| Description |
This paper takes a historical perspective of Alfred Tarski's semantic conception of truth, particularly as developed in The Conception of Truth in Formalized Languages (1933) and "The Semantic Conception of Truth" (1944). This approach takes into consideration the problems and issues being discussed in the intellectual community in which Tarski worked and their effects on his semantics. Two issues had the greatest bearing on the direction of the definition of truth. The first is the physicalist project which demanded that all legitimate disciplines reduce to physical, logical, or mathematical concepts. Tarski answered this demand by giving the definition of truth in terms of recursive satisfaction. The second issue is the semantic paradoxes, which had to be avoided in order to preserve consistency in the definition. This Tarski accomplished by his language-metalanguage distinction. Tarski developed his language-metalanguage distinction, material adequacy requirement, and the reductionism used in the 1933 monograph while working with his Polish colleagues on syntax. A sketch of Tarski's use of these methods and conventions for truth is followed by a discussion of its relevance to later philosophical projects. The debate over Tarski's commitment to a correspondence theory is glanced at, picking up on the importance of the interpretation of Tarski for specific epistemological projects. And Donald Davidson's use of Tarski's semantic methods in developing a definition of truth in natural languages demonstrates the continued relevance of Tarski's work. |
