In this paper I want to explore the question: whether any sense can be made of the traditional view that a true assertion is one that corresponds to reality. Two opinions seem to be widespread: (a) that some sense can be made of the view, and that some sense is made of it (as much as can be hoped for) by Tarski's ‘Semantical Conception of Truth’; (b) that the view collapses as soon as one asks searching questions about the nature of the alleged ‘correspondence’. I shall try to show that both of these opinions are incorrect.

Tarski's conception of truth

According to Tarski, an adequate definition of ‘true as a sentence of English’ should have the feature that from it follows:

1. ‘Snow is white’ is true as a sentence of English if and only if snow is white.

2. ‘Grass is green’ is true as a sentence of English if and only if grass is green.

Tarski claims that this is a formalization of the ‘correspondence theory of truth’. But is it?

Assume for the moment that Tarski's Criterion of Adequacy (roughly described above) is correct. Even so, it seems to refer to purely interlinguistic aspects of the usage of ‘true’. This can be seen, for example, by observing that if the meta-language, say, ML, is only partially interpreted, we might still be able to certify a definition of ‘true as a sentence of L’ to be ‘adequate’ by checking that Tarski's Criterion of Adequacy was conformed to (all biconditionals of the form ‘S is true as a sentence of L ≡ S’ are theorems of ML where S is an arbitrary sentence of L and S is the name – or Gödel number – of S), even though the extra-logical constants of L are totally uninterpreted.