Polish logic, language and philosophy of language

Ryszard Zuber

pp. 219-238

in: Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, Jan Woleński (eds), The Lvov-Warsaw school and contemporary philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

In spite of the strong development of logic and logical methods there is still a level of reflection which presupposes a tight interdependence between logic and language. Many members of the Lvov-Warsaw School, who for short I will call Polish logicians,¹ contributed not only to the techniques of logic but also to various domains more properly considered as belonging to the philosophy of language. The obvious observation concerning their work is that although all of them published in various foreign languages, surely all of them were thinking in Polish. This paper is an attempt to present some results belonging, roughly speaking, to the philosophy of language and to the theoretical linguistics developed by Polish logicians in the linguistic context of the Polish language. As has sometimes been pointed out, some of Leśniewski's logical systems have some flavour of Polish. Although it was never made quite clear, the main influence of the structure of the Polish language that one thinks about immediately concerns the structure and semantics of Polish, or more generally Slavic noun phrases. Indeed, in Polish there are no definite or indefinite articles, and there are many more bare noun phrases, than, say, in English or French.² Probably for this reason Polish logicians in general were much less interested in the problem of definite descriptions than scholars interested in the logical form of natural languages whose native language was English. In fact, the division of names into sub-classes of definite and indefinite descriptions, although very popular among Anglo-Saxon logicians, was not so common among Polish logicians and apparently neither Ajdukiewicz nor Kotarbiński make such a distinction (cf. Pelc, 1971).