This paper examines Tarskian semantics from the point of view of grammar. The author focuses on syntactic constructions available in languages used by Tarski, investigated by means borrowed from categorial grammar. He also tried to make the concept of truth, as defined by Tarski, closer to ordinary language.

It is by now a commonplace that the classification of sciences into nomological and ideographical, which originated with Windelband, is neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Rather, there are sciences in which nomothetical activities are prevalent and there are sciences in which ideographical efforts dominate. A third kind of enterprise is widespread throughout most, if not all, sciences: typological undertakings. In some sciences these are the most important and dominant projects. Linguistics tries to establish types of expressions: phonemes, morphemes, syntactical categories. History (...) of art endeavors to set up various styles, i. e., types of art. General history attempts at well founding of such notions as revolution, reaction, buonapartism, findesieclism. When a historian declares that a revolution starts when a housewife cannot buy a chicken on the market, he divides the stream of events into periods according to a criterion that seems to him important, establishes similarities between different periods, and classifies them into types. Such typological activities are common not only in social sciences and humanities but also in physics which speaks about explosions, collisions, changes from a positive to a negative acceleration. A mathematician often enters into a typological venture, e.g., when he analyzes a function as increasing in an interval or describes it as concave upward in another interval. Typology may be conceived as containing the theory of classification. But there are typological problems that are not included in the theory of classification. A classification is performed on a class when its subclasses are defined. Typology, as suggested by the examples, may take a single object and try to conceive it as a summation of its fragments. To find a segmentation suitable from some point of view is not a classification. Rather, classification presupposes segmentation. (shrink)

A large part of philosophical analysis deals with the problem of how language relates to reality. It is assumed that language speaks—or at least may speak—about something, about one or another kind of reality. It speaks truthfully or falsely, with cohesion or with confusion, with precision or loosely, penetratingly or without much depth, assertively, hypothetically, optatively, interrogatively or in some other way, about the real or supposed world. The so-called “real world” is perhaps amorphous, in flux, continuous and indivisible. Language, (...) on the other hand, is usually viewed as well organized, strict, discrete, and decomposable into its generators. But it is an old, Platonic view that the structure of language reflects the structure of the world. (shrink)

To the philosopher, the logician, and the linguist, questions have a special fascination. The two main views of language, that it describes the world, and that it expresses thought, are not directly applicable to questions. Ques tions are not assertions. A question may be apt, sharp, to the point, impor tant, or it may be inappropriate, ambiguous, awkward, irrelevant or irreverent. But it cannot be true or false. It does not have a truth value not just because an utterance like (...) Was the letter long? does not indicate which letter is being talked about. The indicative The letter was not long has the same indeter minacy. In actual context the anaphoric definite article will be resolved both for a question and for an indicative sentence. Contextual resolutions are easily found for most cross-references. A question cannot be either true or it does not describe a state of affairs. Neither does it express false, because thought, because it is an expression of suspended thought, of lack of judge ment. To dress it in other philosophical styles, a question is not a judgment, it is not a proposition, it is not an assertion. A philosopher may try to paraphrase a question as an indicative sentence, for instance as a statement of ignorance, or as a statement of the desire to know. Hintikka, Wachowicz and Lang explore this territory. Or he may interpret it as a meta statement intimating the direction in which the flow of the discourse is going. (shrink)