{"id":464949,"date":"2010-03-23T20:00:05","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T00:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2204"},"modified":"2010-03-23T20:00:05","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T00:00:05","slug":"tarskis-theory-of-truth-as-a-reason-to-leave-linguistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/464949","title":{"rendered":"Tarski’s theory of truth as a reason to leave linguistics?"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Elif Batuman, “Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar<\/a>“, The Chronicle Review<\/em>, 2\/12\/2010:<\/p>\n

I didn’t care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years\u2014it took the experience of lived time\u2014to realize that they really are the same thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the meantime, I became a linguistics major. I wanted to learn the raw mechanism of language, the pure form itself. For the foreign-language requirement, I enrolled in beginning Russian: Maybe someday I could answer my mother’s question about what Tolstoy was really trying to say in Anna Karenina.<\/span><\/p>\n

The nail in the coffin of my brief career as a linguist was probably a seminar I took that winter about the philosophy of language. The aim of this seminar was to formulate a theory that would explain to a Martian “what it is that we know when we know a language.” I could not imagine a more objectless, melancholy project. The solution turned out to consist of a series of propositions having the form “‘Snow is white’ is true if snow is white.” The professor, a gaunt logician with a wild mane of red hair, wrote this sentence on the board during nearly every class, and we would discuss why it wasn’t trivial. Outside the window, snow piled deeper and deeper.<\/span><\/p>\n

By contrast with the philosophy of language and my other classes in psycholinguistics, syntax, and phonetics, beginning Russian struck me as profoundly human. I had expected linguistics (the general study of language) to resemble a story, and Russian (the study of a particular language) to resemble a set of rules, but the reality was just the opposite.<\/span><\/p>\n

Apparently<\/a> Batuman was an undergraduate at Harvard, so some people whose 02138-ology is more current than mine should be able to decode the identity of that gaunt logician.\u00a0 Good academic gossip, I guess, but I don’t care much (although I do wonder what department (s)he was in).\u00a0 Rather, I’m interested in the idea that Tarski’s theory of truth<\/a> should be the critical factor in a young woman’s decision to abandon linguistics.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Alfred Tarski (1901\u20131983) described himself as “a mathematician (as well as a logician, and perhaps a philosopher of a sort)” (1944, p. 369). He is widely considered as one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century (often regarded as second only to G\u00f6del), and thus as one of the greatest logicians of all time. Among philosophers he is especially known for his mathematical characterizations of the concepts of truth and logical consequence for sentences of classical formalized languages, and to a lesser extent for his mathematical characterization of the concept of a logical constant for expressions of those same languages. Among logicians and mathematicians he is in addition famous for his work on set theory, model theory and algebra, which includes results and developments such as the Banach-Tarski paradox, the theorem on the indefinability of truth (see section 2 below), the completeness and decidability of elementary algebra and geometry, and the notions of cardinal, ordinal, relation and cylindric algebras.<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve often<\/a> complained<\/a> about the fact that linguistics as an academic discipline formed late, left with scraps from the table of many already well-established fields: anthropology, education, literary studies, classical and modern languages, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, speech pathology, and so on.\u00a0 For both external and internal reasons, the field has tended to accept a narrow definition of its scope, at the same time as many other fields (especially anthropology and language departments) have largely lost interest in linguistic analysis.<\/p>\n

In philosophy, the “linguistic turn”<\/a> (which Tarski took part in) was given that name only on its tombstone<\/a>, so to speak. When language was at the center of philosophy, for better or for worse, linguistics as an academic field got little or no bureaucratic benefit.\u00a0 Now the philosophers’ focus has mostly shifted.<\/p>\n

And the only time (as far as I can tell) that the Chronicle of Higher Education has ever referred to Tarski, he’s the intellectual bad guy in an anecdote about abandoning linguistics for literary studies. Typical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to Elif Batuman, “Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar“, The Chronicle Review, 2\/12\/2010: I didn’t care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years\u2014it took the experience of lived time\u2014to realize that they really are the same thing. In the meantime, I became a linguistics major. I wanted to learn the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-464949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}