A note on typed truth and consistency assertions (Q263089): Difference between revisions

The paper deals with typed, compositional axiomatizations of the truth predicate. The author's axioms of truth come with a built-in, minimal and sufficient technical machinery to talk about syntactic aspects of an \textit{arbitrary} base theory. The research interest in axiomatic truth is currently much increasing and many axiom systems for the truth predicate have been discussed in the literature and their respective properties have been analysed. The paper constitutes a contribution to this increasing literature on the topic, in particular works of Albert Visser and Richard Heck, and presupposes at least a partial acquaintance with the theories of truth. The author investigates the strict relationships between Visser's, Heck's and the author's systems, and model constructions in weak arithmetic systems with suitable set existence axioms. \par First, the author briefly summarizes three main goals of axiomatization of truth. They are (a) semantic theories of truth, (b) mutual reductions of axiomatic theories of truth over a base theory \(B\) and extensions of \(B\) with set existence axioms and (c) evaluating the metaphysical impact that axioms of truth have on the underlying mathematical structure. \par The presented theories are essentially Tarski like, and they highlight the most important features of Tarski's solution to the liar paradox. They are typed, compositional axiomatizations of the truth predicate. It means that only the truth of sentences not containing the same truth predicate is provable, thus avoiding the paradoxes by observing Tarski's distinction between object and metalanguage. Moreover, by ``compositional'' we mean the obviously desirable principle ``a conjunction is true if and only if both conjuncts are true''. By contrast, the deflationist's attitude to the compositional principle remains somewhat mysterious. \par In summary, as the author says in concluding remarks, ``the conservativeness of the type theory of truth becomes an almost trivial property and interpretability acquires a predominant role. If this is tolerated, however, it seems that some conceptual gains are reached. Corollaries 6 and 8 tell us that, over an arbitrary base theory \(U\), Tarski-style truth axioms bundled together with enough syntax to make them meaningful can be characterized precisely as an intensionally correct consistency statement for \(U\). For arbitrary \(U\), the truth-theoretic conglomerate considered has to contain also the claim ascertaining the truth of all instances of the schemata of \(U\). These facts seem thus to deliver a clear message: if one considers mutual interpretability as a trustworthy method of comparison, axioms of truth-theoretic and syntactic content, when added to a mathematical base theory, correspond to a metamathematical claim that, given Pudlák's beautiful version of Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, is out of reach for the base theory itself.'' \par Moreover, if we count the above remarks as a (partial) characterization of compositionality in a typed theory of truth, one needs to ascertain that similar characterizations are not available for typed axiomatizations of the truth predicate that allegedly reflect different intuitions on the truth predicate, such as disquotational theories. The author proves that in fact disquotational truth axioms cannot be equated to an intensionally correct consistency statement for the object theory, at least when the latter is sequential.