A. N. Prior Quotes on Truth
Prior's celebrated short paper "The Runabout Inference-Ticket" (1960) gave mid-twentieth-century philosophical logic one of its sharpest objections to the proposal that the meaning of logical connectives can be exhaustively given by their inferential rules. The introduction of Prior's invented connective "tonk," with introduction and elimination rules together licensing every inference whatever, shows that stipulating arbitrary rules cannot by itself confer meaning, and the parallel writings on tense logic, modal logic, and the philosophy of truth defend the case that the analysis of sentences of the form "it is true that p" requires careful attention to the underlying tensed and modal structure that no purely deflationary account can preserve.
Quotes
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“Tense logic is the logic of time.”
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“It is past, it is present, it is future: these are the central modes of time.”
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“Time is what real change requires.”
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“Logic must do justice to the asymmetry between past and future.”
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Attributed to A. N. Prior:
“What was and what will be are not on the same logical footing.”