Topics in Logic

This class will look at old and new attempts to develop formal theories of the concept of truth. After a presentation of the paradoxes of disquotation, we will do a fairly close reading of Tarski's 'The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages'. We will follow this with a close examination of Kripke's formal theory of truth, and will then look at Hartry Field's recent work on truth and the liar paradox. If time permits, we will briefly survey some other modern approaches, including those that revolve around the idea of so-called 'indefinite extensibility' (Glanzberg et al.) (II)