FROM THE ACT OF JUDGING TO THE SENTENCE

FROM THE ACT OF JUDGING TO THE SENTENCE

VOLUME 328

SYNTHESE LIBRARY

STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,

LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Editor-in-Chief:

VINCENT F. HENDRICKS, Roskilde University, Roskilde, DenmarkJOHN SYMONS, University of Texas at El Paso, U.S.A.

Honorary Editor:

JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University, U.S.A.

Editors:

DIRK VAN DALEN, University of Utrecht, The NetherlandsTHEO A.F. KUIPERS, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

TEDDY SEIDENFELD, Carnegie Mellon University, U.S.A.PATRICK SUPPES, Stanford University, California, U.S.A.JAN WOLENSKI, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

FROM THE ACT

OF JUDGING TO

The Problem of Truth Bearers from Bolzano to Tarski

THE SENTENCE

byb

ARTUR ROJSZCZAKJagiellonian University, Kraków,

Poland

Edited by

JAN WOLE SKIJagiellonian University, Kraków,

Poland

†

Published by Springer,

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Summary Contents

Preface vii

1. INTRODUCTION:ALFRED TARSKI’S PHILOSOPHICALBACKGROUND IN THE CONTEXTOF HIS 1933 DEFINITION OF TRUTH 1

2. THE NOTION OF THE TRUTH BEARER 23

3. DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY: THE THEORYOF JUDGEMENT AS THE THEORYOF COGNITION AND KNOWLEDGE 33

4. JUDGEMENT, PSYCHOLOGY, AND LANGUAGE 57

5. THE ONTOLOGY OF JUDGEMENT 83

6. REISM 103

7. THE OBJECTIVITY OF TRUTH 111

8.NOMINALISM 161

9. BRENTANISM AND THE BACKGROUNDOF THE SEMANTICSOF THE LVOV-WARSAW SCHOOL 171

10. JUDGMENT, BELIEF, AND SENTENCES:REMARKS ON THE TRUTH BEARERIN THE LVOV-WARSAW SCHOOL 191

11. FINAL COMMENTS 213

v

Publications of Artur RojszczakAppendices: 235

ONTOLOGISM, ABSTRACT OBJECTS AND

239Index

References 221

Contents

Preface xiii

1. INTRODUCTION:ALFRED TARSKI’S PHILOSOPHICALBACKGROUND IN THE CONTEXTOF HIS 1933 DEFINITION OF TRUTH 1

1 The Question of the Truth Bearer in Tarski’s Theory of Truth? 1

2 The Ambiguity of Tarski’s Concept of a Sentence 4

3 Alfred Tarski as Philosopher? 53.1 Tarski’s Philosophical Background 53.2 Some Facts and Genetic Connections 63.3 Brentanism in Tarski’s Philosophical Background? 73.4 Tarski and the Vienna Circle 83.5 Tarski and Brentano? 11

4 The Content of this Study and what is not Included in PreviousStudies on this Topic 144.1 The Wolenski-Simons Thesis´ 144.2 The Content of the Study 16

2. THE NOTION OF THE TRUTH BEARER 23

1 The Place of the Notion of the Truth Bearerin the Theory of Truth 23

2 The Problem of the Truth Bearer 25

3 The Definition of the Truth Bearer 26

4 The Variety of Truth Bearers 27

3. DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY: THE THEORYOF JUDGEMENT AS THE THEORYOF COGNITION AND KNOWLEDGE 33

1 Franz Brentano (I): The Act of Judging as the Truth Bearer 331.1 The Variety of Entities Related to the Act of Judging 33

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1.2 The Primacy of the Notion of Knowledge in Relationto the Notion of Truth 34

1.3 An Argument Based on the Gnoseological Conceptof Truth 36

1.4 An Argument Based on the Idiogenetic Theoryof Judgement 36

1.5 The Definition of the Act of Judgingas the Truth Bearer 38

2 Kazimierz Twardowski (I): Act-Content-Object 412.1 Presentation 422.2 The Judgment 432.3 The Truth of the Object of Presenting 44

3 Alexius Meinong (I): Thinking and True Objectives 453.1 Thinking 453.2 The Object of Thinking 463.3 Cognition and Knowledge 473.4 A True Objective and a True Act of Judging 48

4 Anton Marty (I): The Adequate Act of Judgingas the Truth Bearer 494.1 The Ambiguity of the Notion of the Primary

Truth Bearer 494.2 An Argument Based on the Epistemological

Notion of Truth 504.3 The Content of a Judgment 51

5 Summary of Chapter 3: the Epistemic Notion of Truth 53

4. JUDGEMENT, PSYCHOLOGY, AND LANGUAGE 57

1 Franz Brentano (II): Linguistic Analysis 571.1 Language and Thinking 571.2 The Use of Linguistic Expressions 591.3 ‘Truth’ as a Syncategorematical Expression 591.4 A Note on Brentano’s Theory of Meaning

and Reference 601.5 An Argument from the Reducibility of Sentences 61

2 Kazimierz Twardowski (II): Determining andModifying Adjectives 612.1 The Meaning and Function of Names 622.2 Attributing and Modifying Predicates 622.3 The Logic of Adjectives 64

3 Alexius Meinong (II): Truth-Predicates in Ordinary Use 653.1 An Expression and Its Meaning 653.2 Communication 68

Contents ix

3.3 Meinong’s Argument from the Ordinary Usageof Epistemic Operators 69

3.4 An Argument from True Hypothesis 71

4 Anton Marty (II): Speech Acts 724.1 Autosemantic Expressions and the Basic Types

of Mental Phenomena 724.2 Linguistic Forms and their Basic Functions 734.3 Communication of Content 744.4 The Truth of Objects 764.5 The Truth-Predicate in Expressions of Direct

and Indirect Judging Acts 774.6 On Arguments from the Natural Use of Adjectives 78

5 Summary of Chapter 4 78

5. THE ONTOLOGY OF JUDGEMENT 83

1 What is the Ontology of Judgement? 831.1 The Link Between Psychology and Language 831.2 Where Are Objects of Judgement? 841.3 The Immanentistic Reading of Brentano’s Doctrine

of Intentionality 85

2 Carl Stumpf (I): On Act and Content 85

3 Kazimierz Twardowski (III): On the Object of Judgement 87

4 Edmund Husserl (I): The Psycho-Linguistic Contentof Judgement 884.1 Formal Ontology 884.2 The Theory of Meaning 894.3 The Theory of the Cognition of Meaning 914.4 Truth as Species 93

5 Anton Marty (III): The Temporal Ontologyof the Content of Judgements 95

6 Adolf Reinach (I): A Platonistic Ontology of Judgement 99


6. REISM 103

1 Franz Brentano (III): The Judger as the Truth Bearer 1031.1 What is Presentable? 1031.2 The Reistic Theory of Meaning 1041.3 What is Presented from the Point of View of Reism? 1051.4 The Judger 105

2 Tadeusz Kotarbinski (I)´ 1062.1 Ontological and Semantical Reism 1062.2 The Sentence from the Reistic Standpoint 106

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2.3 Candidates for the Truth Bearer from the Pointof View of Reism 108

2.4 The Sentence as the Bearer of Truth 109


7. THE OBJECTIVITY OF TRUTH 111

1 Bernard Bolzano (I): Sentences in Themselves 1111.1 What Are Sentences in Themselves? 1121.2 The Meanings of ‘Truth’:

Ordinary Language Analysis 1121.3 The Cognition of Truth 1141.4 The Objective Truth Bearer as a Guarantee

of Objective Truth 115

2 Franz Brentano (IV): Identity and Evidence 1162.1 The Theory of Evident Judgement 1162.2 Brentano’s Extensional, Evidentional

and Criteriological Definition of Truth 1162.3 The Evidence as Mental Phenomenon 1172.4 The Evidence of Factual Judgements 1172.5 The Evidence of Axioms 1182.6 Indirect Evident Judgements 1182.7 Assertive and Apodictic Evidence 1192.8 The Objectivity of Truth and of Evidence 119

3 Edmund Husserl (II): Evidence of Species 1213.1 Knowledge and Evidence 1213.2 The Extra-Temporality of Relations

Between Meanings 1223.3 Factual Truths 124

4 Kazimierz Twardowski (IV): The Eternal Truthof Temporal Truth-Bearers 1254.1 So-called Relative Truths 1264.2 Acts of Judging as Bearers of Eternal Truths 127

5 Kazimierz Twardowski (V) and Jan Łukasiewicz (I):On Psychologism, Acts and Their Products 1285.1 Logic and Psychology 1295.2 Acts and Products 1305.3 Types of Acts and Products 1315.4 Language as a Product 132

6 Tadeusz Kotarbinski (II) and Stanisław Le´ sniewski (I):´The Absoluteness of Truth 1346.1 Free Creation and the Sempiternity of Truth 1346.2 The Notion of Existence 136

