Soviet philosophy and the semantic definition of truth

Abstract

Recent discussion of Tarski's semantic definition of truth1 further ex emplifies how Soviet philosophers assimilate Western theories from the borderline of science and philosophy. It shows that the range of de classified doctrines in the field of logic is increasing once more: first it included only mathematical logic in a narrow sense, then it included formal logic in general2, and now even logical semantics has become recognized as ideologically neutral. In 1959 R. Carnap's well-known book on semantics Meaning and Necessity* was published in Russian translation. But in the same year an investigation of the semantic conception of truth by V. V. Msvenie radze, published by the IF4, still ignored Tarski's main publication of 1933.5 It was based exclusively on Tarski's brief philosophical remarks from 19446 and on a critical essay by M. Black.7 The tone of Msvenie radze was a very militant one: "In science sharp ideological fighting is going on. The scientist cannot stay aside in the role of a "neutral" observer or else he will risk becoming an accomplice of political re action."8 Confusing definition of truth and method of verification, the author objected strongly that Tarski said only that a proposition was true if what it stated was the case, but that he did not tell how to find out when something was the case. He refused to recognize Tarski's contri bution as a definition of truth and saw in it merely an auxiliary device for reducing the truth of logically complex propositions to the truth of elementary ones.9 Although he mentioned briefly that the logician's "results concerning the strictness of construction and the completeness of deductive systems" were useful10, he agreed basically with M. Black on the fundamental character of ordinary language and he defended it against the accusations of equivocity and inconsistency: "Tarski is wrong when he thinks that the task of defining a univocal use of scientific terms is unrealizable in ordinary language."11 But Msvenieradze's main concern was to refute Tarski's claim to the philosophical neutrality of