Work · Analytic Philosophy
The Semantic Conception of Truth
An accessible statement of his theory: “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white – a precise form of Aristotle’s classical conception.
Introduction
Tarski published this paper in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1944, five years after emigrating to the United States. It presents his theory to philosophers without the technical apparatus: the semantic conception of truth, convention T, the distinction between object language and metalanguage, and the reason why natural languages, being “semantically closed”, give rise to paradoxes such as the liar. The second half answers objections – among them that the definition is trivial, or that it commits one to a particular theory of knowledge. Karl Popper adopted Tarski’s concept of truth for his philosophy of science, and Donald Davidson later built a theory of meaning on it.
Connections
Builds on
- Metaphysicsc. 340 BCE · Aristotle
- The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages1933 · Alfred Tarski
More works by Alfred Tarski
Sources: Wikidata
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