August
16, 2017 Wednesday
Bedtime
Story
Developing a Language That Allows "True" to be Used in Form [D]
From
all that we have discussed so far, we can say that the use of the term “true”
in English sentences will only confirm with the classical notion of truth if it
enables to ascertain every equivalence of the form [D] in which “p” is replaced
by any English sentence.
If
this condition is satisfied, the term “true” is then justified and sufficient.
So
then it boils down to this.
There
has to be developed a right way to use the word “true” in English language.
Tarski
felt that a solution to this problem is possible.
All
that is needed is to construct an adequate general definition of truth such
that it will carry with it all the logical consequences that accompany all the
equivalences of the form [D].
Such
a definition should establish the adequate use of the term “true”.
Tarski
says that construction of such a general definition of truth is not all that
difficult in English language provided certain assumptions are made.
The
first assumption is that we will not consider the whole of English language but
only fragments of it.
The
term “true” will be defined solely with respect to sentences of this
fragmentary English language.
Let
this fragmentary English Language be L.
Another
assumption to be made of this language L is that it has precise syntactical
rules that allow differentiating a sentence from an expression that is not a
sentence.
Another
assumption that has to be made is that the number of sentences in this language
is finite.
Remember
how Hilbert was so adamant in sticking to mathematics of finites after the
trauma of Cantor?
Yet
another major assumption that has to be made for this hypothetical language L
is that it should not contain the word “true”.
Moreover,
all the words of the language L lack any kind of vagueness or ambiguity.
The
words are to be clear and plain enough to enable them to be used in the
definition of truth.
That
is the end of the list of assumptions to be made for the language L.
Having
done this, now we can proceed further.
The
very first thing would be to prepare a long list of all the sentences of the
language L.
You
remember that unlike the natural English language, the number of sentences in L
is finite.
For
brevity sake, let us assume that L has one thousand sentences.
Let
us denote each sentence with the symbols “s1”, “s2”, “s3” and so on till
“s1000”.
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.
Advertisements
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:
No comments:
Post a Comment