Truth in Fiction
"Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."
-- Kurt Vonnegut
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
In an influential article on the concept of truth in scientific language, Polish logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski advanced a detailed analysis of what constitutes a "true sentence" (Tarski, 1933). According to Tarski's semantic theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if it states what is the case. For example, the statement, "The cat is on the mat," is true if and only if there is a real cat on an actual mat. Tarski's concern for precise criteria for determining the truth-value of sentences came out of a project to give rigorous definitions of truth in scientific discourse (Hodges, 2010).
At a more general level, logicians and philosophers have argued for centuries over variations of the correspondence theory of truth. In this theory, language is an activity that functions at a meta-level to the reality that it describes. Propositions, when true, correspond to facts and events outside language. When a speaker makes a statement about the world, if the what the speaker claims to be the case (in words) corresponds to what is the case (in reality), then the proposition is true (David, 2009). If the words do not correspond to reality, then the proposition is false. Well-formed scientific statements resolve to either truth or falsehood, depending on their relation to extra-linguistic reality.
In the correspondence theory of truth, those are the only possible values: true and false. However, as the British language philosopher J.L. Austin argued, people often use language for purposes other...
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