Tarski, truth, and semantics

Published, 1993

Tarski is famous for his widely accepted conceptual analysis (or, in his terms, "explication") of the notion of truth for formal languages and the allied notions of satisfaction, definability, and logical consequence.

Tarski suggests a characterization of truth as denotation of states of affairs in his paper "The Semantic Conception of Truth". After formulating what he calls "the classical Aristotelian conception of truth", encapsulated by the formula

Perspectivas

In the present paper, we return to one of the main theses we already defended concerning the role of the tarskian truth notion within the semantic approach (CARNIER, 2022). As it was argued, this truth notion proves to be insufficient to be applied to scientific theories as they are conceived by this approach, i.e., as extralinguistic entities, because it is a property of sentences and because the tarskian truth of a sentence doesn't necessarily mean the world is as it describes, which results in the fact that other truth conceptions more appropriate need to be articulated within the several members of the semanticist family, in order to characterize the relationship between theory and phenomenon. Our argument in this regard was based in a case study applied to constructive empiricism and quasi-realism, but in this paper we extend our analysis to structuralism, assuming and endorsing the position according to which this proposal may be considered a member of the semantic approac...

Synthese, 2014

In a recent article, Marian David (2008) distinguishes between two interpretations of Tarski's work on truth. The standard interpretation has it that Tarski gave us a definition of truth in-L within the meta-language; the non-standard interpretation, that Tarski did not give us a definition of true sentence in L, but rather a definition of truth, and Tarski does so for L within the meta-language. The difference is crucial: for on the standard view, there are different concepts of truth, while in the alternative interpretation there is just one concept. In this paper we will have a brief look at the distinction between these two interpretations and at the arguments David gives for each view. We will evaluate one of David's arguments for the alternative view by looking at Tarski's 'On the Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages', and his use of the term 'extension' therein, which, we shall find, yields no conclusive evidence for either position. Then we will look at how Tarski treats 'satisfaction', an essential concept for his definition of 'true sentence'. It will be argued that, in light of how Tarski talks about 'satisfaction' in §4 of 'On the Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages' and his claims in the Postscript, the alternative view is more likely than the standard one.

New Essays on Tarski and Philosophy, 2008

In this paper, I want to discuss in some detail the original version of Tarski's condition of adequacy for a definition of truth, his Convention T. I will suggest that Tarski designed Convention T to serve two functions at once. I will then distinguish two possible interpretations of Tarski's work on truth: a standard interpretation and a non-standard, alternative interpretation. On the former, but not on the latter, the very title of Tarski's famous article about the concept of truth harbors a lie. Using the symbol 'Tr' to denote the class of all true sentences, the above postulate can be expressed in the following convention: CONVENTION T. A formally correct definition of the symbol 'Tr', formulated in the metalanguage, will be called an adequate definition of truth if it has the following consequences: (α) all sentences which are obtained from the expression 'x  Tr if and only if p' by substituting for the symbol 'x' a structural-descriptive name of any sentence of the language in question and for the symbol 'p' the expression which forms the translation of this sentence into the metalanguage;

Topoi 18: 149-66., 1999