Commentary on the Paper

This chapter compares Tarski’s paper on the establishment of scientific semantics to his other published summaries of his ideas and results on the concept of truth, explains what led Tarski to embark on the project of defining truth, and reveals the basis of Tarski’s choice of the title. It discusses each paragraph. Among other things, it explains what Tarski meant by ‘semantics’ and why he called his semantics ‘scientific’. It explains why Tarski took the structural description of a “formalized language” to include its rules of definition and points out how following them could guarantee that a definition was formally correct. It explains how Tarski’s conception of the material adequacy of a way of introducing a semantic concept into the meta-theory of a formalized language is rooted in a mentalistic, “intuitionist” conception of meaning. It documents how objections of logicians in Vienna to appealing to intuition explain Tarski’s studious avoidance of such appeals in the German-language (but not the Polish-language) version. It explains the background to Tarski’s two substantive objections to introducing a semantic concept axiomatically and points out the weakness of its two novel objections. It notes that Tarski does not even sketch a proof of his main thesis about the definability of semantic concepts.