The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages

Introduction

Alfred Tarski, a Warsaw logician, published the monograph in Polish in 1933 (Pojęcie prawdy w językach nauk dedukcyjnych); a German version with an important postscript followed in 1935. He first sets a condition of adequacy, “convention T”: any acceptable definition must imply all sentences of the form “‘p’ is true if and only if p”. He then shows how truth can be defined for a formalised language, such as the calculus of classes, by way of the notion of satisfaction of formulas by sequences of objects. Because of paradoxes such as the liar, the definition must be given in a metalanguage that is essentially richer than the language it concerns. The work laid the ground for formal semantics and later for model theory.

Connections

Taken up in

• The Semantic Conception of Truth1944 · Alfred Tarski

More works by Alfred Tarski

• 1944The Semantic Conception of Truth