Contents xi

6.3 Note on Truth with a Beginning and on the Principleof the Excluded Middle 138

6.4 Lesniewski’s Response´ 1386.5 The Eternity of Truth and the Principle

of the Excluded Middle 1396.6 What Does ‘Absolute Truth’ Mean? 141

7 Maria Kokoszynska (I): The Relativity of the SemanticŃotion of Truth 1427.1 The Absoluteness of the Classical

Conception of Truth 1437.2 Relativization to Language 143

8 Summary of Chapter 7: Objective Truthand Objective Knowledge 1448.1 Objective Knowledge 1448.2 How Knowledge Becomes Objectivized 1468.3 The Objectivization of Truth 1508.4 Concluding Remarks 153

8. ONTOLOGISM, ABSTRACT OBJECTS ANDNOMINALISM 1611 The Choice of Truth Bearers and Ontological Preferences 1612 Ontologism and Nominalism in Poland 162

2.1 Ontologism as the Brentanian Heritage? 1622.2 Nominalism as a Special Case of Ontologism 1622.3 Tadeusz Kotarbinski (III) and´

Stanisław Lesniewski (II) on General Objects 163´2.4 Stanisław Lesniewski (III): Constructive Nominalism 166´


9. BRENTANISM AND THE BACKGROUNDOF THE SEMANTICSOF THE LVOV-WARSAW SCHOOL 1711 Stanisław Lesniewski (IV): On the Sense of Inscription 171´

1.1 Ontologism as the Primacy of Semantics 1711.2 Language and Metalanguage 1731.3 Existential Sentences 176

2 Maria Ossowska (I): Expressing and Semantics 1772.1 The Notion of Expression 1782.2 The Presentational Function of the Sentence and

the Expressing Function of the Sentence 1802.3 Expressing and the Meaning-Intention 181

3 Stanisław Ossowski (I): On Semantic Products 1833.1 Semantic Products and the Function of Expressing 1833.2 Linguistic Products 185

xii FROM THE ACT OF JUDGING TO THE SENTENCE

3.3 Truth and the Property of Sentences 1874 Summary of Chapter 9 188

10. JUDGMENT, BELIEF, AND SENTENCES:REMARKS ON THE TRUTH BEARERIN THE LVOV-WARSAW SCHOOL 1911 Kazimierz Twardowski (VI) and Tadeusz Czezowski (I):˙

The Product of the Judging Act 1911.1 The Theory of Knowledge

and the Theory of Cognition 1911.2 Elementary Judgments as Truth Bearers 192

2 Jan Łukasiewicz (II): The Sentence in the Logical Sense 1932.1 Judgment and Belief 1932.2 The Truth of Judgments: An Argument from

the Judgment’s Function of Reconstructing 1953 Tadeusz Kotarbinski (IV): The Judgment and the Sentence 197´

3.1 The Judgment and States of Affairs 1973.2 The Sentence: Another Semantic-Reistic Argument 198

4 Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (I): The Picturing Sentence 1994.1 The Motives of True Belief 2004.2 An Argument from the Possibility of Describing

a Judgment 2025 Alfred Tarski on the Truth Bearer 205

5.1 The Sentence and Syntax 2055.2 The Sentence as a Function without Variables 2065.3 The Sentence as a Product 2065.4 The Sentence as a Physical Body 2085.5 The Sentence as an Inscription 2095.6 The Sentence-Type and a Sentence-Name of a Type 2105.7 Summary of Chapter 10 210

11. FINAL COMMENTS 2131 The Weakened Thesis 2132 The Heritage of Brentano 2163 The Truth Bearers 217

Publications of Artur RojszczakAppendices: 235239Index

References 221

Preface

IN MEMORIAM OF ARTUR ROJSZCZAK

For a teacher, the opportunity to write the Foreword to a student’s work givesrise to a sense of fulfilment and pride. In this case, however, although the latterremains, the former has been effaced. In a well-ordered world Artur Rojszczakwould have perhaps one day written tributes to ourselves. It is a poignantparadox when teachers are called upon to comment posthumously on the workof one of their students. This is a terrible task which falls to us—who havebeen not only mentors and colleagues to Artur, but also simply friends—ofeulogizing someone who has died so soon, and so tragically. Artur was killed,together with his father, by an aggressive neighbour on September 27, 2001.Artur’s wife was severely injured in the same attack.

Artur was born on March 12, 1968 in Słubice (close to the Polish-Germanborder). He studied in the Electronics College in Zielona Góra, graduating in1987. But from very early on his dream was to study philosophy, and to doso at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow; no other place was considered byhim seriously. He entered the university in 1988.

Artur first appeared in JW’s seminar in 1990. The seminar was devoted toKripke’s Naming and Necessity. Artur found some unclarity in those parts ofKripke’s treatment of definite descriptions which turn on the problems raisedby disjunctive and conjunctive properties. JW advised that he should writeup his criticism and the resultant essay served as the genesis of Artur’s firstpublished paper. At that time, BS was working at the International Academyof Philosophy in Schaan (Liechtenstein), which then offered grants to well-qualified students from various countries, including Poland. JW recommendedto Artur that he should apply and his application was successful. During histime in Liechtenstein Artur not only contributed much to making the Acad-emy the place for lively philosophical discussions which it then was, but alsoworked in a range of part-time jobs in order to save up the money to buy an

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apartment in Poland. He also wrote a Masters Thesis, entitled Wahrheit undUrteilsevidenz bei Franz Brentano. Still as a student Artur participated in theFirst Congress of GAP (the German Gesellschaft für analytische Philosophie)in Saarbrücken in 1991 and his paper on the correspondence theory of truthappeared in the Proceedings of that meeting (details of Artur’s publications aregiven in the enclosed bibliography). Artur returned to Poland in 1992, wherehe submitted an extended version of his Liechtenstein thesis and graduated inphilosophy summa cum laude in 1993.

Immediately after graduating, Artur began studying for his doctorate, work-ing on the topic of bearers of truth under the supervision of JW. He spent sometime in Salzburg working on the project ‘Psychologismus und Ontologismusin der Logik und in der Philosophie vom Bolzano zu Tarski’. His dissertation,written in German under the title: Vom Urteil zum Satz. Das Wahrheitsträger-problem von Bolzano zu Tarski, was finished and defended in 1997, exactlyfour years after Artur had begun his doctoral studies (a remarkable achieve-ment, given that finishing one’s studies in the required period of four years israther rare in Poland). On the strength of his dissertation, the Foundation forPolish Science awarded Artur a special grant, one of 100 given each year tothe most promising young Polish scientists. Artur had also by this stage solvedhis extra-philosophical problems. He had married and bought an apartment.Dominika, the daughter of Artur and Agnieszka, was born in 1994.

Work on his dissertation did not interrupt Artur’s other scientific activities.He published several papers, in Polish, English and German, and he partici-pated in many philosophical conferences. In particular, he delivered invitedpapers at the conferences Ungarn und die Brentano Schule (Budapest 1993),where Artur spoke on Polish descriptive psychology, The Legacy of Brentano(Cracow 1993), speaking on the theory of objects in Polish descriptive psy-chology, and Tarski and the Vienna Circle (Vienna 1997), a paper on physicalobjects as truth-bearers. He also contributed to many other conferences andsymposia, including the Wittgenstein Symposia in Kirchberg and meetings onAustrian and Polish philosophy held in various places of the world, includingPoland, Austria, Switzerland, Ukraine and the USA. Artur also showed hisorganizational gifts in organizing a successful international conference on thetopic of ’The Brentano Heritage’ in Cracow in 1994. He also co-edited (withJW) its Proceedings, published as Brentano Studien 8.

Every year, the Foundation for Polish Science awards three or four grants toyoung scientists to enable them to study abroad. Artur received such a grant in1998 and decided to go to Buffalo, where BS had in the meantime becomeprofessor. Artur’s main task was to work on an English translation of hisPhD and to take the first steps toward habilitation. For the latter he decidedto work on the borderline of psychology, philosophy and cognitive science,more specifically on the problem of intentionality. His aim was to combineseveral philosophical traditions in a new and original way, incorporating ideas

PREFACE xv

taken over from Brentano and from cognitive psychology with a methodologyderived from analytic philosophy. He also worked together with BS on on-tology, in particular on the problem of truthmakers. Their three joint paperson theories of judgment, states of affairs and objective truth are the result ofthis cooperation. Artur and JW also planned to work together on the topic oftruth-makers.

Artur returned to Poland at the beginning of 1999. His parents sold theirhouse in Rzepin and moved to Cracow and bought an apartment in the samehouse in which Artur and his family lived. In the same year Artur once againdemonstrated his organizational skills as a member of the team preparing the11th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Sciencewhich was held in Cracow in August 1999. Artur contributed in a number ofcrucial ways to the success of this remarkable event. He was also appointededitor-in-chief of the journal Reports on Philosophy, published by the Jagiel-lonian University Press. His classes, too, were among the most popular amongstudents of philosophy in Cracow.

