Abstract:
Tarski claimed that his semantic conception of truth conformed,
on the one
hand,the ordinary use of the adjective "true" (or the
noun "truth") as
well as the classical (philosophical) truth-definition,
on the other hand.
This claim was very often criticized . There is no other
way to confirm or
disconfirm Tarski'sclaim than by an analysis of available
historical data.
Aletheia was the main Greek word used for truth. The standard
grammatical
construction consisted in verbum dicendi + aletheia, for
example (in
English translation) "to say truth". Traces of this usage
are to be find
in Homer's poems, and quite explicit form occurs in one
of Solon's
preserved fragments. The earliest fragments with aletheia
clearly suggest
that truth-talk was related to concrete dialogs and situations.
Although
etymology of aletheia, according to the most commonly
view, indicates its
privative character and justifies the translation as "what
is non-hidden",
Heidegger's conclusions (in fact, based only on the one
fragment of
Plato's Republic)are very dubious. Gradually (Parmenides,
the Sophists,
Thucydices) , aletheia became to be used more abstractly.
There is no
doubt that to say truth meant to say how it was or how
it is. Plato and
Aristotle made the decisive step toward accomodating the
noted use of
aletheia to philosophy. In particular, Aristotle's famous
truth-definition
in Metaphysics 1011 preserve the construction with verbum
dicendi at the
beginning and explanation what does it mean to say truth.
Veritas is Latin translation of aletheia. Thomas Aquinas
offered the most
famous formula for defining truth as adequatio intellectus
et rei.
However, what is very often overlooked, this definition
is in Aquinas
followed by the literal translation of Aristotle's words.
Aquinas' formula
began a spectacular carrier of the understanding of truth
as agreement or
correspondence between thought (propositions, statements,
judgments,
sentence, etc.) and reality. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz,
Kant and many
other philosophers freely used the idea of adequatio.
Russell supplemented
this conception by the requirement that correspondence
consists in
structural relation between truth-bearers and facts. Tarski
himself was
rather sceptical about this understanding of truth. He
preferred more
traditional account which was displayed for his by the
content of
T-scheme.