Having mentioned the eminent Professor Tarski, we can perhaps pose a troublesome question:
Does the famous "T-schema"
i. "Snow is white" is T iff snow is white
reduce to
ii. "Snow is white" iff snow is white
???
What, in your opinion, is the truth of the matter?
i don't think that the schema is a good one, because it ends up being circular. this is me affected by collins. i'll explain myself. there's two concepts here. snow and white. now in the definition of snow is that it is white. in the definition of white things, there's snow. so in order to form those two concepts, we have assumed each other. (does this make sense?). furthermore, the whiteness of snow is problematic, since it assumes a stability of perception and that's a leap of faith, in the sense that at least half the time (during the night) snow isn't white anyway.
Haris - I agrre that "white" is part of the intension of "snow", but isn't "snow" part of the *extension* of "white"?
i suppose i'd deny one of the two. i suppose intension (refuse to remember which one is which)
tsk tsk tsk - "intension" is when they hang from the ceiling; "extension" is when they rise up from the ground.
We can state this clearly
i. Some thing is white and is snow
ii. Not all things that are white are snow
iii. All things that are snow are white*
*This is a pedagogic, not a descriptive, statement. I KNOW that not all snow is white - after all, I was in Paris last week.
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