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Ungroundedness in Tarskian Languages

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Several writers have assumed that when in “Outline of a Theory of Truth” I wrote that “the orthodox approach” – that is, Tarski’s account of the truth definition – admits descending chains, I was relying on a simple compactness theorem argument, and that non-standard models must result. However, I was actually relying on a paper on ‘pseudo-well-orderings’ by Harrison (Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 131, 527–543 1968). The descending hierarchy of languages I define is a standard model. Yablo’s Paradox later emerged as a key to interpreting the result.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Eduardo Barrio and Romina Padró for their help in producing this paper. This paper has been completed with support from the Saul Kripke Center at the City University of New York, Graduate Center and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant number RQ-255700).

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  1. The Saul Kripke Center and The Graduate Center of the University of New York, Room 7118 212 817 7484, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY, 10016-4309, USA

    Saul A. Kripke

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Kripke, S.A. Ungroundedness in Tarskian Languages. J Philos Logic 48, 603–609 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-018-9486-x

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