Is Tarski’s theory of truth a philosophical one?

Abstract

This article examines to what extent Tarski’s conception of truth in formalized languages can be considered a satisfactory philosophical theory of truth. Criticism of Tarski's theory by Hilary Putnam and some other philosophers gets viewed against the defence of it by Panu Raatikainen. The author explores the methodological status of Convention T and the homophonic theory of relationship between the object-language and the meta-language as a condition for Tarski's explication of the semantic concepts, arguing for the metaphysical neutrality of Tarski's theory and its convergence with the deflationary conception of truth by way of trivialization of the semantic content of the latter. The paper then proceeds to analyzing the role of truth predicate in Quine's theory of the functioning of language, the conclusion being that in the first place one must expose the conditions under which Tarski's conception will deserve to be considered a philosophical theory of truth. In the writings of the philosophers, indeed, there is a lot of confusion as to whether the said theory is an elaboration of some accepted theory of truth such as correspondence or coherence theory, or it is altogether irrelevant to any classical theory of truth. Formalization of a philosophical context normally pursues two objectives: firstly, it seeks to clarify intuitions, and secondly, to explicate intuitive ideas. As soon as one accepts the view of explication as elimination, the intuitive conception of truth cannot any longer play any significant role in the appraisal of Tarski's theory, since the latter is a typical case of explication. Tarski substituted the intuitive idea for the exact notion suitable for scientific discourse; as a philosophical explanation of truth, however, his theory as an absolute failure.