Emily comments on An Introduction To Rationality - Less Wrong

11 Post author: kerspoon 20 October 2013 02:43AM

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Comment author: Emily 24 October 2013 09:49:36AM 0 points [-]

"The sentence 'snow is white' is true if, and only if, snow is white." -- Alfred Tarski

What is being said here is that if the reality is that 'snow is white' then we should believe that 'snow is white'. In other words, we should try to make our belief match reality. Unfortunately we cannot directly tell if in reality snow is white but given enough evidence we should believe it as true.

I could be wrong, but I'm not sure that's what Tarski was talking about. I think this quote has more to do with getting at the nature of the relationship between a proposition (snow is white) and its representation (the string "snow is white"). Beliefs are somewhat irrelevant, or at least thinking about them goes well beyond the point made by the Tarski quote.

Comment author: Vaniver 24 October 2013 12:38:57PM 0 points [-]

I could be wrong, but I'm not sure that's what Tarski was talking about. I think this quote has more to do with getting at the nature of the relationship between a proposition (snow is white) and its representation (the string "snow is white"). Beliefs are somewhat irrelevant, or at least thinking about them goes well beyond the point made by the Tarski quote.

The relationship between a proposition and its representation is analogous to the relationship between reality and beliefs about reality. It's identifying truth as correspondence.

Comment author: Emily 24 October 2013 01:12:28PM 0 points [-]

OK, that makes sense as an analogy. I'm not sure the intention of drawing such an analogy comes through in the part of the post I quoted.

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