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This chapter collects and examines Tarski's remarks on definition. Influences on Tarski from Lesniewski, Kotarbinski and others are discussed, and Tarski's remarks on Padoa's method are examined at length. A timeline for the development of Tarski's definition of truth is suggested, and various strands in the development of model-theoretic techniques in Tarski's work are presented.

The aim of this chapter is to show that allowing languages to have ontologically neutral idioms, both quantificational and singular, poses no problems for semantic theories of such languages. The ontologically neutral idioms in the object language are just replicated (in their resources) in the metalanguage that provides the semantic theory for that object language. A traditional truth-conditional theory of a language is given that illustrates the point. That the same point holds for singular idioms is illustrated by describing various semantic approaches to demonstratives. There is a view, propounded by Lewis, Higginbotham, Ludlow, and others, that disquotation is crucial to semantic theories because such provide the needed language/world connections. This claim is shown to be wrong: even with disquotation, such language-world connections can be absent; and it’s also shown that semantic theories that aren’t disquotational can nevertheless provide language-world connections if such are wanted.

Do we need a truth predicate to express logical generalizations? If, so, what sort of truth predicate do we need? One answer, due to Alfred Tarski and W. V. Quine, is that to express logical generalizations all we need is a disquotational truth predicate. Another answer, due to Gottlob Frege and Hilary Putnam, is that to express logical generalizations we need a truth predicate that applies not only to our own sentences as we now use them, as the first answer suggests, but also to other speakers' sentences and our own sentences as we used them in the past. This introductory chapter outlines how to reconcile these two answers by constructing a conception of words that fits with our non-deliberative practical identifications of words. It ends with a brief summary of the radical consequences of combining this non-deliberative practical conception of words with a disquotational definition of truth.

This chapter explains the considerable difficulty we have in making sense of the world and finding our place in it. To undertake that task we need to start with the most basic questions about how we gain knowledge of the world (epistemology), including the limits on our senses and the inevitable ways we form mental images that shape our understandings. It explores longstanding issues of the composition of the world (metaphysics), particularly the challenges of coming to terms with intangibles, along with the limits on human rationality and the inevitable origins of normativity in human sentiment, genetics, and cultural inertia. It takes up the cultural disorientation brought on by the decline of religion and the claims of Darwin, Freud, Einstein and others leading to the pessimism of such works as Krutch, The Modern Temper from the 1920s. It reviews the three basic definitions of truth, considers how the parts of nature form wholes with emergent properties, considers intangibles and continued claims for the objective reality of morals, and challenges the misleading claims about the social construction of nature. All of this supplies a foundation for a critique of prevailing culture and key institutions and calls for cultural reform.

Jainism traces the roots of violence in absolutism of knowledge. Badrinath is of the opinion that the Jaina syada-vada suggests that to every assertion one has to add a syat, or a ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’, or ‘in a sense’. This leads us to perceiving the truth of anything, or of any person, as not something ‘one-sided’ but ‘many-sided’ at the same time; that every variety of human violence, with its cruelty and degradation, has flowed from the competing one-sided ideas of what truth is, and hence from one-sided judgements about oneself and about others. Jainism liberates us from the violence of one-sided truths. Badrinath informs us that both the Mahabharata and Jainism say to us that to be sensitive at all times to the other dimensions of truth is the best form of security.