Together with Sebastian Speitel, I am organizing a colloquium on “Tarskian Themes in Language and Logic” for the upcoming GAP.12 conference, to be held from 8 to 11 September 2025 in Düsseldorf. We have an exciting list of speakers – more to come soon! For now, here’s the proposal text:
Alfred Tarski’s work on logic, truth, and language is among the most influential in the history of not only analytic philosophy, but of the formal sciences in general. His approach to truth in formalized languages [9] and logical consequence [10] has achieved canonical status and become the paradigm in the teaching of the subject. His definition of truth, use of model-theoretic tools, and explication of the notion of logical consequence are foundational in philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, and computer science.
Although Tarski was initially only concerned with the notion of truth in formalized languages, and expressed doubts about the possibility of extending his insights to natural languages, later writers did not share this skepticism. Montague [4, 5] firmly established Tarskian semantics as the foundational paradigm for pursuing natural language semantics and Davidson [1] took Tarski’s truth definition as providing an account of an empirically testable theory of natural language meaning.
The extension of Tarski’s work on truth beyond the foundations of logic and mathematics has not only originated a rich tradition in natural language and philosophical semantics, but also given rise to a lively and enduring debate concerning the foundations, significance and applicability of Tarski’s notion of truth and the model-theoretic methods based on it.
Examples include the recent and active debates on the existence of a logical consequence relation in natural language [3, 7], the status of Tarskian models in formal semantics and philosophical theorizing [2, 11], the logical/non-logical distinction at the foundations of the model-theoretic definition of logical consequence [8] and, of course, the nature of the Tarskian notion of truth [6].
The proposed symposium aims to take up these Tarskian themes in language and logic, unified by his influential conception of truth, and provides a forum for the ongoing debates in the foundations of logic, semantics and philosophical applications of Tarskian methodology.
References
[1] Davidson, D., “Truth and Meaning”, Synthese 17(1), 1967, 304–323.
[2] Etchemendy, J. The Concept of Logical Consequence, Harvard University Press 1990.
[3] Glanzberg, M., “Logical Consequence and Natural Language”, in: Foundations of Logical Con- sequence, C.R. Caret and O.T. Hjortland, Oxford University Press 2015, 71–120.
[4] Montague, R., “English as a formal language”, in: Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, R.H. Thomason (ed.), Yale University Press 1974, 188-221.
[5] Montague, R., “The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English”, in: Approaches to Natural Language, K.J.J. Hintikka, J.M.E. Moravcsik and P. Suppes (eds.), Dordrecht 2002, 221–242.
[6] Ray, G., “Tarski on the Concept of Truth”, in: The Oxford Handbook of Truth, M. Glanzberg (ed.), Oxford University Press 2018, 695-717.
[7] Sagi, G., “Considerations on Logical Consequence and Natural Language”, Dialectica 74(2), 2022, 327-348.
[8] Sher, G., The Bounds of Logic: A Generalized Viewpoint, MIT Press 1991.
[9] Tarski, A., “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages”, Logic, Semantics, Metamathe- matics, J. Corcoran (ed.), 2nd edition, Hacket Publishing Company 1983, 152-279.
[10] Tarski, A., “On the Concept of Logical Consequence”, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, J. Corcoran (ed.), 2nd edition, Hacket Publishing Company 1983, 409-421.
[11] Zinke, A. “Reinterpreting Logic”, in: The Semantic Conception of Logic: Essays on Conse- quence, Invariance, and Meaning, G. Sagi and J. Woods (eds.), Cambridge University Press 2021, 186-207.
Erik Stei 