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Is it True What Haack Says About Tarski?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Richard C. Jennings
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Extract

In her paper ‘Is it True What They Say About Tarski?’, Susan Haack argues that Popper is wrong to regard Tarski's theory of truth as a correspondence theory of truth. For, she says:

… Tarksi does not present his theory as a correspondence theory. In fact Tarski explicitly comments that the correspondence theory cannot be considered a satisfactory definition of truth. And later he observes that he was ‘by no means surprised’ to learn that, in a survey carried out by Naess, only 15 per cent agreed that truth is correspondence with reality, while 90 per cent agreed that ‘It is snowing’ is true if and only if it is snowing (p. 324).

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 62 , Issue 240 , April 1987 , pp. 237 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1987

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References

1 Philosophy 51 (1976), 323–336. All references to Haack will be to this paper.

2 Alfred, Tarski, ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 152–278. All italics in quotations from Tarski are Tarski's own.Google Scholar

3 Alfred, Tarksi, ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1943–4), 341–375. This paper is reprinted in Readings in Philosophical Analysis, Herbert Feigl and Wilfred Sellars (eds)(New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), 52–84. Page references will be to the former source. All italics are Tarski's own.Google Scholar

4 Actually it is not quite clear what Haack thinks Tarski does say. She tells us that Tarski:

… observes that he was ‘by no means surprised to learn that, in a survey carried out by Naess, only 15 per cent agreed that truth is correspondence with reality, while 90 per cent agreed that ‘It is snowing’ t g is true if and only if it is snowing (Haack, p. 324).

But the opening quotation mark of Tarski's observation is never followed by a closing one. Tarski's actual words, quoted in full, are:

Therefore, I was by no means surprised to learn (in a discussion devoted to these problems) that in a group of people who were questioned only 15 per cent agreed that ‘true’ means for them ‘agreeing with reality’, while 90 per cent agreed that a sentence such as ‘it is snowing’ is true if, and only if, it is snowing. Thus, a great majority of these people seemed to reject the classical conception of truth in its ‘philosophical’ formulation, while accepting the same conception when formulated in plain words … (Tarksi, op. cit., note 3, p. 360).

The last sentence in this observation makes it clear that Tarski is not suggesting that there is anything wrong with the correspondence theory of truth but, rather, is concerned with the methodological problem of how people in general can be asked about it. Asked in philosophical language, only 15 per cent agree, and this is because of difficulties in understanding the question. But, asked in plain words, 90 per cent agree with it. In a word, what Naess found was that 90 per cent of the people questioned agreed with the formulation in plain words of the correspondence theory of truth.