I explore three main points in Alfred Tarski’s Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundation of Theoretical Semantics: (1) his physicalist program, (2) a general theory of truth, and (3) the necessity of a metalanguage when defining truth. Hartry Field argued that Tarski’s theory of truth failed to accomplish what it set out to do, which was to ground truth and semantics in physicalist terms. I argue that Tarski has been adequately defended by Richard Kirkham. Development of logic in the past three decades has created a shift away from Fregean and Russellian understandings of quantification to an independent conception of quantification in independence-friendly first-order logic. This shift has changed some of the assumptions that led to Tarski’s Impossibility Theorem.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uno.edu/oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:honors_theses-1057 |
| Date | 01 May 2014 |
| Creators | Lumpkin, Jonathan |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UNO |
| Source Sets | University of New Orleans |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Senior Honors Theses |
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