Philosophy and Religion

Many of Tarski's better known papers are either about or include lengthy discussions of how to properly define various concepts: truth, logical consequence, semantic concepts, or definability. In general, these papers identify two primary conditions for successful definitions: formal correctness and material (or intuitive) adequacy. Material adequacy requires that the concept expressed by the formal definition capture the intuitive content of truth. Our primary interest in this paper is to better understand Tarski's thinking about material adequacy, and whether components of his view developed over time. More precisely, we are concerned with how Tarski's understanding of the content of the common-sense, every-day usage of truth may have developed over time. We distinguish this concern from the character of the extensional criterion of adequacy Tarski proposes: that a materially adequate definition must entail all instances of Convention T. We will develop our reading of Tarski as follows: first, we will review the "Polemical Remarks," focusing primarily on §§14 and 17, and Tarski's references to Naess' empirical research. Next, we will provide a summary and discussion of Naess' work, especially his findings with respect to Tarski's definition of truth and his research that suggests there is no single common or everyday concept of truth. Third, we will consider several possible objections to our interpretation of the Tarski-Naess dialectic. We will conclude that Tarski's conception of what the material adequacy requirement develop over time, potentially because of what he had learned through his interactions with Naess.

The development of a model is always at the service of a set of purposes or goals. These goals either help to guide us or compel us in making choices regarding the level of detail or complexity to be represented within the model. Economic models, for example, regularly ignore the particularities of actual individuals or governments or corporations in favor of representing the variety of economic agents in terms of sets of more-or-less easily represented behaviors governed by an idealized form of rationality. Weather forecasting models often deal with fairly large ‘packets’ of air uniformly assigning them characteristics such as temperature and humidity even though in actuality these conditions might vary widely. It follows rather straightforwardly from this observation that in order to make intelligent choices about what details to retain and what details to omit in a model we ought to have a more complete understanding of what we are trying to model than is given by or in the model...