Chapter 3
In: The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy of Language
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Abstract
Tarski’s theory of truth is one of the most important truth theories ever put forward, and many authors have focused on it to use it for more general projects or to criticize it. Among the aspects subject to dispute concerning Tarski’s theory are whether he intended his theory to be a correspondence theory of truth and, independently of Tarski’s intentions, whether his theory is a correspondence theory. These are the two questions on Tarski’s truth theory we will concentrate on. The paper is divided into three parts. First, we will pay attention to some features of the intellectual framework of Tarski’s professional background, the Lvov-Warsaw School, since the truth conceptions of some of the authors belonging to that School influenced Tarski’s view on truth. Second, we will analyse most passages of Tarski’s writings which contain his view of semantics and of semantic concepts as well as the truth formulations which comprise the meaning of the concept of truth that his theory intended to grasp. Third, we will examine the interpretations of Tarski’s theory by Popper, Davidson and Field in order to assess some misunderstandings of Tarski’s theory and some of the shortcomings attributed to it.