Date of Award
5-2014
Thesis Date
5-2014
Degree Type
Honors Thesis-Unrestricted
Degree Name
B.A.
Department
Philosophy
Degree Program
Philosophy
Director
Robert Stufflebeam
Abstract
I explore three main points in Alfred Tarski’s Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundation of Theoretical Semantics: (1) his physicalist program, (2) a general theory of truth, and (3) the necessity of a metalanguage when defining truth. Hartry Field argued that Tarski’s theory of truth failed to accomplish what it set out to do, which was to ground truth and semantics in physicalist terms. I argue that Tarski has been adequately defended by Richard Kirkham. Development of logic in the past three decades has created a shift away from Fregean and Russellian understandings of quantification to an independent conception of quantification in independence-friendly first-order logic. This shift has changed some of the assumptions that led to Tarski’s Impossibility Theorem.
Recommended Citation
Lumpkin, Jonathan, "A Semantic Conception of Truth" (2014). Senior Honors Theses. 60.
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/honors_theses/60
Rights
The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this honors thesis in whole or part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the honors thesis.