In May 2001 Artur delivered a talk at the Tarski Centenary Conference inWarsaw, where a constellation of leading mathematicians and philosophers cel-ebrated the hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of the great logicians ofthe twentieth century. Thus, by the time he was still not much older than 30years of age, Artur already enjoyed an established position in national and in-ternational philosophical life. Everything seemed to point towards a brilliantcareer and a happy personal life for this extremely gifted philosopher, until anabsurd death annihilated these great hopes.

Artur left behind an English translation of his PhD dissertation. This workis the culmination of Artur’s thinking on topics already dealt with, both histori-cally and systematically, in his earlier writings, and it reflects his philosophicalinterests in Austrian philosophy from Bolzano to the present day and in par-ticular in the Polish wing of the Austrian tradition established by KazimierzTwardowski. The present book is the first monograph in the literature of phi-losophy entirely devoted to the problem of truth-bearers. It focuses primarilyon ontological, rather than on semantic and logical, problems, and perhaps itsmain virtue lies in its careful and detailed investigation of the issue of whethera physicalist conception of truth-bearers is possible.

BARRY SMITH

JAN WOLENSKI

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION:ALFRED TARSKI’S PHILOSOPHICALBACKGROUND IN THE CONTEXTOF HIS 1933 DEFINITION OF TRUTH

1. The Question of the Truth Bearer in Tarski’s Theoryof Truth?

Alfred Tarski’s work on the theory of truth published in 1933 entitled Pojecie˛prawdy w jezykach nauk dedukcyjnych˛ [The Concept of Truth in FormalizedLanguages] belongs, no doubt, to the canon of philosophical thought.1 Sinceits appearance, the semantic theory of truth has been mentioned in almost everydiscussion on truth, even if only to criticize it. The important position occupiedby Tarski’s theory in the history of philosophy seems to justify its inclusion ina study on the theory of truth. In Tarski’s conception of truth, the predicate ‘istrue’ is a metalinguistic affirmation which is applied to sentences expressed inan object language, i.e. in the language in which we speak about things. Thereare misinterpretations or reinterpretations of Tarski’s theory which considerhim to have held that propositions or statements are the bearers of truth, thatis, the objects of which the truth-predicate is affirmed. Nevertheless, when weexamine Tarski’s semantic notion of truth more closely, it becomes evident thatthe entities that play the role of truth bearers are sentences or sentence-types.Hence it would appear at first glance that a reconsideration of the issue of whatfunctions as the truth bearer in Tarski’s work is superfluous. However, if onelooks at the original 1933 work, in which the existence of a univocal notionof sentence is called into question, it is quite difficult to give an unambiguousanswer. I believe that the metalinguistic expressions which describe sentencesin Tarski’s 1933 work do not univocally define the notion of sentence; this is anissue which has never hitherto been the subject of dispute. In the next sectionI shall point out various formulations of the notion of sentence in an attempt toevoke in the reader some doubts as regards the unique definition of a sentencein Tarski’s 1933 paper on truth.

1

2 CHAPTER ONE

I believe, however, that the answer to the question of whether Tarski believesthat sentences, sentence-types or something else are the bearers of truth is am-bigous unless we include the definitions of sentences found in Tarski’s 1933paper in a more general philosophical framework within which they come tobe consistent. A justification of this statement requires that we turn to the Tar-ski’s original work. In the course of this study I shall provide the evidenceneeded for a justification of the statement that the various formulations of sen-tences given by Tarski can be put into a conceptual framework where theybecame more comprehensive. Before I build a framework for explaining dif-ferent ways of understanding sentences in Tarski’s paper, I shall seek to answera genetic question which can be asked in this context: Why has Tarski chosensentences as the bearers of truth? This sort of question is based on the as-sumption, of whose truth I am convinced, that Tarski’s choice of sentenceswas philosophically motivated. More precisely, I assume that Tarski’s philo-sophical background played an important role in the preparation of his theoryof truth. I therefore think that the logician and mathematician Alfred Tarskiwas also a philosopher sensu stricto.

The relevant question here is what ought to be considered as philosophicalbackground? In other words, in which philosophical tradition should we in-clude Tarski in order to answer the question about his philosophical motivationregarding the choice of sentences as truth bearers? I think that the philosoph-ical tradition usually mentioned when speaking about influences on Tarski inthe context of his theory of truth, i.e. the tradition of the Vienna Circle, is notnecessarily the most important tradition in this respect. For example, I doubtwhether the physicalism of the sort presented in the Vienna Circle played animportant role as far as Tarski’s choice of sentences for truth bearers is con-cerned: this thesis is stated, among others, by Tarski commentators such asHartrey Field.2 I, however, shall argue that the tradition to which Tarski’s philo-sophical background belongs is the School of Franz Brentano. Hereafter I shallrefer to it as the Brentanian tradition.3

This study is throughout principally historical. It presents, however, not onlya possible philosophical motivation for Alfred Tarski’s choice of sentences astruth bearers, based on his motivation of the conceptual framework in whichvarious notions of sentence come to be consistent. Under the pretext of a histor-ical analysis of Tarski’s philosophical background as placed in the Brentaniantradition, I also attempt to answer questions which are of general philosophi-cal interest: How far does the choice of the truth bearer affect the conceptualframework of the theory of truth? Is it, for example, the case that a theoryof truth such as Tarski’s semantic theory is completely independent of whatserves as the truth bearer? Can we switch from sentences to statements or topropositions as bearers of truth without making important changes within thetheory of truth itself? Does the choice of a truth bearer exclude some possibil-ities in developing a theory of truth? Furthermore, in the context of Tarski’s

Tarski’s Philosophical Background and his 1933 Definition of Truth 3

theory of truth, why should sentences and not, for example, judgments take onthe role of truth bearers? In other words, why should sentences play the roleof truth bearers better than judgments? These kinds of philosophical questionsare also at issue in this study. They will not usually be answered directly, butthey will be considered in the context of corresponding questions asked froma historical perspective. The latter questions include, for example, the mostimportant one: ‘Why did the sentences, instead of acts of judging, assume therole of the truth bearer in the first three decades of this century?’

Historical discussions of the issue of the bearers of semantic properties areof importance not only to historians. Analytical philosophy in the last sixtyyears has focused almost exclusively on propositions and propositional atti-tudes as bearers of truth and of other semantic features. In light of this study,however, this fact becomes less understandable. Interest in language and se-mantics does not directly imply the acceptance of entities and states such aspropositions and propositional attitudes. A clear example here is the Lvov-Warsaw School where Tarski’s definition of truth came to light.

Nowadays, and mostly due to the fashionableness of cognitive science, weknow that there are several ways of explaining the ‘propositional attitude’ otherthan the explanation commonly employed by philosophers of language whouse entities such as ideal meanings. Thus, there can be another lesson from thisstudy which seems of importance for contemporary discussions. The period ofthe history of philosophy which this study embraces anticipates a number ofproblems considered today within the framework of the theory of speech actsand of cognitive science. The latter never paid much attention to the historyof philosophy. I would risk saying that they did not pay enough attention.The trail of cognitive science is marked by forgotten ideas such as Twardow-ski’s distinction between act, content, and object, Reinach’s theory of speechacts, or Husserl’s psycholinguistic theory of meaning. These ideas originatedin Austria and Poland, when experimental psychology was still in the cradle.In what follows I shall not repeat contemporary discussions of ideas that arenowadays considered to be ‘orthodox.’ Here I can only say to those who do notcare much about the history of ideas that some of the ideas which have comefrom the Brentanian tradition are worth mentioning not only because they areanticipations of what followed, but also because they can be inspirations forfuture investigations concerning the bearers of semantic properties. A goodexample here is the problem of the relationship between acts of cognition andtheir linguistic expressions, something that was called ‘pragmatics’ by certainsemanticalists who employed propositions, and which I shall call the problemof inheriting intentionality.

Generally speaking, it is interesting to note how far changes in what is con-sidered to be the bearer of truth affect the understanding of truth and vice versa.I hope that this study will make it clear that the choice of the truth bearer is not

4 CHAPTER ONE

neutral since it involves philosophical decisions which later must necessarilybe reflected in the theory of truth. Such choices always have a price.

