Abstract:
A hallmark of correspondence theories of truth is the principle that
sentences
are made true by some truth-makers. A well-known objection to treating
Tarski´s
definition of truth as a correspondence theory is put forward by Donald
Davidson. He argues that Tarski´s approach does not relate sentences
to any
entitities (like facts) to which true sentences might correspond.
From the historical viewpoint, it is interesting to observe that Tarski´s
philosophical teacher Tadeusz Kotarbinski advocated an ontological
doctrine of
reism which accepted only concrete individuals and rejected all such
abstract
entities as facts, states of affairs, properties, and sets. Kotarbinski´s
physicalism influenced Tarski who avoided concepts like "fact" and
"property"
in his theory of truth. In his 1933 definition, Tarski assumed that
truth is
defined relative to the "domain of all objects", but - unlike Kotarbinski
- he
used freely set-theoretical terminology. In his 1935 definition of
logical
consequence, Tarski defined the concept of "model" as a sequence of
objects
that satisfies a formula with free individual and predicate variables.
In his mature work in model theory in the 1950s, Tarski used systematically
the
notion of a "relational system" (i.e., a domain of objects with designated
elements, subsets, and relations). Wilfrid Hodges has argued that the
notions
of "structure" and "truth" in a structure appeared in Tarski´s
work only in
1952. In my view, one can find the main ingredients of the model-theoretic
account of truth already in the 1930s. These considerations suggest,
against
Davidson, that Tarski´s definition presupposes that truth is
always related to
some kind of truth-maker.