Alfred Tarski on Scientific Semantics

This book tells the story of the landmark event in modern logic whereby Alfred Tarski became “the man who defined truth”. Alfred Tarski’s classic monograph on truth became known internationally in 1935, when he presented its ideas in German at an international conference and collaborated in preparation of its German translation.

This book provides the first English translation of the Polish version of Tarski’s conference paper, which for purposes of comparison is printed side-by-side with a new exact English translation of the German version. It offers for the first time a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the paper, and for the first time a description and analysis of the discussion of the paper immediately after its presentation. It discusses 22 substantive differences between the two versions.

The book also extracts from recently discovered correspondence about the German translation of the truth monograph how it was decided to produce such a translation, the process of vetting and changing the translation, changes requested by Tarski, objections to the appeal to intuition in the Polish original (supported by a list of those appeals with their replacements in the German and English translations), other translational issues, discrepancies other than those concerning appeals to intuition between the Polish original and its German translation, the “Keystone cops” saga of Tarski’s off-prints, and monetary matters. It lists from Tarski’s journal his skiing, mountaineering and tourist trips in 1935, and describes his companions on those trips. An electronic supplement translates or summarizes the complete correspondence, with comments, and includes images from Tarski’s journal of his itineraries of his 1935 trips, with the editors' explanatory comments.

David Hitchcock is professor emeritus of philosophy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, where he was a full-time faculty member for 46 years. He is the co-author with Magda Stroińska of "Alfred Tarski's 'On the concept of following logically'", a translation with introduction of the Polish version of the companion conference paper to Tarski's "On the establishment of scientific semantics", whose Polish and German versions are translated with commentary and comparison in the present volume. He is the author of Critical Thinking: A Guide to Evaluating Information  (Methuen, 1983) and of Definition: A Practical Guide to Constructing and Evaluating Definitions of Terms (Windsor Studies in Argumentation, 2021), and co-author with Milos Jenicek, MD, of Evidence-Based Practice: Logic and Critical Thinking in Medicine (AMA Press, 2005). He co-edited with Bart Verheij Arguing on the Toulmin Model: New Essays in Argument Analysis and Evaluation (Springer, 2007). His On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking (Springer, 2017) brings together 25 previously published sole-authored articles, along with seven new chapters updating his views on their topics. He is the author of the entry on critical thinking in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

Magda Stroińska MA (Warsaw), PhD (Edinburgh) is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics and German at McMaster University, where she has taught since 1988. Her major areas of research and publication include analysis of discourse, cross-cultural pragmatics, cultural stereotyping, language and politics, language and identity in exile, aging and bilingualism, translation and interpretation studies, as well as language and psychological trauma. She edited a number of books: Stereotype im Fremdsprachenunterricht (with Martin Löschmann, Peter Lang 1998); Relative points of view (Berghahn 2001); Exile, language and identity (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2003); International classroom: Challenging the notion (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2006); and The Unspeakable: Narratives of Trauma (with Vikki Cecchetto and Kate Szymanski, Peter Lang 2014). She translated Victor Klemperer’s book The Language of the Third Reich from German into Polish (Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy, Toronto 1992). In 2023, she published her linguistic memoir My life in Propaganda: Language and Totalitarian Regimes, Durvile and UpRoute). With David Hitchcock, she prepared and published (in History and Philosophy of Logic, 2002) a new English translation with introduction of Alfred Tarski’s 1936 paper “On the concept of following logically”, based on both the Polish and the German versions of his paper (the previous translation being based solely on the German text). They then applied their strict translation procedure to produce a new English translation of Tarski’s 1936 paper on the establishment of scientific semantics, a project that grew to incorporate a survey of the surviving correspondence about the translation and publication of Tarski’s monograph on the concept of truth.