This paper was written with two aims in mind. A large part of it is just an exposition of Tarski's theory of truth. Philosophers do not agree on how Tarski's theory is related to their investigations. Some of them doubt whether that theory has any relevance to philosophical issues and in particular whether it can be applied in dealing with the problems of philosophy (theory) of science.In this paper I argue that Tarski's chief concern was the following question. Suppose a (...) language L belongs to the class of languages for which, in full accordance with some formal conditions set in advance, we are able to define the class of all the semantic interpretations the language may acquire. Every interpretation of L can be viewed as a certain structure to which the expressions of the language may refer. Suppose that a specific interpretation of the language L was singled out as the intended one. Suppose, moreover, that the intended interpretation can be characterized in a metalanguage L +. If the above assumptions are satisfied, can the notion of truth for L be defined in the metalanguage L + and, if it can, how can this be done? (shrink)

The book provides a historical and systematic exposition of the semantic theory of truth formulated by Alfred Tarski in the 1930s. This theory became famous very soon and inspired logicians and philosophers. It has two different, but interconnected aspects: formal-logical and philosophical. The book deals with both, but it is intended mostly as a philosophical monograph. It explains Tarski’s motivation and presents discussions about his ideas as well as points out various applications of the semantic theory of truth to philosophical (...) problems. (shrink)

In the present paper Cohen's and Lee's theory of social conformity and Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance are first reconstructed according to a revised form of the so-called “structuralist theory-conception” developed by Sneed and Stegmüller with their collaborators. Then the two theories are conceptually correlated in the sense of a technical notion of conceptual correlation which can be shown to be an essential generalization of the theory-relations handled by the structuralist. It will turn out that there is no unique way (...) to connect these theories with each other. However, it is shown that two ontologically and conceptually different theories can be correlated. This in turn gives in principle an opportunity to compare critically these two theories given that the constructed conceptual correlation is sufficiently sound and that the theories are empirically testable to a sufficient extent. (shrink)