Tarski, Truth, and Semantics

No one denies that Tarski made a major contribution to one particular problem about truth, namely, the resolution of the semantic paradoxes—although, of course, there is disagreement about whether he provided the correct solution. But some philosophers have suggested that Tarski also made a significant contribution to an-other project, that of providing semantic theories for natural languages. Hartry Field (2001), for example, credits Tarski with transforming the problem of reduc-ing truth to physicalistically acceptable notions into that of reducing “primitive denotation”. And Donald Davidson (1984c) founded an entire approach to seman-tics by arguing that a theory of meaning for a language may take the form of a Tarskian definition of truth. But, according to John Etchemendy Etchemendy (1988),1 in so far as Tarski’s work does contribute to empirical semantics, this “is little more than a fortuitous accident”. There are both conceptual and historical issues here. The conceptual question is whether reading Tarski’s work on truth as it must be read, if it is to have any relevance to semantics, requires misunderstanding the character of hi