This paper re-contextualises Popper within a Kantian tradition by examining his interaction with the Vienna Circle. The complexity of Popper's relationship to the Vienna Circle is often a point of confusion as some view him as a member of the Vienna Circle while others minimise his association with this group. This paper argues that Popper was not a member of the Vienna Circle or a positivist but shared many neo-Kantian philosophical tendencies with the members of the Circle as well as (...) many of their philosophical problems and interests. By better understanding the influence of the Circle's members upon Popper, we not only remove the myths surrounding Popper's positivism, but also place the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle within its proper philosophical context. This paper further argues that it was Popper's friend during his formative philosophical years in Vienna, Julius Kraft (1921–1960) who was responsible for the way in which Popper approached Kant. Through Kraft, Popper was introduced to the thought of Leonard Nelson (1882–1927) and Jakob Fries (1773–1843) as well as a tradition of critical rationalism which Popper would continue both in his methodological orientation as well as through his late German Enlightenment intellectual values. (shrink)

Many commentators on Alfred Tarski have, following Hartry Field, claimed that Tarski's truth-definition was motivated by physicalism—the doctrine that all facts, including semantic facts, must be reducible to physical facts. I claim, instead, that Tarski did not aim to reduce semantic facts to physical ones. Thus, Field's criticism that Tarski's truth-definition fails to fulfill physicalist ambitions does not reveal Tarski to be inconsistent, since Tarski's goal is not to vindicate physicalism. I argue that Tarski's only published remarks that speak approvingly (...) of physicalism were written in unusual circumstances: Tarski was likely attempting to appease an audience of physicalists that he viewed as hostile to his ideas. In later sections I develop positive accounts of: (1) Tarski's reduction of semantic concepts; (2) Tarski's motivation to develop formal semantics in the particular way he does; and (3) the role physicalism plays in Tarski's thought. (shrink)

This study looks to the work of Tarski's mentors Stanislaw Lesniewski and Tadeusz Kotarbinski, and reconsiders all of the major issues in Tarski scholarship in light of the conception of Intuitionistic Formalism developed: semantics, truth, paradox, logical consequence.

It is often thought that instances of the T-schema such as snow is white is true if and only if snow is white state correspondences between sentences andthe world, and that therefore such sentences play a crucial role in correspondence theories oftruth. I argue that this assumption trivializes the correspondence theory: even a disquotationaltheory of truth would be a correspondence theory on this conception. This discussionallows one to get clearer about what a correspondence theory does claim, and toward the end (...) of thepaper I discuss what a true correspondence theory of truth would involve. (shrink)

Tarski’s Convention T is often taken to claim that it is both sufficient and necessary for adequacy in a definition of truth that it imply instances of the T-schema where the embedded sentence translates the mentioned sentence. However, arguments against the necessity claim have recently appeared, and, furthermore, the necessity claim is actually not required for the indefinability results for which Tarski is justly famous; indeed, Tarski’s own presentation of the results in the later Undecidable Theories makes no mention of (...) an assumption to the effect that the definition of truth implies the biconditionals. This raises a question: was Tarski in fact committed to the necessity claim in the important papers of the 1930s and 40s? I argue that he was not. The discussion of this apparently esoteric interpretive issue in fact gets to the heart of many important questions about truth, and in the final sections of the paper I discuss the importance of the T-biconditionals in the theory of meaning and the relation of deflationary and inflationary theories of truth to the semantic paradoxes. (shrink)