ABSTRACT
Tarski considers Aristotle’s well known definition, ‘to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, or of what is not, that it is not, is true’, and says of it that it is more satisfactory in respect of clarity and precision than more modern formulations such as ‘the truth of a sentence consists in its agreement with (or correspondence to) reality’. The notion of satisfaction and the use to which Tarski puts it are crucial to the semantic theory. It is important to bear in mind that the concept is introduced in application to sentential functions, that is, to expressions which are not sentences because they contain unbound variables. But the correspondence theory of truth, of which the semantic theory claims to be a rational reconstruction, purports to explain the truth of empirical sentences.
