Undefinability of the notion of truth

Tarski's undefinability theorem, stated and proved by Alfred Tarski in 1936, is an important limitative result in mathematical logic, the foundations of mathematics, and in formal semantics. Informally, the theorem states that arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic.

The theorem applies more generally to any sufficiently strong formal system, showing that truth in the standard model of the system cannot be defined within the system.

In 1931, Kurt Gödel published the incompleteness theorems, which he proved in part by showing how to represent the syntax of formal logic within first-order arithmetic. Each expression of the formal language of arithmetic is assigned a distinct number. This procedure is known variously as Gödel numbering, coding and, more generally, as arithmetization. In particular, various sets of expressions are coded as sets of numbers. It turns out that for various syntactic properties (such as being a formula, being a sentence, etc.), these sets are computable. Moreover, any computable set of numbers can be defined by some arithmetical formula. For example, there are formulas in the language of arithmetic defining the set of codes for arithmetic sentences, and for provable arithmetic sentences.

The undefinability theorem shows that this encoding cannot be done for semantic concepts such as truth. It shows that no sufficiently rich interpreted language can represent its own semantics. A corollary is that any metalanguage capable of expressing the semantics of some object language must have expressive power exceeding that of the object language. The metalanguage includes primitive notions, axioms, and rules absent from the object language, so that there are theorems provable in the metalanguage not provable in the object language.

The undefinability theorem is conventionally attributed to Alfred Tarski. Gödel also discovered the undefinability theorem in 1930, while proving his incompleteness theorems published in 1931, and well before the 1936 publication of Tarski's work (Murawski 1998). While Gödel never published anything bearing on his independent discovery of undefinability, he did describe it in a 1931 letter to John von Neumann. Tarski had obtained almost all results of his 1936 paper Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen between 1929 and 1931, and spoke about them to Polish audiences. However, as he emphasized in the paper, the undefinability theorem was the only result not obtained by him earlier. According to the footnote of the undefinability theorem (Satz I) of the 1936 paper, the theorem and the sketch of the proof were added to the paper only after the paper was sent to print. When he presented the paper to the Warsaw Academy of Science on March 21, 1931, he wrote only some conjectures instead of the results after his own investigations and partly after Gödel's short report on the incompleteness theorems "Einige metamathematische Resultate über Entscheidungsdefinitheit und Widerspruchsfreiheit", Akd. der Wiss. in Wien, 1930.

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