Understandability

Authors: Richard Creath

Publish Date: 2015/09/22

Volume: 25, Issue: 1, Pages: 25-30

PDF Link

Abstract

Understandability Verständlichkeit is surely one of the central topics both in the documents presented in Greg FrostArnold’s Carnap Tarski and Quine at Harvard Conversations on Logic Mathematics and Science and in his excellent editor’s introduction to them FrostArnold 2013 Understandability is also closely tied to other major topics in the book and central to an understanding of midtwentiethcentury analytic philosophy not to mention important in its own right Yet understandability itself can be variously understood and much hangs on the variationsFrostArnold emphasizes the issue of understandability in the Harvard conversations And I doubt that one can do better in explicating the documents he presents or in setting them within the context of philosophic work up to and including the present on the issues of nominalism finitism analyticity and metaphysics By way of endorsing FrostArnold’s efforts I will here focus on understandability First I argue for

Keywords: