In defense of the semantic definition of truth (Q5931295)

Woleński distinguishes four main objections made by H. Putnam against Tarski's theory of truth. These objections are intended to show that Tarski's theory is not a philosophically valuable theory of truth. According to the first objection, Tarski's theory fails to explain the concept of correspondence. Second, Tarski settled for a solution of the semantical paradoxes which is not clearly the best option. The third objection claims that Tarski's theory is not a semantical account of truth because Tarski parses truth as a purely morphological (syntactic) notion. In Putnam's view a purely morphological theory or truth suffers from some severe defects. Furthermore, according to Putnam's fourth objection, Tarski's theory, in particular, his material adequacy criterion, i.e., Convention T, is circular or relies at least on other non-reduced semantical notions like naming; moreover the soundness or truth of the meta-language have to be presupposed in the definition of truth, and therefore the definition is circular. Woleński focuses on the third and fourth objection. In response to the third objection, Woleński claims that Tarski's theory is not purely morphological because Tarski presupposes that the object-language, for which truth is to be defined, is an interpreted language and therefore not only a purely uninterpreted theory or collection of formulas on Tarski's account. With respect to the circularity objection, Woleński argues that the soundness of the meta-theory is not required for Tarski's purposes. In the view of the reviewer, it should be added that some aspects of Putnam's objections are hardly original and rely to some extent on Putnam's own peculiar conceptions of semantics. Examples of earlier attacks on Tarski's theory similar to Putnam's arguments are \textit{C.~Lewy} [Analysis 8 (1947)], \textit{A. Pap} [Theoria XX (1954)] and \textit{H. Field} [J. Philos. 69 (1972)]. Therefore the paper repeats some discussion to be found in earlier literature (as is acknowledged by the author).