ABSTRACT
Popper was one of the first philosophers to take to heart Tarski's theory of truth. Popper was never primarily interested in formulating a definition of truth; an opponent of definitions, he saw clearly that Tarski was not attempting an analysis of truth very evident in Etchemendy. The chapter looks at the two problems that Tarski's theory seems to be competent to deal with, each of them closely connected with the idea that truth is correspondence to the facts, and each significant beyond the boundaries of logic and the theory of knowledge. One of them, the problem of how objective truth is to be distinguished from objective knowledge of the truth, was most definitely in the air in Vienna, and elsewhere, in the early 1930s. The second problem, the problem of selectivity, has been more rarely discussed, even though it seems to lie behind many of the standard criticisms of the correspondence theory.
