Several years ago a group of researchers investigating on truth were engaged in describing the ‘state of the art’ concerning one of the most popular conception of truth: the semantic theory of Alfred Tarski. In other occasions offered by Researchgate I had the opportunity to discuss on truth, a subject returned intensely as a focus of interest of the community with a lively debate and deep efforts to clarify the concept.
We may argue that what is said is true if and only if it corresponds to how things are. In our case, if we are thinking of truth as ‘correspondence’.
We can define the correspondence theory of truth as epistemological which holds that the mind reflects, without substantial modifications, what exists in itself outside us. Aristotle can be considered the most important philosopher of this conception because the human mind, according to him, must reach, at the end of a process of abstraction, the understanding of the substance as a form, that is, of what a certain reality must necessarily be.
Tarski’s semantic theory lists some expressions, the singular terms (primitives), which are obviously elements of the language, and coordinates them as objects, that is to say to elements of the world, assigns objects to variables, and on the basis of a gripping of how a predicate applies to a constant or variable, explains the truth.
Tarski considered the semantic theory close to the correspondent one, and believed that plucked the characterization of the Aristotelian truth, according to which "say of what is that it is and what is not is not, is the truth "(Aristotle Metaphysics Gamma, 7, 101 1b 27.)
The semantic conception seems to better pursue the objectives that make natural a ‘correspondent’ inclination. The core of the semantic idea is the application of a predicate to an object or a series of objects. It is not a matter of language, but something that requires to coordinate words and things. What we are talking about are the objects in the domain, and then what stands out are the domain objects, and, when using constant, particular objects and therefore not an indefinite number of states of affairs, to be specified by demonstrative conventions. We believe that at the correspondent search is the adequacy of the representation to the thing represented, which seems close to the application of a predicate to an object or set of objects.
This is the essential element in the core of the research. We see the correlation as a connection of linguistic expressions with objects, and not with facts, and that differentiate in the correlation linguistic aspects, such as the designation of the constants, and features not just linguistic as the application of predicates. In relation to this point, other characteristics, in particular the "neutrality" of the semantics perspective should be investigated. Compared to what we just said, it emerges in speaking of application of a predicate instead of a property - it may be that the predicate applies mediately because it denotes a property which applies immediately to the object, but it may not be the case. In relation to the truth, it is only interested in the semantic conception of statements and objects, and does not deal with propositions or facts. In addition, what is correlated is, at most, another statement (the meta). This is best expressed by the endless statements of the form '' s " is true [in L] if and only if p ', where' p 'translates' s', that is, from the condition of adequacy V of a definition of truth, condition proposed by Tarski himself: the correlation is between the 's' and 'p', between the terms of L and one of ML.
In the 1940s Rudolf Carnap saw the possibility to exploit some of the results obtained by the Polish logician A. Tarski to introduce in the logic of science concepts as truth and denotation, thus initiating the 'semantic phase'. But it did not correspond to a legitimization of the extra-linguistic (denoted objects) and therefore of metaphysics. It was not generated by of a certain way to resolve long-standing issues, such as the nature of the world and its relationship with language. These issues were left open, assuming a rather tolerant attitude towards the plurality of the solutions proposed. The semantic notions of truth and reference were rather studied in relation to the logical systems with which scientific theories were formalized, in order to permit a more effective analysis of their deductive capacity.
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