ABSTRACT
The original idea behind logical calculi was to capture, and thus to make calculable, what follows from what. Nobody seemed to have any doubt that this was a task that could be accomplished; however, this idea was challenged by Gödel and Tarski in the 1930s. This brought Tarski to the idea that to capture following-from adequately we need some means more powerful than those which are offered by calculi; his idea was that we could perhaps help ourselves to such tools if we managed to logically capture the concept of truth and consequently some other concepts more or less related to truth, such as consequence or denotation. This move is often construed as a step in which the languages of formal logic, which up to that point incorporated only calculi and thus merely “syntax,” finally embraced “semantics” and thus became languages in the fully-fledged sense. The chapter argues, however, that this construal is misguided, that the distinction between calculi and formal semantics is not that between syntax and semantics but rather a distinction between two kinds of means to account for following-from.
