FOM: Re: fom-digest V1 #141

Wed Sep 23 12:15:53 EDT 1998

Ther was some discussion of these issues a long time ago between Hans
Reichenbach
and C.I. Leis; one insisting that probabilistic arguments without a 
non-probabilistic foundation makeno sense, and the other - Reichenbach -
denying this. Just because some debates took place some time ago, that is
not a 
reason not to look at them. E.g. Tarski said in 1936 that his type of
semantics cannot be
applied to natural languages. WITHOIUT ANYONE ANSWERING his points, a
cottage 
industry is going ahead merrily applying Tarski-type truth coinditions
to sentences of natural languages. Mathematicians should learn from this
regrettable negative example. Julius Moravcvsik.