Logic & Philosophy of Science Colloquium


Vann McGee
MIT

“The Maiasaur Problem ”

Two conceptions of truth are currently prominent. The deflationary conception regards "'Snow is white' is true" and "Snow is white" as analytically equivalent. The alternative attempts to explain the connections between a community's utterances and the things their utterances are about by seeing how the practices of the community establish truth conditions for their sentences. The conception that treats truth conditions as a causally explanatory notion runs into serious obstacles, in the form of paradoxes that would tend to collapse the causal explanatory notion into the deflationary notion. I attempt to remove a couple of the obstacles.

Friday, May 18, 2001
SST 777, 3 pm

Refreshments will be served

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