What is Tarski's theory of truth? (Q1969808): Difference between revisions

The author investigates Tarski's theory of truth as well as Field's (1972) reductionist variants with respect to four questions. The first question concerns the role of both the fixed and the variable elements in Tarski's theory. In the author's mind, it is not clear what features, according to Tarski's methods, are supposed to be common to all definitions of truth for languages. The second question concerns whether Tarski's theory is reductionist or structuralist. The point of a reductionist account is the reduction of the truth (or satisfaction) conditions of complex sentences to truth conditions of atomic sentences. In the structuralist approach, however, different truth conditions of sentences with different levels of complexity are analyzed. The two remaining questions concern the relationship of Tarski's theory (and its variants) to correspondence and deflationist accounts of truth. In order to overcome the relativization of truth to a particular language as well as the trivialization of truth by a list definition, Field has proposed an amendment of Tarski's theory. The author discusses the problems of Tarski's theory and Field's attempts to solve them.