Truth is undefinable in formal languages
Alfred Tarski's theorem reveals that truth cannot be fully defined within a formal language itself, exposing fundamental limits to logical self-reference and influencing fields from philosophy to AI.
In 1933, logician Alfred Tarski showed that within any powerful formal language, like math, you can't define 'truth' for all its statements using only that language. This means a language can't fully describe its own truth without running into paradoxes, like the famous liar paradox.
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