On Tarski’s “Convention T”

Accolades:

Convention T embodies our best intuition as to how the concept of truth is used.

-- Donald Davidson

My lone dissent:

More boredom thou shalt never see

than Tarski’s Truth Convention T.

“Snow’s white” is true -- let’s get this right --

if, but only if,  snow is white.

A.T., logician and skirt-chaser

[Footnote]

When Tarski’s logical machinery is used to provide languages with an interpretation, it should not be seen as giving us a definition of truth. [Emphasis in original.]  When used in this way, it gives us a theory that, for each of the infinitely many sentences of the language, assigns a condition that obtains if and only if that sentence is true -- where truth is something we takes ourselves to understand antecedently, without definition.

-- Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), vol. II, p. 293

For a major empirical research program, investigating the validity of Convention T, click here.