Page 557 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

expressions using the formal apparatus of quanti- fication. For Strawson, Russell's error was the con- flation of the use of an expression to make unique reference with the assertion that there is just one object possessing certain characteristics. The meaning of an expression cannot be identified with its purported ref- erent. Additionally, Russell overlooked the fact that it was not sentences, properly speaking, which are true or false, but rather the assertion or proposition they are used to state. In his later criticism of Quine, Straw- son reiterated his doubts about the eliminability of singular terms, since they played a vital role in ident- ifying the topic of discourse for the purposes of com- municating facts about it. A condition of successful reference is that it is presupposed that there is some known description under which the identified object falls. This view contrasts with causal theories, where successful reference may obtain without such knowledge.
Interestingly, it was in opposition to a fellow Oxon- ian, John Austin, that Strawson ventured his own account of truth. Austin had sought to rehabilitate the correspondence theory in terms of conventions linking words to the world. Strawson maintained that saying that a statement was true was tantamount to endorsing it, i.e., expressing agreement. In taking this stance, Strawson once again showed his pre- occupation with the question of how expressions are used, and of the presuppositions behind that use.
3. Problems and Ramifications
Strawson introduced a notion of presupposition according to which a statement A presupposes a state- ment B, if, and only if, A is neither true nor false unless B is true. To take the example from the critique of Russell: if there is no King of France, the statement 'The present King of France is bald' has no truth- value, and the question of its truth 'does not arise.' There has been a sizable literature in linguistics on the subject of presupposition, and some doubt over whether it is either well-defined or distinct from logical entailment. Moreover, there has been much debate since the time of Frege over whether sentences with nonreferring subject terms make statements which lack truth-value, or else fail strictly to make statements at all.
Seealso:Presupposition;Presupposition, Pragmatic; Reference: Philosophical Issues; Truth.
Bibliography
Strawson P F 1950 On referring. Mind 59; repr. in Flew A (ed.) 1956 Essays in Conceptual Analysis. Macmillan, London
StrawsonPF1952IntroductionToLogicalTheory. Methuen, London
Strawson P F 1959 Individuals. Methuen, London
Strawson P F 1971 Logico-Linguistic Papers. Methuen,
London
Alfred Tarski, one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century, was born in Warsaw, Poland, on January 14, 1902. His family name was Tajtelbaum. Tarski studied mathematics, biology, philosophy, and linguistics at Warsaw University. In 1924 he received his PhD under the guidance of Lesniewski. He was appointed decent at the University of Warsaw in 1926 and adjunct professor shortly afterwards.
In 1939, while Tarski was on a lecture tour of the United States, World War II broke out and as a conse- quence he decided not to return to Poland. For a time he taught at Harvard University, then at the City College of New York. Later he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1942 he was appointed lecturer at The University of Cali- fornia at Berkeley, where he became a Full Professor
in 1946. He stayed in California until his death on October 27, 1983.
1. Mathematics
From the beginning of his career, Tarski enjoyed great fame. At first his reputation was due mainly to his work on mathematics and its foundations. Through- out his lifetime mathematics would remain his main interest. He wrote on general algebra, set theory, (un)decidability, algebraic logic, pure and applied model theory, and geometry. An exhaustive survey of his work can be found in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 51. In most of his writings Tarski explored areas not investigated before.
Tarski published his first paper on problems con- 535
Tarski, Alfred F. Veltman
Tarski, Alfred