Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-r5zm4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T21:17:07.119Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tarski on truth and logical consequence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

John Etchemendy
John Etchemendy*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Tarski's writings on the concepts of truth and logical consequence rank among the most influential works in both logic and philosophy of the twentieth century. Because of this, it would be impossible to give a careful and accurate account of how far that influence reaches and of the complex route by which it spread. In logic, Tarski's methods of defining satisfaction and truth, as well as his work pioneering general model-theoretic techniques, have been entirely absorbed into the way the subject is presently done; they have become part of the fabric of contemporary logic, material presented in the initial pages of every modern textbook on the subject. In philosophy, the influence has been equally pervasive, extending not only to work in semantics and the philosophies of logic and language, but to less obviously allied areas such as epistemology and the philosophy of science as well.

Rather than try to chart the wide-ranging influence of these writings or catalog the important research they have inspired, I will concentrate on various confusions and misunderstandings that continue to surround this work. For in spite of the extensive attention the work has received in the past fifty years, especially in the philosophical literature, misunderstandings of both conceptual and historical sorts are still remarkably widespread. Indeed in the philosophical community, recent reactions to Tarski's work on truth range from Karl Popper's “intense joy and relief” at Tarski's “legitimation” of the notion [1974, p. 399], to Hilary Putnam's assessment that “as a philosophical account of truth, Tarski's theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail” [1985, p. 64]. Opinions have not exactly converged.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Symbolic Logic , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 51 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

My work on this paper was made possible in part by a grant from the System Development Foundation; it was completed at the Center for the Study of Language and Information on computer equipment provided by the Xerox Corporation. My understanding of Tarski's work on truth has benefitted from discussions with many people, in particular, Jon Barwise and Scott Soames; helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper were received from Jon Barwise, Ned Block, Wilfrid Hodges, David Israel, Julius Moravscik, Patrick Suppes, Anthony Ungar and this Journal's referee. I would like to thank both the institutions and the colleagues.

References

REFERENCES

Bernays, Paul [1922] Review of a paper by Behmann, Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik, vol. 48, pp. 1119–1120.Google Scholar
Davidson, Donald [1967] Truth and meaning, Synthese, vol. 17, pp. 304–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Etchemendy, John [1982] Tarski, model theory and logical truth, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan.Google Scholar
Etchemendy, John [1983] The doctrine of logic as form, Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 6, pp. 319–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feferman, Solomon [1984] Kurt Gödel: conviction and caution, Philosophia Naturalis, vol. 21, pp. 546–562.Google Scholar
Field, Hartry [1972] Tarski's theory of truth, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 69, pp. 347–375.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gödel, Kurt [1929] Über die Vollständigkeit des Logikkalküls, Doctoral dissertation, University of Vienna; reprinted, with translation, in Godel [1986].Google Scholar
Gödel, Kurt [1930] Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls, Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, vol. 37, pp. 349–360; reprinted, with translation, in Gödel [1986].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gödel, Kurt [1930a] Über die Vollständigkeit des Logikkalküls (Abstract), Die Naturwissenschaften, vol. 18, p. 1068; reprinted, with translation, in Gödel [1986].Google Scholar
Gödel, Kurt [1986] Collected works. Vol. I, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986.Google Scholar
Henkin, Leon [1949] The completeness of the first-order functional calculus, this Journal, vol. 14, pp. 159–166.Google Scholar
Hilbert, David [1929] Prohleme der Grundlegung der Mathematik, Mathematische Annalen, vol. 102, pp. 1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilbert, David and Ackermann, Wilhelm [1928] Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1928 (2nd ed., 1938; translated in [1950]).Google Scholar
Hilbert, David and Ackermann, Wilhelm [1950] Principles of mathematical logic, Chelsea, New York.Google Scholar
Kemeny, John [1948] Models of logical systems, this Journal, vol. 13, pp. 16–30.Google Scholar
Kripke, Saul [1975] Outline of a theory of truth, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 72, pp. 690–716.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luschei, Eugene [1962] The logical systems of Leśniewski, North-Holland, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Popper, Karl [1974] Some philosophical comments on Tarski's theory of truth, Proceedings of the Tarski symposium, Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics, vol. 25, American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, pp. 397–409.Google Scholar
Prawitz, Dag [1965] Natural deduction: a proof-theoretical study, Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm.Google Scholar
Putnam, Hilary [1985] A comparison of something with something else, New Literary History, vol. 17, pp. 61–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quine, Willard Van Orman [1985] The time of my life, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Schilpp, Paul (editor) [1963] The philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Open Court Press, La Salle, Illinois.Google Scholar
Soames, Scott [1984] What is a theory of truth?, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 81, pp. 411–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suppes, Patrick [1988] Philosophical implications of Tarski's work, this Journal, vol. 53, pp. 80–91.Google Scholar
Vaught, Robert [1986] Alfred Tarski's work in model theory, this Journal, vol. 51, pp. 869–882.Google Scholar