His work on the concepts of truth and logical consequence is the foundation of all rational thought - modern logic, influencing developments in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. His most important achievement in logic is his formulation of the semantic method. Semantics is the study of the relations between terms (words or sentences) and their objects. Pursuing his researches in semantics, Tarski furnished significant definitions not only of the term "logical consequence" but even of the term "definability." His paper "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics" (1944), had considerable impact on epistemology outside mathematics and logic, and is regarded as one of the major versions of the correspondence theory of truth.
His books included Introduction to Logic (English version, 1941), Undecidable Theories (with others, 1953), Ordinal Algebras (1956), The Theory of Modules (editor, with others, 1965), and Cylindric Algebras (with others, 1971). He contributed more than 100 articles on logic and mathematics to professional journals during his career.
"It is evident that all these results only receive a clear content and can only then be exactly proved, if a concrete and precisely formulated definition of [true] sentence is accepted as a basis for the investigation."
"Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white
""Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white"
ReplyDeleteIsn't that obvious. If snow is black then it is not true that snow is white.
What is so special about that?