2. The Ambiguity of Tarski’s Concept of a SentenceWe have already said that the metalinguistic expressions which describe sen-tences in Tarski´s 1933 work do not offer a unique notion of sentence whichmight serve as the bearer of truth. In order to understand this, we should takea look at the formulations that describe the notion of a sentence in this work.The following are taken from The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages:

(i) A sentence as a concrete inscription or an inscription-type:

Statements (sentences) are always treated here as a particular kind ofexpression, and thus as linguistic entities. Nevertheless, when the terms‘expression’, ‘statement’, etc., are interpreted as names of concrete se-ries or printed signs, various formulations which occur in this work donot appear to be quite correct, and give the appearance of a widespreaderror which consists in identifying expressions of like shape. (. . .) It isconvenient to stipulate that terms like ‘word’, ‘expression’, ‘sentence’,etc., do not denote concrete series of signs but the whole class of suchseries which are of like shape with the series given; only in this senseshall we regard quotation-mark names as individual names of expres-sions. (Tarski 1933, p. 5 [1983, p. 156])

(ii) A sentence in the context of the grammar of a given language:

Among all possible expressions which can be formed with these signsthose called sentences are distinguished by means of purely structuralproperties. (Tarski 1933, p. 16 [1983, p. 166])

(iii) A sentence as a (psycho-physical) product or as a class of (psycho-physical) products:

Normally expressions are regarded as the products of human activity(or as classes of such products). (Tarski 1933, p. 25 [1983, p. 174])

(iv) A sentence as a physical body:

But another possible interpretation of the term ‘expression’ presentsitself: we could consider all physical bodies of a particular form andsize as expressions. (Tarski 1933, p. 25 [1983, p. 174])

(v) A sentence as a sentence-function without free variables:

x is a sentence (or a meaningful sentence)—in symbols x ∈ S—if andonly if x is a sentential function and no variable vk is a free variable ofthe function x. (Tarski 1933, p. 29 [1983, p. 178])

As one can see, Tarski used at least four different concepts of a sentence: a sen-tence can be understood as an expression of a specified syntactical category, as


a psycho-physical product, as a physical body or, last but not least, as a functionwithout free variables (as an expression of a logical category). If one assumesthat each of the sentences can be understood either as a concrete entity or asa type or a class (something which Tarski himself also said explicitly), one canobtain more than ten different notions of a sentence. I think that this requiresexplanation.

3. Alfred Tarski as Philosopher?3.1 Tarski’s Philosophical BackgroundAlfred Tarski’s greatness is evident in his work as a logician and as a mathe-matician. However, one can object that it is an abuse to speak about a logicianand mathematician as if he were a philosopher. My assumption is that AlfredTarski was conscious of the philosophical consequences of his work, even ofthe consequences of the choice of the truth bearer.

This statement, however, is not beyond reproach. On the one hand, if I seeTarski as a mathematician and a logician who worked through all of the philo-sophical consequences of his logico-semantic work on truth, I will probablycome into conflict with some of the facts of his biography. During his stayin the United States Tarski associated with mathematicians rather than withphilosophers. Yet on the other hand, as it was repeatedly said,4 it is impor-tant to keep in mind that even in his later period of scholarly activity, Tarskimore than once assumed the role of philosopher. Regardless of whether Tar-ski considered himself to be a philosopher and of how often he expressed hisphilosophical beliefs, there is no doubt that Tarski was educated in philosophy.It is reasonable, then, to speak about his philosophical background. Moreover,the 1933 paper on truth unambiguously states his philosophical inspirationsand aspirations. Later, on several occasions, Tarski also expressed the philo-sophical basis of his semantic conception of truth.5

There are, therefore, reasons for believing that the choice of sentences astruth bearers lies not in a mere theory of meaning, which is called sometimes‘the reference theory of meaning’ where a sentence is defined as a referen-tial linguistic expression together with its meaning.6 I would rather look forreasons for the referential theory of meaning. It is reasonable to suppose thatthe explanation may be found elsewhere, in the tradition of the Lvov-WarsawSchool. This is the school which was responsible for shaping Tarski’s philo-sophical views and, therefore, the sense of his philosophical background. Aswe shall see, the state of the discussion about truth and true sentences in thisschool is reflected in some of the philosophical beliefs expressed in his writ-ings.

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3.2 Some Facts and Genetic Connections

Alfred Tarski (1902–1983) was a pupil of Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Lesniew-´ski and Tadeusz Kotarbinski. Łukasiewicz and Le´ sniewski were his teachersín logic. The latter was the director of Tarski’s doctoral dissertation. The verystrong connection between them was broken in 1923, but until this time Tarskiworked on the problems of Lesniewski’s system of protothetics. After 1923´Tarski focused on issues connected with set theory, and at the end of the twen-ties he began to work with Jan Łukasiewicz on the topic of logical calculi. Asis reported by Tarski himself, the semantic definition of truth was prepared byhim in 1929 and delivered at the session of the Philosophical Society in 1930.7

The publication, however, did not appear until 1933. In the very first section ofthe postponed publication Tarski acknowledges Stanisław Lesniewski’s strongínfluence on his work on truth. In this respect he refers directly to Lesniewski’s´lectures in the 1919/1920 academic year, as well as to their private academicdisputes. From a historical point of view it still remains unclear which partof this section of The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages comes fromwhom. It seems that for Tarski, the crucial point in this part of his study wasLesniewski’s views on language.´

In the same section of Tarski’s famous book of 1933, he also mentions hisphilosophy teacher—Tadeusz Kotarbinski. It is crucial from a historical pointóf view to point out that for the most part Tarski adopted Kotarbinski’s viewsćoncerning truth. For example, the so-called classical formulation of the defi-nition of truth that appears in the 1933 book comes from the latter.8 It is worthnoting that among the few remarks on the notion of a sentence, Tarski refersto Kotarbinski’s´ Elementy logiki formalnej i metodologii nauk [Elements ofFormal Logic and Methodology of Science].9 It is also remarkable that Tar-ski’s collection of papers from 1956, very well known in English speakingphilosophical circles, was dedicated to Kotarbinski alone.´ 10 The influence ofLesniewski and Kotarbi´ nski on Tarski is not surprising if we consider that their´discussion about the objectivity of truth took place prior to Tarski’s enrollmentat the university in 1918.11

In the context of the definition of truth advanced by Tarski in 1933, it isalso important to mention Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. His papers are included inthe short bibliography that appears at the very beginning of Tarski’s work ontruth in formalized languages. When Tarski, motivated by Gödel’s theorems,was rewriting his work on truth, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz had prepared twoimportant papers on language and meaning.12 Both of Ajdukiewicz’s paperswere influenced by the same philosophical problems regarding the problem oftruth and the truth bearer which affected Tarski’s work. Ajdukiewicz admitsto this in his lectures on the theory of knowledge he held in the academic year1930/1931.13


Both of Tarski’s teachers, Lesniewski and Kotarbi´ nski, together with Łuka-´siewicz, belong to the first generation of students of Kazimierz Twardowski,the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School. The historical question is how farTwardowski is responsible for the state of the philosophical discussions (espe-cially about truth) that took place among his students? In other words, howmany of Twardowski’s ideas were taken as axioms by his followers? Fur-thermore, continuing along this historical line, how many of Twardowski’sphilosophical ideas are to be found in Tarski’s own thought? Can we find evi-dence of the influence of Twardowski on Tarski’s concept of truth and the truthbearer? Is there a causal link between Twardowski’s and Tarski’s notions oflinguistic expression? Is it possible to interpret Tarski’s notion of a sentencefrom Twardowski’s terminological point of view?14 We shall examine the an-swers to these questions on several occasions in the course of this study. At thisstage I would like to mention only that persons like Twardowski, Łukasiewicz,Lesniewski, Kotarbi´ nski and Ajdukiewicz are of great importance in the devel-ópment of the Lvov-Warsaw School, the school of modern Polish philosophythat only in the last two decades attained a prominent and deserved positionin the history of philosophical ideas. One can argue, and rightly so, that thesethinkers had a decisive influence on both the approach and the topics of philo-sophical discussions on truth within the Lvov-Warsaw School. Their philo-sophical investigations, therefore, shaped Tarski’s philosophical background.Tarski himself was very clear about Twardowski’s heritage:

Almost all researchers, who pursue the philosophy of exact sciences in Poland, areindirectly or directly the disciples of Twardowski, although his own works could hardlybe counted within this domain. (From the letter to Otto Neurath dated April 25, 1930,Tarski 1992, p. 20)

In the same letter to Otto Neurath from which the above citation comes, Tarskidescribes the general condition of Polish philosophy around 1930. In view ofthe pieces of information the letter includes, it is reasonable to assume thatTarski was very well acquainted with almost every aspect of the philosophicalactivity in Poland at this time, and not only in Warsaw where he worked, butalso in Lvov, Krakow and Vilnius.

3.3 Brentanism in Tarski’s Philosophical Background?In recent years the phenomenon of the Lvov-Warsaw School has been the topicof philosophical inquiry in the works of Skolimowski, Szaniawski, Wolenski,´Simons and Smith.15 As a result of these works, not only views concerningthe roots of this school, but also its image have changed. Until the 1980’s theschool was more or less famous for its achievements in logic. Polish logicwas the standard label for the contributions of Polish philosophy. At best, thephilosophy of the Lvov-Warsaw School was associated with a kind of neo-positivism, a philosophy informed by the logical positivism of the Vienna Cir-

8 CHAPTER ONE

cle. Although it may be true that the Polish school from the late nineteenthcentury to the first three decades of the twentieth century owes its place in theworld of philosophy to its contributions in logic, it was not merely a logicalmovement but a ‘philosophical school’ in the full sense of this expression. Itis, perhaps, above all a philosophical school. According to the first historicalmonograph devoted to this school, which has became the standard text on theLvov-Warsaw School and has helped to establish the school as a separate cat-egory in the history of philosophical ideas ‘the Lvov-Warsaw School was notpositivistic but rather analytic.’16

The connection between the Lvov-Warsaw School and the Vienna Circle isindisputable.17 First, however, it is important to mention another great traditionthat influenced the Lvov-Warsaw School. This is the School of Franz Brentano,above all because of the central figure of Polish philosophy, Kazimierz Twar-dowski. The latter seems to have been even more influential philosophically onthe Lvov-Warsaw School than was the Vienna Circle.18 As regards our inter-ests in the bearers of truth in particular, clear connections between the Schoolof Brentano and the Lvov-Warsaw School have already been mentioned by Si-mons and Wolenski in their ‘The Veritate´ . . .’19 In this study I shall attempt todevelop further the connections as described in their paper.

