Transitions: 1933–1935

Abstract

Well past 1931 semantics was for Tarski simply a tool for producing explicit definitions of certain concepts that appeared both suspect and difficult to avoid: truth, denotation, satisfaction and (semantic) definition. Some of the tools thereby developed were even mathematically fruitful, as shown in the later pages of ODS and its sequel, “Logical Operations and Projective Sets”, co-authored with Kuratowski. But it seems not to have occurred to Tarski to think of meaning itself in terms of semantic word–world relations; he was too wedded to the conception of meaning in terms of the expression of thought and the constraints placed on this by the deductive structure of an axiom system. His willingness to present “Some Methodological Investigations” in 1934 and publish it in 1935 shows how far he was, even that late, from thinking that semantics could stand on its own or take the place of the older meaning-theoretic notions he had acquired from Kotarbiński and Leśniewski. Padoa’s method clearly should be construed in semantic terms, yet in 1934 Tarski is willing to re-use material from 1926 in which the notion of an interpretation of a term receives the same psychologistic treatment it gets from Padoa himself.