Truth as consensus. a logical analysis

Katarzyna Kijania-Placek

pp. 343-353

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

Abstract

Most philosophers of the Lvov-Warsaw School accepted the classical concept of truth, especially after Tarski's works. The only exception are the views of Edward Poznański and Aleksander Wundheiler expressed in the paper "The concept of truth in physics', written in 1934, where they developed a conception that combined the coherence theory with the consensus theory, arguing that the concept of absolute truth has no application in physics. By saying that truth is absolute they meant that the truth of a sentence or proposition is independent of the knowing subject, of truth of other sentences and of the state of knowledge at a given time; absolute truth is a disjunctive property, which admits no degrees. Pozńanski and Wundheiler claimed that instead of the absolute notion of truth, in physics and in other areas of human activity where the classical notion of truth provides no means of deciding whether a sentence is true or false, we use the so called operationalist notion of truth. On that construal, truth is closely related to the methods by which we decide whether a sentence is true or false. Their proposal consists of conjoining two criteria, the coherence criterion, which, they think, applies to a physical theory as a whole, and the common agreement criterion, which applies to elementary sentences, by which they understand sentences about the spatio-temporal ordering of phenomena and about counting.