"Tarski’s Conceptual Analysis of Semantical Notions"
Expanded text of a lecture for the Colloque, “Sémantique et épistémologie”, Casablanca, April 24-26, 2002.
27 pp.
T's notions of
- truth for formal languages and the allied notions of
- satisfaction,
- definability, and
- logical consequence
two questions are of interest.
- what motivated Tarski to make these analyses, and
- what led to their particular form?
Turing's concept of computability
- how? the general notion of a computing machine
- why? a precise notion of computability was needed to show that certain problems (and specifically the Entscheidungsproblem in logic) are uncomputable
Tarski's concept of truth
- how? his definition of truth is given in general set-theoretical terms
- why? no similarly compelling logical reason for Tarski’s work on the concept of truth, and will suggest instead a combination of
- psychological and
- programmatic reasons
The main puzzle to be dealt with has to do with the relations between the notions of
- truth in a structure and
- absolute truth
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