Tarskiʹs definition and truth-makers Original Research Article

A hallmark of correspondence theories of truth is the principle that sentences are made true by some truth-makers. A well-known objection to treating Tarskiʹs definition of truth as a correspondence theory has been put forward by Donald Davidson. He argued that Tarskiʹs approach does not relate sentences to any entities (like facts) to which true sentences might correspond. From the historical viewpoint, it is interesting to observe that Tarskiʹs philosophical teacher Tadeusz Kotarbiński advocated an ontological doctrine of reism which accepted only concrete individuals and rejected all such abstract entities as facts, states of affairs, properties, and sets. Kotarbińskiʹs physicalism influenced Tarski who also avoided concepts like “fact” and “property” in his theory of truth, but—unlike Kotarbiński—he used freely set-theoretical terminology. In his mature work in model theory in the 1950s, Tarski used systematically the notion of a relational system (i.e., a domain of objects with designated elements, subsets, and relations). Wilfrid Hodges has argued that the notions of “structure” and “truth in a structure” appeared in Tarskiʹs work only in 1950. In my view, one can find the main ingredients of the model-theoretic account of truth already in the 1930s. These considerations suggest, against Davidson, that Tarskiʹs definition presupposes that material truth is always related to some kind of truth-maker. Further, facts as truth-makers can be reconstructed by employing the resources of model theory.