The intellectual trajectory of Alfred Tarski constitutes a decisive inflection in twentieth-century logic, wherein the concept of truth was emancipated from metaphysical opacity and reconstituted as a mathematically disciplined notion. Educated within the exacting milieu of the Lwów–Warsaw School and later consolidated at the University of California, Berkeley, Tarski advanced a semantic programme that reoriented metamathematics from proof-theoretic introspection to model-theoretic analysis. His seminal articulation of truth for formalised languages—encapsulated in Convention T—stipulated material adequacy through biconditionals of the form “‘p’ is true if and only if p”, thereby forging a correspondence schema immune to semantic paradox via hierarchical language stratification. This conceptual architecture found technical reinforcement in the undefinability theorem, demonstrating that sufficiently expressive languages cannot internally define their own truth predicate, thus delimiting formal self-reference with surgical precision. Parallel to these semantic innovations, Tarski’s work on logical consequence reconceived validity as preservation of truth across all models, instituting the now-canonical model-theoretic criterion. A concrete illustration emerges in the celebrated Banach–Tarski paradox, where set-theoretic decomposition defies geometric intuition, exemplifying the latent power of axiomatic abstraction. Collectively, these contributions synthesise into a coherent vision: logic as an invariant structural discipline, continuous with mathematics yet reflexively aware of its own expressive limits. Tarski’s legacy, therefore, resides not merely in discrete theorems but in the institutionalisation of semantics as the sovereign method of modern logical inquiry.
