Wednesday, June 17, 2009   I am reading Tarski's "The Semantic
Conception of Truth" and came across this paragraph which I just
had to blog:  It is perhaps worth while saying that semantics as
it is conceived in this paper (and in former papers of the
author) is a sober and modest discipline which has no
pretensions of being a universal patent-medicine for all the
ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You
will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or
illusions of grandeur or class conflicts. Nor is semantics a
device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his
friends is speaking nonsense. (Sorry if there are typos—I am
writing this with vim over ssh from my Treo.)   David said...
Probably the reason Tarski said this is that at the time he
wrote, the "general semantics" movement of Count Korzybski,
which made claims like the ones to which Tarski refers, was
popular.  Alexander R Pruss said...  The last sentence is a jab
at logical positivists and others who claim