Changes Requested by Tarski: A New Title, a Postscript, a Historical Note, and a Changed Sentence

The correspondence about the German translation of Tarski’s truth monograph shows that he initiated four changes to the Polish original: a new title, a postscript, a historical note, and a change in one sentence. The new title is a more accurate description of the work’s content. The postscript updates Tarski’s main results by abandoning Husserl’s theory of semantic categoriesSemantic categories, theory of as a constraint on the structure of formalized languages and by allowing variables in a language to be of transfinite order; it thus replaces Tarski’s initial partly negative result with a uniformly positive result, and at the same time makes much of the original work obsolete. The historical note addresses an experience whose unpleasantness Tarski felt to the end of his life—the implication in a footnote of a paper by Rudolf CarnapCarnap, Rudolf that his investigations on truth were derivative from Gödel’sGödel, Kurt work on the incompleteness of Principia MathematicaPrincipia Mathematica and related systems. The change in the sentence is substantive but minor.