This article is polemical. It argues with those philosophers who see, in the semantic theory of knowledge of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, the significant and exclusive influence of Alfred Tarski’s semantic output. Listening to these philosophers, one gets the impression that they have overlooked the fact that the term “semantics” meant one thing in the case of Ajdukiewicz, presenting the semantic theory of knowledge, and something different in the case of Tarski, presenting the semantic theory of truth. There is another difference, related (...) to the abovementioned, and fundamental in the case of both these logicians, namely their different approach to language, which seems to escape the attention of those who write about the semantic theory of knowledge. Ajdukiewicz’s approach was intensional, while Tarski’s approach was extensional: for the first of them, the intensional interpretation of language was basic, as for the second, was the extensional interpretation. The philosophers with whom I argue overlook one more fact, namely the impact, difficult to overestimate, that the intentional theory of language of Edmund Husserl had on the emergence of the semantic theory of knowledge. This article tries to restore Tarski’s real role in the matter referred to in the title, and do justice to Husserl: after all, without his philosophy of the semantic theory of knowledge, as a metaepistemological project, it would not have come to be. It was only in the implementation of this project that some of the achievements of Tarski’s semantics were used. (shrink)

Ajdukiewicz’s account of mathematical theories is presented and analyzed. Theories consist of primary and secondary theorems. Theories go through three phases or stages: preaxiomatic and intuitive, axiomatic but intuitive, axiomatic and abstract, whereas the final stage takes two forms: definitional and formal. Each stage is analyzed. The role of the concepts of truth, evidence, consequence, and existence is examined. It is claimed that the second stage is apparent or transitory, whereas the initial and final stages are vital and constitute two (...) salient attitudes to mathematics, focused on truth or consequence respectively. It is also claimed they are attitudes rather than stages, and the crucial difference between them concerns effectiveness. The chief question of philosophy of mathematics turns out to be to determine whether mathematical theories are assertive or hypothetical. (shrink)

This paper presents four key results. Firstly, it distinguishes between _partial_ and _consistent_ assertion of a sentence, and introduces the concept of an _equivocal_ sentence, which is both partially asserted and partially denied. Secondly, it proposes a novel definition of truth, stating that _a true sentence is one that is consistently asserted_. This definition is immune from the Liar paradox, does not restrict classical logic, and can be applied to declarative sentences in the language used by any particular person. Thirdly, (...) the paper introduces an epistemic model of language, known as _assertional language_, which is used to formalize the definition of truth. Finally, it provides an argument for the falsity of so-called Liar sentences. The paper also discusses Tarski's solution to the Liar paradox and argues for the abandonment of the Tarski Scheme: _'p' is true if and only if p_, in the context of everyday language. The proposed definition of truth can be viewed as a formal account of the correspondence theory. The epistemic model is a powerful concept on its own that allows for combining different languages in a meaningful way. This model is uniquely capable of reflecting on epistemic inconsistencies, such as logical paradoxes, in a consistent manner. (shrink)

Inthisarticle,IreconstructKazimierzAjdukiewicz’sviewthathecalledradical conventiona‐ l i s m (as opposed to moderate conventionalism developed by Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem). then, I recall little‐known criticism of this approach developed by Stefan Amsterdamski. Finally, I demonstrate, contrary to the conception of the originator’s declarations, that a radical conventio‐ nalism is not a ‘paper ction’. On the other hand, the standpoint of radical conventionalism is useful due to the precision of expressions provided to it by Ajdukiewicz; it shows the di culties that have to (...) be tackled by each philosophical approach assuming a social constructivism or related notion. (shrink)

Formal semantics and pragmatics as they have developed since the late 1960's have been shaped by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and logicians, among others, and in turn have had noticeable effects on developments in syntax, philosophy of language, computational linguistics, and cognitive science.In this paper I describe the environment in which formal semantics was born and took root, highlighting the differences in ways of thinking about natural language semantics in linguistics and in philosophy and logic. With Montague as (...) a central but not solo player in the story, I reflect on crucial developments in the 1960's and 70's in linguistics and philosophy, and the growth of formal semantics and formal pragmatics from there. I discuss innovations, key players, and leading ideas that shaped the development of formal semantics and its relation to syntax, to pragmatics, and to the philosophy of language in its early years, and some central aspects of its early impact on those fields. (shrink)

The article presents the method of analytic description as applied in the theory of questions. This procedure, described by Tadeusz Czeżowski and broadly used in the Lvov-Warsaw School, is applied first of all at the pre-theoretic stage of research, namely to construct the conceptual scheme of a given discipline and to classify the objects of investigations. Ajdukiewicz’s theory of questions and its developments, in particular recent works of Adam Jonkisz, are presented as examples of the applications of this method. Analytic (...) description is contrasted with other procedures, which differ from it with respect to the empirical basis and theoretical perspective. On this background, differences between various currents in erotetic research as well as the sources of misunderstandings between the representatives of these currents are explained. (shrink)

