August
12, 2017 Saturday
Bedtime
Story
Definitions of "True"
One
can replace the word “false” of Aristotle with “not true” for our discussion.
They
are practically synonymous.
The
manner in which Aristotle is defining the notions of “true” and “false” seems to
be very clear and non-controversial and perhaps very ordinary and banal.
Yet
it lacks precision and formal correctness by the standards of mathematics and
logic that was developing in the early twentieth century.
One
of primary limitation of the Aristotelian definition is that it is bit too
specific.
It
limits itself to sentences that “say” about something.
That
something is either “that it is” or “that it is not”.
This
definition thus excludes many declarative sentences that will not, or perhaps
cannot be stated in this fashion without distorting its meaning.
Modern
philosophers have tried to come up with better statements, perhaps more
generalized version of the Aristotelian one.
Consider
the following two examples as the definition of a true sentence by modern
philosophy.
“A
sentence is true if it denotes the existing state of affairs.”
“The
truth of a sentence consists in its conformity with (or correspondence to) the
reality.”
These
two definitions look quite satisfactory and perhaps even sophisticated.
But
Tarski is not impressed even with these definitions of truth.
To
him, they are even less robust and vaguer than the one put forth by Aristotle.
All
the truth notions that are expressed in the above statements, both Aristotelian
and the modern ones, are known as the classical or semantic conception of
truth.
Semantics
is that part of logic which connects the sentences to what is expressed by
them.
What
Aristotle describes in his notation is truth is the semantic nature of the term
“true”.
This
notion of truth is also known as the correspondence theory of truth; the
correspondence being between what is stated by a sentence and its expression.
Tarski
in this paper tried to formulate a more precise definition of truth, an
improvement over the Aristotelian one, keeping its basic tenets the same.
In
order to achieve this goal the language has to specified, since what makes
sense in one language becomes gibberish in another.
In
our case, we of course will stick to the English language.
In
addition, some of the methods of formal logic need to invoked and incorporated.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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