Tarski on models and logical consequence

Abstract In the last two decades there has been a heated debate on the exact nature of Tarski’s theory of logical consequence (Tarski 1936a, 1936b). Since the publication of Etchemendy’s papers and book in the 1980s, contributions by, among others, Sher, Ray, Gomez-Torrente, and Bays have provided a much more detailed picture of Tarski’s seminal 1936 paper. However, this intense focus on the original publication has led to several disagreements with respect to important interpretative issues related to Tarski’s contribution. One of the bones of contention, and the only one I will treat in this chapter, concerns Tarski’s notion of model, the key element of Tarski’s famous definition of logical consequence. In this chapter I shall offer new arguments (see Sections 2 and 3) to show that Tarski upheld a fixeddomain conception of model in his 1936 paper and that he was still propounding it in 1940.