Secondly, in order to justify the thesis that it is the Brentanian side of theAustrian philosophical tradition which was much more influential on the Polishschool than the Vienna Circle, it is worth noting the time when the connectionsbetween the Polish school and the Vienna Circle and the exchange of theirphilosophical ideas took place. The next two parts of this section will focuson some examples of the mutual influences between the Lvov-Warsaw School(including Tarski himself), the Vienna Circle and the Brentano School. Theanalysis will, however, restrict itself to the contexts of the notion of a sentence,or, more generally, of the notion of the truth bearer.

3.4 Tarski and the Vienna CircleFor purposes of this text, I shall divide the period in which the exchange ofphilosophical ideas between the Vienna Circle and the Lvov-Warsaw Schooltook place into two parts: The first part is between 1929, the date of the ‘Wis-senschaftliche Weltanschauung’ manifesto and 1933, the publication date ofTarski’s original work on truth. The second part starts in 1934. The precisedate can be fixed as November 22, 1934. This is when Moritz Schlick openedthe first meeting of the Vienna Circle after a one-year break and Maria Koko-szynska, another of Twardowski students, having been sent by him to Vienna,´began to attend the meetings regularly. As far as the first part is concerned, theoffensive of logical empiricism went together with Tarski’s main work on truth.The personal connections between the Vienna Circle and the Lvov-WarsawSchool were established in 1930, when Tarski visited Vienna and, at the end of


the same year, when Carnap visited Warsaw. Otto Neurath’s report sheds lighton the opinion in Vienna of the Lvov-Warsaw School:

The Warsaw Circle, with Lesniewski, Łukasiewicz, Tarski, Kotarbi´ nski, and others wasínfluenced by Brentano, above all through Twardowski; there are also still some con-nections with the theory of objects and phenomenology. Mach and Avenarius had aninfluence, above all, through Cornelius. On the part of the logicians the strongest in-fluence was that of Frege, Schröder and Russell. The most important areas of investi-gation of the Varsovians are logistic and metamathematics. (O. Neurath, ‘HistorischeAnmerkungen. Zum Bericht über die 1.’ Tagung für Erkenntnislehre der exakten Wis-senschaften in Prag, 15.–17. September 1929’—my translation)

In his original 1933 work Tarski refers to Carnap’s Abriss der Logistik, buthe does it only in order to explain some notions of the theory of types, i.e. thelanguage in which he gives the definition of truth, and almost always in relationto the Whitehead-Russell work.20 Tarski’s references to other members of theVienna Circle are limited to Gödel. There is no evidence for assuming anyphilosophical influence on Tarski from the Vienna Circle before his 1933 book.However, there are noteworthy influences in the sphere of logic, especially thatof Gödel. For example, the fact that Tarski postponed the publication of hisbook because of Gödel’s theorems is well known. It is also worth remarkingthat, even if we look at the work of Ajdukiewicz, who was under the spell ofthe Vienna Circle during a long period of his philosophical activity, there is noevidence of any such influence before 1934.21

As for the influences of the Viennese thinkers on Polish philosophers before1934, I would like to mention Maria Kokoszynska’s reports to Twardowski.´From these it can be concluded that the philosophy of the Vienna Circle wasnot as well known in Lvov as it is assumed by historians of philosophy. Koko-szynska’s letters include a great number of details such as, for instance, the fact´that she was surprised by Moritz Schlick’s assertion that a statement such as‘The world is will’ could be interpreted as meaningful. As she pointed out, thetheory of meaning embraced by the Vienna Circle in the way in which it waspresented in Lvov differed completely from the original view of the membersof the meetings she attended.22

In the period in which, I believe, only the influences of Vienna on the Lvov-Warsaw School in the sphere of logic can be taken into account, the philo-sophical influence of the Polish School on the Vienna Circle seems to be muchmore remarkable. The letters which Tarski wrote in 1936 to Neurath include,for example, the following remarks:

And now Carnap was of the opinion, that just the liberation from this hindering influ-ence of W.[ittgenstein] is due to the Varsovians (and especially to my Vienna lectures. . .)Herr Neurath spoke in a comprehensive way about the influence of the Varsovians onthe Vienna Circle and especially about the influence of Tarski’s lectures, about the dis-cussions which these lectures provoked (. . .). This agrees also with what Gödel told mein Vienna a year ago; he told me namely about the general mistrust which all investi-

10 CHAPTER ONE

gations and considerations concerning language encounters before my lectures. (Tarski1992, pp. 25–26.)

However, it is not to be assumed that the Viennese took the idea of languagesof different levels as fixed. In the letters to Twardowski mentioned aboveMaria Kokoszynska reported,´ inter alia:

First things first, there blooms here on a great scale a confusion between statements andstatements about those statements, that is, between language and metalanguage. (Letterto Kazimierz Twardowski from December 14, 1934—my translation)

The fact is that the character of the mutual influence between the Varso-vians and the Viennese changed completely in 1934. The members of theLvov-Warsaw School often discussed the philosophical problems of logicalempiricism. This began with the 1934 congress in Prague, and lasted throughthe Paris and Krakow congresses in 1936. ‘To discuss’ does not automaticallymean ‘to adopt’, but this is not the place for a discussion of this issue.23 As faras the problem of the truth bearer is concerned, in the letter to Otto Neurath,Tarski refers to his relation to the Vienna Circle as follows:

You maintain, as far as I see, that the admissibility of sentences about sentences, thepossibility of speaking about a language in a fault-free manner, was accepted in theVienna Circle to a wide extent still before my lectures (1930), you even want to lookat the recognition that sentences about sentences are legitimate, as a Viennese ownattainment, and you admit only this much, that in Warsaw this recognition came tolight simultaneously—around 1928/1929—and in an independent way. I regret to sayin reply, that me recollections and impressions on this point deviate completely fromyours. In the first place, this recognition on the grounds of Warsaw dates back not tothe years 1928/1929, but to a period at least 10 years earlier. (Tarski 1992, p. 25)

Later he continues:

You write in your letter that the thesis, according to which sentences, punctuationmarks, etc., are physical pictures, was debated in the Vienna Circle still before mycoming to Vienna and met in part a positive judgment. I certainly have no right tocontest this. I only want to observe, that this thesis has been prevailing in Warsaw foryears (and to be sure, at least since the year 1918) and is adopted by all, that it foundits expression in several publications (not only in the Polish language) before the year1928/1929 also it appears to me that the characterization of pictures of sentences as‘ornaments’ is not an original Viennese formulation: among us, we spoke of figures ofspeech as ‘arabesques’ (is there such a word as ‘Arabesken’ in German?); Łukasiewiczgave a lecture (around 1925), in which he endeavored to show just this, that one canlook upon pictures of sentences simply as ‘ornaments’: he brought along to his lecturea large number of differently coloured squares, trapezoids, etc., and developed a systemof sentential calculus, in which he employed these ‘ornaments’ as logical variables andconstants. (Tarski 1992, p. 26)

We can add to this picture described by Tarski the pieces of information whichhe included in his historical remarks at the end of the English version of hisoriginal 1933 work (1936 and 1955 editions).24 Thus, in Tarski’s opinion wasno influence of the Vienna Circle on the Lvov-Warsaw School insofar as the


nature of language and the way of speaking about language are concerned.Moreover, it is important to note that in 1937 Otto Neurath also accepted Tar-ski’s opinion in that he characterized the Lvov-Warsaw School (speaking aboutthe Polish School) as an important school, of great significance in the area oflogic, with an empirical tinge which, via Twardowski (Lvov), goes back toBrentano.25

3.5 Tarski and Brentano?It is clear, then, that the influence of Austrian philosophical thought on theLvov-Warsaw School prior to 1934 was limited to the School of Brentano.It was only in this year that the Vienna Circle also began philosophicaly toexert an influence. Since Tarski’s definition of truth was published in 1933 andthe present work is devoted to the philosophical background of his notion ofthe truth bearer, I shall therefore follow Otto Neurath and examine the Polishschool from the Brentanian standpoint. The focus of this examination will bethe problem of truth bearers. Thus, the evidence presented below shall examineonly selected materials.

