No, that is not what I said. I said that IF “snow” means snow, “is” means is, and “white” means white, THEN “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white.
That makes a lot more sense, thanks.
But the fact has nothing to do with truth unless you bring language into the discussion. Only linguistic objects (such as sentences) can be true.
I think we’re getting somewhere. I thought that you were saying that whether or not a statement is true is a property of language. Tarski’s saying that whether or not a sentence is true is determined by whether it corresponds to reality. You’re saying that whether or not it corresponds to reality is determined by the meaning the language assigns to it.
I’m still not convinced that truth is to do with language, though. Consider a squirrel trying to get nuts out of a bird-feeder, say. The squirrel believes that the feeder contains nuts, that there’s a small hole in the feeder, and that it can eat the nuts by suspending itself upside down from a branch to access the hole. The squirrel does actually possess those beliefs, in the sense that it has a state of mind which enables it to anticipate the given outcome from the given conditions. The beliefs are true, but I’m certain that the squirrel is not using a language to formulate those beliefs in.
I’m still not convinced that truth is to do with language, though. Consider a squirrel trying to get nuts out of a bird-feeder, say. The squirrel believes that the feeder contains nuts, that there’s a small hole in the feeder, and that it can eat the nuts by suspending itself upside down from a branch to access the hole. The squirrel does actually possess those beliefs, in the sense that it has a state of mind which enables it to anticipate the given outcome from the given conditions. The beliefs are true, but I’m certain that the squirrel is not using a language to formulate those beliefs in.
That sounds right. I think if we describe a sentence as being “true” then we’re really saying that it induces a possibly-nonverbal mental model of reality that is true (or very accurate), but we can say the same about mental models that were nonverbal to begin with.
That makes a lot more sense, thanks.
I think we’re getting somewhere. I thought that you were saying that whether or not a statement is true is a property of language. Tarski’s saying that whether or not a sentence is true is determined by whether it corresponds to reality. You’re saying that whether or not it corresponds to reality is determined by the meaning the language assigns to it.
I’m still not convinced that truth is to do with language, though. Consider a squirrel trying to get nuts out of a bird-feeder, say. The squirrel believes that the feeder contains nuts, that there’s a small hole in the feeder, and that it can eat the nuts by suspending itself upside down from a branch to access the hole. The squirrel does actually possess those beliefs, in the sense that it has a state of mind which enables it to anticipate the given outcome from the given conditions. The beliefs are true, but I’m certain that the squirrel is not using a language to formulate those beliefs in.
That sounds right. I think if we describe a sentence as being “true” then we’re really saying that it induces a possibly-nonverbal mental model of reality that is true (or very accurate), but we can say the same about mental models that were nonverbal to begin with.