would have to be necessary truths, which they are not; and (3) T‐sentences are not necessarily true and can even can be false. I reply that (1) cannot be an objection to Tarskian truth theories, since these can be formulated in terms of whatever truth bearers might be. Thesis (2) is unjustified: Harrison's argument for it depends on an equivocation. Thesis (3) is false, since the right‐hand side of a T‐sentence is a meta‐language translation of the object‐language sentence described on the left‐hand side, and this guarantees its truth

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Dan Boisvert
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Citations of this work

More on Putnam and Tarski.Panu Raatikainen - 2003 - Synthese 135 (1):37 - 47.

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References found in this work

Inquiries Into Truth And Interpretation.Donald Davidson - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Logic, semantics, metamathematics.Alfred Tarski - 1956 - Oxford,: Clarendon Press. Edited by John Corcoran & J. H. Woodger.
Collected papers.Gareth Evans - 1985 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Outline for a Truth-Conditional Semantics for Tense.Ernest Lepore & Kirk Ludwig - 2003 - In Quentin Smith & Aleksandar Jokic (eds.), Tense, Time and Reference. MIT Press. pp. 49-105.

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