The aforementioned letter of Tarski to Otto Neurath states that the viewthat sentences are physical pictures was accepted by Poles since at least 1918.I must admit that I am not in a position to explain why Tarski believes thatthe year 1918 marks the beginning of the Poles’ acceptance of sentences asphysical pictures. Twardowski’s paper ‘O czynnosciach i wytworach’ [On Actsánd Products],26 where he explicitly interprets sentences as physical products,appeared in 1912. Either Tarski made a mistake about the year of publicationof this paper, or 1918 refers to the year in which he enrolled at the universityand began to attend Lesniewski’s lectures. I think one should look for the´roots of the concept of a sentence before 1918. As we shall see, the view thatTwardowski expressed in his ‘On Acts and Products’ is deeply rooted in theBrentanian tradition.

Beside Twardowski, the direct influence on the part of the Brentanians isseen quite clearly also in Jan Łukasiewicz, one of Twardowski’s pupils and Tar-ski’s teacher. It was one of the most important problems for the Brentanian tra-dition, i.e. the problem of psychologism in logic, which was of interest to Łu-kasiewicz in his early philosophical activity. His paper ‘Logika a psychologia’[Logic and Psychology] of 1907 shows a strong influence of Brentano’s pupilsAlexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl.27 Two years later Łukasiewicz went toGraz to meet Meinong. Łukasiewicz attended his seminars in 1908 and 1909.In the 1909 he lectured on Meinong’s views in Lvov.28 In Meinong’s Nach-lass there is evidence of correspondence between both philosophers.29 In hisbook on Aristotle Łukasiewicz refers to Meinong on several occasions.30 Thebook also allows us to formulate a judgment about other philosophical worksof Łukasiewicz, such as studies on Husserl and Trendelenburg (the latter was

12 CHAPTER ONE

Brentano’s teacher in Berlin).31 The book also contains direct remarks aboutproblems discussed in the Brentanian tradition, such as the critique of the con-cept of evidence as the criterion of truth32 or the critique of psychologism.33

On this basis and on the basis of other facts, Peter Simons goes so far as to pro-pose that Łukasiewicz’s idea of many-valued logic and his theory of probabilityfollow the main lines of Meinong’s thought.34 Moreover, it was Łukasiewicz’swork on the law of contradiction in Aristotle which triggered the discussionabout truth between Kotarbinski and Le´ sniewski.´

In 1961 Kotarbinski wrote:´Devoured by a passion for an absolute exactness of statement, he looked for inspirationto Hans Cornelius, who was at the same time close to both empirio-criticism and Kan-tianism, to the writings on general grammar and the philosophy of the Brentanist Marty,and to the semantic chapters of Mill’s System of Logic. (Kotarbinski 1967, p. 4–5)´ 35

There are good reasons claiming that one of the people who most influencedLesniewski was Anton Marty. Even though Marty’s´ Untersuchungen zurGrundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie [Investiga-tions to the Foundation of General Grammar and Philosophy of Language]36

presented Lesniewski with a picture which was far from possessing the ex-áctness he expected in philosophical writings, Marty was the philosopher thatinfluenced Lesniewski view’s on language. Le´ sniewski believed that the prob-´lems of the philosophy of language included in Marty’s book were the mostimportant questions of philosophy.37 Lesniewski’s very first papers often re-´fer to Marty, Husserl, and Meinong. Brentano and Twardowski were notmentioned even once. Lesniewski took Husserl, Meinong, and—it may be´worth emphasizing—Łukasiewicz to be the partners of his discussion on gen-eral objects.38 The influence of Austrian philosophy on Lesniewski seems to´be clear. Lesniewski was at home with the problems of the Austrian School´(as he called the tradition) and he engaged in polemics within the conceptualframework proposed by this school.

As for Tadeusz Kotarbinski, the influence of the Brentanian School is alsoíndisputable. There are many places in Kotarbinski’s writings where he refers´to Brentano, Bolzano, Husserl, and other Austrian philosophers. Moreover,the characteristic problems of Austrian philosophy, such as, for instance, theproblem of the interplay of logic and psychology39 or the problem of innerperception40 are problems which Kotarbinski discussed. Furthermore, the dis-´pute with Lesniewski about eternal truth shows the Brentanian conceptual´framework.41 One of the most remarkable phenomena is that Kotarbinski’s´view called ‘reism’, quite similar to the reistic view of the late Brentano, cameinto being independently of the latter. It can be seen as a sign of the peculiarphilosophical situation in Poland that prevailed in Twardowski’s school in thefirst decades of the twentieth century: a sign of Brentano’s heritage in its spirit.

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz studied in Göttingen with Husserl and Hilbert. Twoof Ajdukiewicz’s first papers, ‘O znaczeniu wyrazen’ [On the Meaning of Ex-´


pression] and ‘Sprache und Sinn’ [Language and Sense],42 refer directly toHusserl’s Logische Untersuchungen [Logical Investigations].43 Moreover, ‘Onthe Meaning of Expression’ is reminiscent in its construction of Husserl’s firstlogical investigation ‘Ausdruck und Bedeutung.’44 In the same paper Ajdukie-wicz refers also to Marty’s Untersuchungen.45 Furthermore, even in the 1934paper ‘Language and Meaning’ where Ajdukiewicz develops his own theoryof meaning, he calls his own considerations ‘semasiology’, which is Marty’sterm for what later was replaced by ‘semantics.’ It is not quite clear whetherHusserl inspired Ajdukiewicz’s interests in Göttingen, but Ajdukiewicz’s ‘Lan-guage and Meaning’ includes a sharp critique of Husserl. In this paper Aj-dukiewicz also discusses another Brentanian concept, i.e. that of acceptance(Annerkennens(( ).46 To give one other example: in the early 1921 paper entitled‘O pojeciu dowodu w znaczeniu logicznym’ [The Logical Notion of Proof],˛ 47

Ajdukiewicz describes the notion of a pre-axiomatic period of the deductivesciences. Although he does not ascribe the notion to any concrete person, theterms he uses, as well as the views he mentions, recall the Brentano-Husserlianunderstanding of the deductive science.48

It would be surprising if Tarski’s teachers had not been able to transfer anyof their Brentanian ideas to their most capable student. The aforementioned ex-amples provide sufficient evidence to establish at least the possibility that someof the theories concerning language, judgment and truth in the Brentanian her-itage are to be found in Tarski’s philosophical background. I shall offer a jus-tification for the above view in what follows.

A Remark about a Possible Misinterpretation. I do not want to give theimpression that everything which is at issue in this study was known and con-sidered by Tarski. By having a philosophical background influenced by theBrentanian heritage I do not mean here the conscious consideration of, for ex-ample, the descriptive-psychological problem of general presentations. In thisrespect by ‘conscious’ I mean the outcome of discussions in which Tarski af-firmed the nominalistic theses presented by Lesniewski and Kotarbi´ nski. I dońot want give the reader the impression that Tarski possessed complete knowl-edge about everything I shall present in the course of this study. I do not wantto write a text about all that Tarski might have learned and did in fact learnabout the Brentanians and about others.

Secondly, I do not want to represent Tarski’s education and philosophicaldevelopment as due only to the teachers and colleagues mentioned in refer-ence to the tradition of Austrian philosophy, including Brentano and even theVienna Circle. One should not forget two other groups of thinkers that stronglyinfluenced Tarski. The first consists of the mathematicians whom Tarski met inWarsaw, i.e. Wacław Sierpinski, Kazimierz Kuratowski, Zygmunt Janiszewskiánd Stefan Mazurkiewicz. The second group includes Bertrand Russell and

14 CHAPTER ONE

Alfred North Whitehead, as known from the Principia Mathematica, as wellas Leon Chwistek and Kurt Gödel. Although there might be a connection be-tween the second group and the problem of truth bearers, I am not able to judgeit in this study. As for Gödel, the answer is partly included in what I have saidabout Tarski’s philosophical connections with the Vienna Circle. As for themathematicians, I would say that there is no reason to assume a philosophicalinfluence of any kind with regard to the problem at hand.