In this paper I first present in a few sentences the main theses of Ajdukiewicz’s theory of questions, then I briefly express the main theses of Professor Jonkisz’s book and the indisputable advantages of this work. Then I put forward my objections to some theoretical solutions adopted by the Author, namely the assumption that datum questionis is sequence of components without any syntactic requirements, the assumption about the special character of the so called generalized negation and the assumption that no (...) ontological assumptions are adopted in the work. The adoption of the language of set theory is already a privileging of a set theory ontology. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł ma polemiczny charakter. Polemizuje on z głosami tych filozofów, którzy w semantycznej teorii poznania Kazimierza Ajdukiewicza widzą znaczący i nadto wyłączny wpływ semantycznego dorobku Alfreda Tarskiego. Słuchając głosów tych filozofów można odnieść wrażenie, że przeoczyli oni fakt, iż termin „semantyka” znaczył co innego w wypadku Ajdukiewicza, prezentującego semantyczną teorię poznania, a co innego w wypadku Tarskiego, prezentującego semantyczną teorię prawdy. Z tą różnicą, dotyczącą znaczeń terminu „semantyka”, wiąże się inna, fundamentalna w wypadku obu tych logików różnica, a mianowicie (...) ich odmienne podejście do języka, co zdaje się umykać uwadze tym piszącym o semantycznej teorii poznania, z którymi zamierzam polemizować. Podejście Ajdukiewicza było intensjonalne, natomiast podejście Tarskiego – ekstensjonalne, co mówiąc mam na myśli to, że dla pierwszego z nich podstawową była intensjonalna interpretacja języka, a dla drugiego – interpretacja ekstensjonalna. Filozofowie, z którymi polemizuję, przeoczają jeszcze jeden fakt, a mianowicie trudny do przecenienia wpływ, jaki na powstanie semantycznej teorii poznania miała intencjonalna teoria języka Edmunda Husserla. Niniejszy artykuł stara się przywrócić właściwą miarę Tarskiemu w tytułowej sprawie oraz oddać sprawiedliwość Husserlowi, bez filozofii którego semantycznej teorii poznania, jako metaepistemologicznego projektu, by nie było. A przecież to ów projekt legitymizował jego realizacje i dopiero w nich były wykorzystywane niektóre osiągnięcia semantyki Tarskiego. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that it is the explicativecharacter of Tarski's semantic definition of truth given in his study of 1933 that allows forconsideration of a philosophical background of this definition in the proper sense. Given the explicativecharacter of this definition it is argued that the philosophical tradition that should be taken intoaccount with regard to this philosophical background is the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw Schoolin its connections with the School of Brentano. As an example of (...) the explanatory power ofconsidering this tradition as far as Tarski's philosophical choices are concerned I use here thenotion of sentence-inscription, i.e., the notion of that entity of which truth is predicated inthe definition in question. One of the consequences of these statements is that philosophicaldiscussions concerning the semantic definition of truth can be regarded from two points ofview. On the one hand, they may take the perspective of its explicational function, i.e., theperspective of its philosophical background. On the other hand, they might consider the philosophicalconsequences of the definition with respect to the goal of the explication, i.e., they may considerits philosophical content independently of its historical background. (shrink)

Mentalism preserves the triad: brain's state — thought — state of affairs whereas phy‐sicalism identifies the former two elements of it. Both stands meet the famous difficulties. But these presuppose ontological actualism. On the ground of ontological possibilism, claiming the existence of all possible worlds, one may identify a thought with the corresponding state of affairs in a possible world. Yet, possibilism turns out to be too narrow to carry such an identification and requires a significant generalization.

Here, I offer a rapid overview of the theory of metaphor, in order to situate the contributions to this volume in relation to one another and within the field more generally.

In British and American anthropological literature, the ethnology of Central and Eastern European countries has shared in the plight of descriptions of this part of the world: it was seen as exotic, foreign, remote, a backwater, focused on sideline problems and situated on the periphery of this field of science. This state of affairs has been the case since at least the beginning of the Cold War as the descriptions of the national characters of Eastern Bloc communities, drafted by American (...) scholars. The ethnography of these countries was automatically aligned with the same categories of description which were applied to the characteristics of these communities. This was, in part, an effect of entirely different research traditions in the subject matter, objectives and methods of these remote parts of the science. The differences of ’cultural wholes’ did have a decisive impact on the image of ethnology. Like all these communities, Polish ethnology was perceived as a homogeneous whole, which it never was. (shrink)