Also available at RandJACM, 8 (3), 404-17

CACM, 7, 219–244.

Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 1 (3), 79-90.

Teddington Conference

Teddington Conference

The recent work of the Unit has been primarily concerned with the employment ofthesauri in machine translation. Limited success has been achieved, in punchedcardtests, in improving the idiomatic quality and so the intelligibility of an initiallyunsatisfactory translation, by word-for-word procedures, from Italian intoEnglish, by using a program which permitted selection of final equivalents from"heads" in Roget's Thesaurus, i.e. lists of synonyms, near-synonyms and associatedwords and phrases, instead of from previously determined lists of alternativetranslations. Mechanical Translation, vol.4, nos.1 and 2, November 1957; pp. 35-43]

Language, a journal of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), has appeared continuously since 1925 (4 issues per year). It publishes scholarly articles that report on original research covering the field of linguistics broadly, thus treating topics that include, among others, linguistic theory (phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics); language description; language in its social setting; the history of individual languages; language acquisition; experimentation on language perception, production, and processing; computational modeling of language; and the history of linguistics. Language also publishes research reports, discussion notes, and reviews and, beginning in 2013, has expanded to include digital content in four online-only sections: Perspectives, Phonological Analysis, Language and Public Policy, and Teaching Linguistics. Language also included the LSA Bulletin newsletter as a supplement from 1930 - 1969.

Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue.Since 1950, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS) has presented the best new work in the discipline. Published on behalf of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, the journal offers innovative and thought-provoking papers that open up new areas of inquiry or shed new light on well-known issues.

The Journal of Symbolic Logic (JSL) was founded in 1936 and it has become the leading research journal in the field. Volume 71, being published during 2006, will consist of approximately 1300 pages. The Journal is distributed with The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. The Journal and The Bulletin are the official organs of the Association for Symbolic Logic, an international organization for supporting research in symbolic logic and furthering the exchange of ideas among mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists, linguists, and others interested in this field. The main purpose of The Journal is to publish original scholarly work in symbolic logic.

‘Tarski discovered interconnections between such diverse areas of mathematics as logic, algebra, set theory, and measure theory. He brought clarity and precision to the semantics of mathematical logic, and in so doing he legitimized semantic concepts, such as truth and definability, that had been stigmatized by the logical paradoxes … Tarski’s famous work on definitions of truth in formalized languages (1933-1935) gave the notion of satisfaction of a sentence in a structure for first-order logic, second-order logic, and so on. This work had a profound influence on philosophers concerned with mathematics, science, and linguistics’ (DSB). ‘Tarski’s main contribution of the decade was his definition of truth. He claimed to have found the essential components by 1929, and they were stated without proof in the short paper [Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den Sprachen der deduktiven Disziplinen, 1932] communicated to the Vienna Academy in January 1932 which Carnap had seen. The first long version appeared in Polish as a book in 1933 … Acknowledging the work of Leśniewski on semantic categories, Tarski began by pondering the definability of truth for natural languages, and decided against it, especially because of unavoidable paradoxes; he stated a version of the liar paradox due to Łukasiewicz based upon giving the sentence “c it not true” the name “c”. But he saw a chance for a definition in a formal language by distinguishing it from a “second language, called the metalanguage (which may contain the first as a part)” and belonging to a “second theory which we shall call the metatheory”. This is seemingly the origin of those names: Carnap, to whom “object language” is due, mistakenly credited himself with “metalanguage” much later. The distinction was essential to Tarski’s theory, since the truth was a property in the metalanguage of a sentence correctly expressing some state of affairs in the object language: “it is snowing” is a true sentence if and only if it is snowing”. ‘Making use of recursive definitions, Tarski constructed a predicate calculus for the metalanguage, imitating the structure of the one in the object language. In order to ease the use of recursion, he worked with sentential functions rather than sentences: “for all [objects] a, we have a satisfies the sentential function ‘x is white’ if and only if a is white”. The crucial property was “satisfaction of a sentential function by a sequence of objects” in some domain, for from it he defined truth for any formal language with a finite number of orders of semantic category in terms of satisfaction by any sub-sequence in that domain. The background influence of Principia mathematica was explicit in his analogy between categories and simple types, and maybe in his decision to work with sentential functions ... ‘Comparing Tarski with Gödel, some of his techniques, and the impossibility result, correlate with incompletability and numbering; hence he was anxious to emphasise the independence of his own work, pointedly so in his Vienna note. However, his proof allowed for denumerably infinite sequences, while Gödel’s was finitary. Another contrast lies in Russell’s understanding: Gödel’s theorem always escaped him, but Tarski’s definition was described in his Inquiry’ (Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots pp. 551-553). Tarski’s work was translated into German in 1935, and into English in 1956. From Bernard Quaritch Ltd Catalogue 2012/5 (https://www.quaritch.com/books/tarski-alfred/poj%C4%99cie-prawdy-w-j%C4%99zykach-nauk-dedukcyjnych/S870/). See also: J. Łukasiewicz. The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages (http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/Readings/Tarski%20-%20The%20Concept%20of%20Truth%20in%20Formalized%20Languages.pdf).