Convention T

In the philosophy of language, convention T is understood to be the guiding principle of Alfred Tarski's semantic truth theory . It was formulated as follows in his 1935 publication on the concept of truth:

A formally correct definition of the symbol Tr, formulated in a metalanguage , is called an adequate definition of truth if it has the following consequences:

(a) All sentences which are obtained from the expression " Tr (x) if and only if p" , if the symbol x is replaced by a structurally descriptive name of some sentence in the language under consideration and the symbol p is replaced by the expression which the translation of this expression into the metalanguage forms can be derived from it.

(b) The theorem for all x: if Tr (x), then S (x) (in other words: Tr ᑕ S) can be derived from it.

Put simply, it is a conventional condition for truth definitions in languages. A truth theory based on such definitions is required to be endowed with sufficient descriptive potential to make statements of the form

The statement x is the case is true if x is the case

or to give a specific example

The statement snow is white is true when snow is white

to construct.

The convention thus requires the existence of a metalanguage which, in addition to logical links and objects, also contains the predicate “is true”. The metalanguage must therefore be richer than the language in which the statements of the type “x is the case” are constructed (the so-called object language ). The “Convention T” is thus an attempt to formalize truth attributions (in the context of the underlying language) by means of a demand on the structure of the language. At the same time, the convention states how one can define a concept of truth in formal linguistic systems. However, the convention says nothing about the conditions under which “x is the case” in the above example. It is primarily - if you will - just about the connection between the truth of the formal statement and the truth of the fact.

Tarski's convention T is a term that is often quoted , especially in the philosophy of language , which is often associated with the Benacerraf dilemma that Paul Benacerraf later posed . The American philosopher Donald Davidson refers to Tarski's work in his semantic theory for natural languages.

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1. ↑ A. Tarski: The concept of truth in the formalized languages. Studia Philosophica 1 (1935), pp. 261-405. (Original title: Pojęcie prawdy w językach nauk dedukcyjnych , 1933)