A Remark about other Brentanian Figures in Polish Philosophy. Thereare several other scholars in the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School who, inaddition to Łukasiewicz, Kotarbinski, Le´ sniewski, Ajdukiewicz and, through´them, Tarski, could serve as even better examples of the Brentanian influenceupon this school. Among these are Leopold Blaustein, Adam Stögbauer, Mar-ian Borowski and others who worked more or less in the framework of descrip-tive psychology.49 There is another figure in the Lvov-Warsaw School to whomwe shall devote some attention: Tadeusz Czezowski. I have not mentioned him˙previously since there is no evidence of direct intellectual connections betweenhim and Tarski. Nonetheless, Czezowski can serve as a model˙ sensu strictofor the statement that the heritage of Brentano in the Lvov-Warsaw Schoolshould be taken seriously. The most interesting fact distinguishing him fromthe descriptive psychologists is that he belongs to the logical branch of theLvov-Warsaw School, i.e., to the figures whose main interest lay in the realmof mathematical logic. As Ajdukiewicz reported, Czezowski focused ‘mainly˙on particular problems of logic.’50 His logical writings show a strong influ-ence of Brentano throughout. Czezowski’s book˙ Klasyczna nauka o sadzie˛i wniosku w swietle logiki współczesnej´ [The Classical View on Judgment andProof in the Light of Modern Logic]51 presents an attempted interpretationof the reform of logic made by Brentano and Hillebrand in terms of modernlogic. Another example is ‘The History of the Theory of Classes,’ which isthe first part of his dissertation Teoria klas [The Class-Theory]52 and where hedraws upon the work of Husserl.53 The later activity of Czezowski also clearly˙shows that he defended views shared in common with Brentano, such as theidiogenetic theory of judgment or the axiology and psychology of knowledge,among others.54

4. The Content of this Study and what is not Included inPrevious Studies on this Topic

4.1 The Wolenski-Simons Thesis´Jan Wolenski states that the Brentanian tradition laid the foundation for theéstablishment of a context for the development of semantics in Poland.55 Inthis respect he sees the concept of intentionality as what led to the natural as-sumption of semantics that every language has to be about something. The


thesis was earlier formulated in an extended but roughly expressed form by Si-mons and Wolenski in the aforementioned paper on truth in the Austro-Polish´tradition entitled ‘The Veritate. . .’56 The broadening of the thesis took intoconsideration interests in Aristotle (and the Scholastics) as well as interests inthe correspondence theory of truth shared by Brentano and the Polish philoso-phers Twardowski and Łukasiewicz. As the background for Tarski’s definitionof truth Simons and Wolenski also refer to the issue of the objectivity of truth´(Twardowski, Lesniewski and Kotarbi´ nski), to Le´ sniewski’s conception of lan-´guage, as well as to the connections between Marty, Lesniewski, Meinong and´Łukasiewicz. My study might be seen in this respect as the next and moresystematized extension of the Simons-Wolenski thesis.´

However, my attempt differs in three respects. First, I concentrate on thenotion of the truth bearer. This notion is, of course, deeply ingrained in thecontext of the theory of truth. Yet since the notion of the truth bearer involvessuch notions as judgment, sentence and meaning, it can be seen also in broadercontexts, such as, for example, that of the theory of judgment and the theory oflinguistic expressions. Secondly, I want to learn from this study a little abouthow far the choice of the truth bearer is independent of the general concep-tion of truth. Thirdly, I shall attempt to explain the turn from acts of judgingto sentences as bearers of truth-value without reference to the standard Fregeand Russell tradition, and thereby, without using the terms ‘proposition’ and‘propositional attitude’ that are usually used in this context. The standard ex-planation is as follows. Due to a so-called ‘linguistic turn,’ the psychologi-cal distinction between an act, its content, and its object was replaced by thedistinction between a sign, its sense, and its reference in Frege’s sense. Inparticular, the distinction between assertion, content of judgment, and stateof affairs is replaced by the distinction between sentences, propositions, andtruth-values. The problem of cognition and communication is solved, in thisaccount, by the adoption of a propositional attitude.57 My attempt is to explainthe turn from speaking about judgments to speaking about sentences withoutusing the thesis of the linguistic turn and without introducing the propositionalattitude. For example, instead of replacing contents by meanings, I wouldprefer, following Wolenski, to speak about replacing intentions by reference´wherever this is possible. Similarly, instead of referring to ideal propositions,I would prefer to speak in terms of a kind of folk psychology, i.e., about thecognition of judgments which are (or could be) expressed in the language.

In order to approach the last two tasks I shall attempt to embrace the turnfrom the judging act to the sentence in the historical context of the Brentaniantradition as influencing the Lvov-Warsaw School. Thus, for the purpose of thisstudy, I assume the following reformulation of the Wolenski-Simons thesis: the´Brentanian tradition presents an essential context for the development of thetruth bearer in the Lvov-Warsaw School. It will be clear in what follows howessential the Brentanian tradition was in this respect. It would be more essential

16 CHAPTER ONE

if the explanation of the turn from judgment to sentence did not demand theexplanation given by the Anglo-American tradition of analytical philosophy,which is usually associated with the names of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein.

Again, however, I believe that this study presents not only a part of thehistory of the notion of the truth bearer. My purpose is not purely historical inthe sense of presenting an attempt to write a chapter of that history by carryingout an analysis of sources that are important in this respect, with a clear accenton the School of Brentano (including tracing Tarski’s concept of a sentencebased on his 1933 work on truth to the school of Brentano). I shall try to drawupon history in a systematic way, collecting and ordering arguments for andagainst the various the candidates for the bearer for truth. In doing so, I willask some important questions regarding the topic, such as, for example, how tomake truth objective by the means of a truth bearer. Therefore, the argumentsshall sometimes be ordered in a logical sequence of argumentation relevant tothe topic, instead of in a historical sequence.

One might argue that in such an attempt to systematize I cross the line ofadmissible historical speculation. Even if this is sometimes unintentionally thecase (I tried to be both—historically correct and rational) I would say that thebackground of my analysis consists, above all, of questions such as: Whichtruth bearer best guarantees the objectivity of truth?; Do sentences serve astruth bearers better than judgments?; Is the change of the bearer of truth con-nected with the theory of meaning or with other factors?; How far is the notionof truth independent of the choice of its bearer?; Do we need the notion ofa truth bearer at all? Unfortunately, a historical study cannot give direct andultimate answers to all of these questions. I think, however, that a brief lookat the history of the direction taken during the period when semantics becamea part of philosophical investigations will shed light on these questions. Thisis important because Tarski’s work remains one of the most important attemptsto advance a theory of truth.

4.2 The Content of the StudyIn expanding the Simons-Wolenski list of connections between the Polish andÁustrian schools, I shall consider the following topics as important for theproblem of the truth bearer:

(i) Theories of descriptive psychology, and in particular, the theories ofjudgments and the development of the contrast between the object andthe content of a judgment.

(ii) Views on language and, especially, cognitive theories of meaning, aswell as theories of the relation between language and thinking.

(iii) The ontology of judgment, as the problem of the connection betweenthe investigation of the special objects of judging acts and the linguisticcounterparts of judging.


(iv) Other ontological problems rooted in descriptive psychology, such asthe problem of general objects.

(v) The problem of the objectivity of knowledge and of truth.

(vi) General theories of truth and remarks concerning the problem of truth.

(vii) Semantic investigations in the Lvov-Warsaw School rooted in theBrentanian tradition.

To some extent I shall investigate all of these topics below in the context ofthe problem of the truth bearer. The latter already appeared with Alfred Tar-ski’s 1933 paper on truth. Because of the possibility of a consistent explanationof the concept of the truth bearer in Tarski’s book that I see in the context of theBrentanian tradition, I shall trace the problem of the truth bearer from Brentanoto Tarski. As far as the title of this study is concerned, we need only add that thename of Bolzano appears because of his influential ideas in Wissenschaftslehre[Theory of Science],58 rediscovered for the Brentanian tradition by Twardow-ski. Thus the investigation will not cover the entire period promised in thetitle, i.e., between Bolzano’s Theory of Science and Brentano’s Psychologievom empirischen Stanpunkt [Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint]59 (i.e.from 1837 to 1874).

In the next chapter I shall define the notion of the truth bearer and attemptto situate it in the general theory of truth.

In Chapter Three, I concentrate on the theory of judgment in the realm ofdescriptive psychology. Section by section, I present the arguments of FranzBrentano, Kazimierz Twardowski, Anton Marty and Alexius Meinong con-cerning truth bearers. I shall show that the starting point of those conceptionsare epistemological questions treated as parts of descriptive psychology.

In the corresponding sections of Chapter Four I try to deal with problemspresented in the previous chapter in their linguistic formulations in the way inwhich they were historically presented by the philosophers who have been al-ready mentioned. I present their views as regards their theories of the functionsof expression, meaning, and reference, and as regards the relation betweenlanguage and the mind. I argue that what they share are: a clear distinctionbetween the logical structure of an act of judging and the grammatical struc-ture of its expression; the view of a sign as a convention in speech acts; andthe treatment of the functions of linguistic signs with respect to the results ofdescriptive psychology.

Chapter Five presents a link between descriptive psychology and linguisticattempts to formulate and solve its problems. Thus, I refer to the views ofHusserl, Marty, and Reinach, who provided such a link by making the notionof a state of affairs a central category of the theory of judgment.

In Chapter Six I first briefly present the reistic positions of Franz Brentanoand Tadeusz Kotarbinski. Next, I formulate semantic-reistic arguments for thećhoice of the sentence and judging persons as truth bearers.

18 CHAPTER ONE

Chapter Seven considers theories of truth from the point of view of the ob-jectivity of truth along the lines drawn by Bolzano, i.e. with respect to the time,to the subject and to the circumstances. It takes into account also the notionof objective truth as result of the ontology of judgment invesigated in the fifthchapter. The analysis of the views of Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl, Twardowski,together with the dispute on the objectivity of truth provided by Kotarbinski,´Lesniewski and Kokoszy´ nska, leads me to the presentation of various reasons´for the acceptance as truth bearers of such entities as inscriptions, sentences inthemselves, evident acts of judging or their species. The investigations I un-dertake lead to the conclusion that the choice of the truth bearer decides aboveall about the way in which truth and knowledge remain objective. This chapteralso contains a brief sketch of the anti-psychologistic turn in the Lvov-WarsawSchool. In this respect I focus first and foremost on Twardowski’s theory ofacts and their products. The reason for this is that this theory, treating thelanguage as a permanent product of an act of consciousness, presents the rele-vant step in the direction where the semantic function of language is describedwithout reference to acts of consciousness.

