Feigl is concerned with the problem of how one sublanguage supplants another, e.g., how the language of quantum mechanics may be said to supplant that of classical physics. As a preliminary to tackling the problem, it has first to be generalized. Thus, in order to indicate how one language might supplant another, the line of a general theory of truth has to be traced. Among the conditions that such a theory has to satisfy is that its truth criteria must permit (...) us to evaluate current consensus judgments in science as true, on a par with the truth of our everyday ‘factual’ or ‘noninferential’ judgments. (shrink)

IS THE RELATION between the descriptive dimension of ordinary language and the world it purportedly describes better depicted as one-one or many-one? Does the one represent a necessary and sufficient linguistic condition for the other, or a sufficient linguistic condition alone? One difficulty with the "one-one" relational view is that it rules out the possibility of affirming that ordinary language evolves correlatively with an ongoing recasting of our knowledge of the world and that no ordinary proposition is in principle immune (...) to this process. By contrast, the "many-one" view logically allows for this possibility. Positively, on the latter showing, science is seen, in the final analysis, as a governor of our common sense judgments: science is but common sense gone systematic. This is the position that I wish to defend. In recent years another position, one recalling the "one-one" or Aristotelian view, has gained renewed momentum. It derives support from the movements of both phenomenology and ordinary language analysis. There is an assumption about "the given" in each of these movements, and it is to this assumption that I wish now to turn. (shrink)