Indefinability and Inconsistency

Abstract

Our discussion of Tarski’s Intuitionistic Formalist treatment of truth in §§ 2–4 of CTFL concerned material that seems to have been developed by 1931 ([Hodges, 2008, 120–6]) and merely polished for the 1931 submission of the Polish original of the work. (Cf. Tarski’s own “Historical Note” where the addition of the Gödelian treatment of indefinability is described as, of all the results in the work “the only one subsequently added to the otherwise already finished investigation” [Tarski, 1983a, 278].) We have thus been able to discuss the material of §§ 2–4 with little concern for our overall story about Tarski’s development from the late 1920s up to the Paris Unity of Science conference in 1935. Now that we turn to Tarski’s remarks on the conditions under which truth cannot be defined we will be unable to ignore the issues raised by Tarski’s evolving views.