{"title":"Tarski’s Theory of the Formal Correctness of Definitions","authors":"","doi":"10.1007/s10992-023-09729-0","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>In his 1933 monograph on the concept of truth, Alfred Tarski claimed that his definition of truth satisfied “the usual conditions of methodological correctness”, which in a 1935 article he identified as consistency and back-translatability. Following the rules of defining for an axiomatized theory was supposed to ensure satisfaction of the two conditions. But Tarski neither explained the two conditions nor supplied rules of defining for any axiomatized theory. We can make explicit what Tarski understood by consistency and back-translatability, with the help of (1) an account by Ajdukiewicz (1936) of the criteria underlying the practice of articulating rules of defining for axiomatized theories and (2) a critique by Frege (1903) of definitions that conjure an object into existence as that which satisfies a specified condition without first proving that exactly one object does so. I show that satisfaction of the conditions of consistency and back-translatability as thus explained is guaranteed by the rules of defining articulated by Leśniewski (1931) for an axiomatized system of propositional logic. I then construct analogous rules of defining for the theory within which Tarski developed his definition of truth. Tarski’s 32 definitions in this theory occasionally violate these rules, but the violations are easily repaired. I argue that the Leśniewski-Ajdukiewicz theory of formal correctness of definitions within which Tarski worked is superior in some respects to the widely accepted analogous theory articulated by Suppes (1957).</p>","PeriodicalId":51526,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL LOGIC","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL LOGIC","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-023-09729-0","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"PHILOSOPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In his 1933 monograph on the concept of truth, Alfred Tarski claimed that his definition of truth satisfied “the usual conditions of methodological correctness”, which in a 1935 article he identified as consistency and back-translatability. Following the rules of defining for an axiomatized theory was supposed to ensure satisfaction of the two conditions. But Tarski neither explained the two conditions nor supplied rules of defining for any axiomatized theory. We can make explicit what Tarski understood by consistency and back-translatability, with the help of (1) an account by Ajdukiewicz (1936) of the criteria underlying the practice of articulating rules of defining for axiomatized theories and (2) a critique by Frege (1903) of definitions that conjure an object into existence as that which satisfies a specified condition without first proving that exactly one object does so. I show that satisfaction of the conditions of consistency and back-translatability as thus explained is guaranteed by the rules of defining articulated by Leśniewski (1931) for an axiomatized system of propositional logic. I then construct analogous rules of defining for the theory within which Tarski developed his definition of truth. Tarski’s 32 definitions in this theory occasionally violate these rules, but the violations are easily repaired. I argue that the Leśniewski-Ajdukiewicz theory of formal correctness of definitions within which Tarski worked is superior in some respects to the widely accepted analogous theory articulated by Suppes (1957).
期刊介绍：
The Journal of Philosophical Logic aims to provide a forum for work at the crossroads of philosophy and logic, old and new, with contributions ranging from conceptual to technical. Accordingly, the Journal invites papers in all of the traditional areas of philosophical logic, including but not limited to: various versions of modal, temporal, epistemic, and deontic logic; constructive logics; relevance and other sub-classical logics; many-valued logics; logics of conditionals; quantum logic; decision theory, inductive logic, logics of belief change, and formal epistemology; defeasible and nonmonotonic logics; formal philosophy of language; vagueness; and theories of truth and validity. In addition to publishing papers on philosophical logic in this familiar sense of the term, the Journal also invites papers on extensions of logic to new areas of application, and on the philosophical issues to which these give rise. The Journal places a special emphasis on the applications of philosophical logic in other disciplines, not only in mathematics and the natural sciences but also, for example, in computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, jurisprudence, and the social sciences, such as economics, sociology, and political science.
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