Historical and Theoretical Importance of Tarski’s Paper

Tarski’s presentation made extensional semantics logically respectable. Mathematical logicians and logically inclined philosophers had been working within a purely syntactic approach to logic and language, out of fear of falling into contradictions of the type revealed by such semantic antinomies as the liar paradox. At the conference, Tarski’s paper “in large measure found approval”. But the contradiction-free definitions of semantic concepts that it proclaimed were not yet the contemporary conceptions in terms of models. Tarski did not articulate such conceptions until the early 1950s.