Alfred Tarski Quotes on Knowledge
Alfred Tarski’s “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages” (1933) gave twentieth-century logic and philosophy of language their definitive treatment of the formal semantics of truth. The central project is the rigorous definition of truth for the sentences of a formalized language through the recursive specification of satisfaction conditions in a metalanguage richer than the object language — a definition Tarski showed must satisfy the famous Convention T (Material Adequacy condition), exemplified by the schema: “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. The framework, integrating model theory and metalogic in their modern forms, shaped the subsequent analytic philosophy of language through Carnap, Davidson, Field, and Kripke, and supplied the technical resources within which the Liar and other semantic paradoxes are now standardly analyzed.
Quotes
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Snow is white if and only if snow is white.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Truth in a formalized language can be defined by recursion on the structure of its sentences.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Logic must distinguish object language from metalanguage to escape the liar.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“A theory may admit several non-isomorphic models, each as legitimate as the others.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Decidability is the dream and rarely the reality of formal systems.”
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“Introduction to Logic: and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences. (1941/2013) Tr. Olaf Helmer, pp. 108-110.”
Logic is justly considered the basis of all other sciences , even if only for the reason that in every argument we employ concepts taken from the field of logic, and that ever correct inference proceeds in accordance with its laws. -
“There can be no doubt that the knowledge of logic is of considerable practical importance for everyone who desires to think and infer correctly.”
Introduction to Logic: and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences. (1941/2013) Tr. Olaf Helmer, p. 109. -
“It is perhaps worth while saying that semantics as conceived in this paper (and in former papers of the author) is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions to being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflicts. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense.”
p. 17; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 90. -
“It is perhaps worth while saying that semantics as conceived in this paper (and in former papers of the author) is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions to being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflicts. Nor is semantics a ”
p. 17; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 90. -
“If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes.”
p. 41. -
“For reasons mentioned at the beginning of this section, we cannot offer here a precise structural definition of semantical category and will content ourselves with the following approximate formulation: two expressions belong to the same semantical category if (I) there is a sentential function which contains one of these expressions, and if (2) no sentential function which contains one of these e”
p. 45; as cited in: Schaff (1962) pp. 36-37.