Alfred Tarski on Scientific Semantics

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.

• Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Historical and theoretical importance of Tarski’s paper.- Chapter 3. Analytical outline of Tarski’s paper.- Chapter 4. Commentary on the paper.- Chapter 5. Immediate reaction to Tarski’s paper.- Chapter 6. Comparison of the Polish and German versions.- Chapter 7. Remarks on the translation.- Chapter 8. Translation of the Polish and German versions of Tarski’s paper.- Chapter 9. Appendix: Correspondence concerning the German translation of Tarski’s truth monograph.