In Chapter Eight I argue for the thesis that ontological disputes constituteda permanent element of the philosophical tradition of the school of Brentanoand the Lvov-Warsaw School. I also argue that the view shared by Tarski’steachers called ‘nominalism’ was rooted in the Brentanian tradition, as a resultof discussions about language and about general objects.

In Chapter Nine I consider the semantic conceptions which could decideabout the choice of the sentence as the truth bearer. These conceptions are,again, rooted in the Brentanian tradition. After analyzing papers written byLesniewski, Ossowski and Ossowska, I arrive at the following conceptions: thećonventional understanding of interpreted formalized languages; the separationof the semantic function of a sign from its function of expression; the meaning-intention conception; the conception of semantic products; and the semanticunderstanding of the predicate ‘true.’

Chapter Ten consists of arguments for the choice of a given truth bearer, ar-guments which were explicitly expressed by the members of the Lvov-WarsawSchool. These are arguments for the choice of the psychological act of judgingas the truth bearer (Twardowski and Czezowski), for the choice of judgments˙in the logical sense as the truth bearer (Łukasiewicz), as well as argumentsfor the choice of sentences as the truth bearer (Kotarbinski, Ajdukiewicz and´Tarski). I also argue that in the light of my former investigations, all of Tar-ski’s descriptions of the notion of the sentence quoted in previous section areequivalent.

The last chapter repeats once again that the thesis about the Brentanian her-itage with respect to some of the semantic ideas of the Lvov-Warsaw Schoolis correct. It includes a weakened thesis as far as the heritage in the context ofsemantic definition of truth is concerned. I establish also a rather long list of


entities that served as truth bearers in philosophical discourse in the period thatI considered in my study. The list allows me to draw a number of conclusions,such as, for example, that the notion of the semantic attitude is vague.

A Remark on Sources. In the course of this study, I shall rely almost exclu-sively upon selected primary sources. The principal reason for limiting sourcesalmost exclusively to primary sources is that the secondary bibliography for thetopics treated here would take more than half of the space of this study, not tomention half of my life, and it would still not guarantee that the results wouldbe more interesting. Those studies do not refer directly to the problem of thetruth bearer. Thus, in order to limit the secondary literature I decided, first, torefer to those prior to 1933, i.e., to sources which appeared prior to the publi-cation of Tarski’s conception of truth in formalized languages. The choice ofthe literature from the period until 1933 is, I think, quite obvious consideringthe fact that I attempt to explain Tarski’s acceptance of sentences as truth bear-ers. Secondly, I restrict myself in the secondary literature after the year 1933to texts which are relatively new. By ‘relatively new’ I mean texts publishedafter the Brentanian influences on the Lvov-Warsaw School were recognizedby historians of philosophy. The secondary literature comes, therefore, almostexclusively from the period that begins in the 1980’s. It limits this kind ofliterature significantly, giving a warranty that I shall not state the obvious.

Yet even these primary sources are limited. I refer above all to the most rel-evant or representative primary literature from the point of view of this study.One of the criteria here was the accessibility of texts. For example, aside fromtheir importance, I have chosen papers published by Ossowski and Ossowska,accessible to me because of my knowledge of Polish, but inaccessible in gen-eral because they have not been translated. Another criterion was the extent towhich primary sources have been the subject of recent literature. I have alsoomitted those works which have been thoroughly and deeply discussed, suchas, for example, the important writings of Husserl, since the reader can easilyfind for much deeper analyses than it would be possible for me to offer in thefew pages of this text.

A Remark on Method and Reading. Since I do not use all of the sourceswhich can be found relevant to the discussions I present, i.e., to the context ofthe truth bearer with regard to mutual Austro-Polish influences, I am unable(with some exceptions and only when necessary) to investigate the phases ofthe philosophical activity of a given philosopher. I am therefore unable inevery case to explain the nuances of meaning in the notions used by individualwriters, which might show their development in the course of time. I do tryto give a coherent and comprehensive interpretation of the views of a givenphilosopher on a given topic. When giving such interpretations in many placesin this study, I shall rather recall the system of concepts and arguments of

20 CHAPTER ONE

a philosopher than fully explain his or her conceptual framework. I do notusually argue for the chosen framework. This is partly due to the fact that theviews recalled present rather basic philosophical knowledge that is demandedby an argument for or against a given truth bearer. Only when my interpretationdiffers from standard views with regard to a given philosopher shall I offer anargument. In places where my views are opposed to the standard interpretationand, where I do not present any argument against the standard view, the readermay assume that I have taken an attitude which can be described as commonsense attitude. It is common in a sense along the lines of folk psychology, inthat I want to speak about concrete mental acts or uttered sentences rather thanabout meanings, types, representations, and similar abstract entities.

However, even if the study requires some basic knowledge, I think that it canand should be read as an introduction to parts of the philosophy of the membersof the Austrian and Polish schools. The study can be read also according tonames (Twardowski (I), Twardowski (II), and so on). Although it changes theplot, it might offer information needed for other purposes.

Notes1 Tarski 1933 (1983).2 Field 1972. See also McDowell 1978.3 I shall use the names ‘the School of Brentano’, ‘the Brentanian tradition’, ‘Brentanian philosophy’ and

‘Austrian Philosophy’ synonymously. However, the standard use of these terms in the philosophicalliterature is quite different in that the term ‘Austrian Philosophy’ covers both ‘the School of Brentano’and ‘the Vienna Circle.’ It should be clear from the context in which I shall use these terms that both theVienna Circle and Brentanian Philosophy are proper parts of Austrian Philosophy. Thus, I sometimescontrast the Vienna Circle with the School of Brentano, and in those cases I shall not use the term‘Austrian Philosophy’ synonymously with complex terms having ‘Brentano’ as their part. I leave thisambiguity of the term ‘Austrian Philosophy’, since it seems that Polish philosophers used this term, andmore precisely the term ‘Austrian School’, before the Vienna Circle came into existence. See Lesniewski´1911.

4 See, for example, Wolenski 1993, 1995.´5 See his 1944, translation of 1933 in 1956, and 1968 papers as examples.6 We shall see that this is, in fact, a transmuted definition of what Łukasiewicz (one of Tarski’s teachers)

took for a sentence. See below sections on Łukasiewicz.

7 Tarski 1933, p. 3 [1983, p. 152]8 Compare also Tarski’s T convention and Kotarbinski’s definitions of truth in Kotarbi´ nski 1926.´9 Kotarbinski 1929, English translation with different title as Kotarbi´ nski 1966; see also Tarski 1933, p. 6,´

1983, p. 156.

10 Tarski 1956/1983.11 Kotarbinski 1913, Le´ sniewski 1913 and chapter 7 below.´12 Ajdukiewicz 1931, 1934.13 Ajdukiewicz 1988, 1993.14 For such an interpretation see Rojszczak 1993.15 Skolimowski 1967, Szaniawski (ed.) 1989, Wolenski and Simons 1989, Wole´ nski 1985, 1988, Smith´

1994, Wolenski and Köhler (eds.) 1999.´

16 Wolenski 1985, p. 317.´17 Szaniawski (ed.) 1989, Wolenski and Köhler (eds.) 1999.´18 See Dambska 1978, D ˛˛ ambska 1979, Simons 1992, Smith 1994, Wole˛ nski 1994.´19 Simons and Wolenski 1989.´


20 See Tarski 1933, pp. 11, 21, 67, 69; 1983, pp. 161, 170, 216, 218.21 See his paper from 1931, for example.22 A good example for this is her letter to Kazimierz Twardowski from November 1934, written two days

after her arrival to Vienna. The letter comes from the correspondence of Kazimierz Twardowski as headof the Polish Philosophical Society, archived in the Library of Institute of Philosophy at the Universityof Warsaw. I would like to thank Professor Jacek J. Jadacki for his permission to use this material.

23 See the papers from the congresses and other articles discussing logical empiricism, such as: Sztejnbarg1934, Ajdukiewicz 1934a, Łukasiewicz 1936, Zawirski 1936, 1937, 1938, Kokoszynska 1936, 1937–38,´1938, Hosiasson 1937–38.

24 Tarski 1992, p. 227.25 Otto Neurath 1937, pp. 309–312.26 Twardowski 1912.27 Łukasiewicz 1907, Husserl 1900, Meinong 1904.28 Łukasiewicz 1909.29 For some transcriptions and translations see Simons 1992, pp. 219–223.30 Łukasiewicz 1910, pp. 13–14, 28, 42, 110–113.31 Łukasiewicz 1910, p. 14 (Meinong 1907), pp. 28, 42 (Höfler, Meinong 1890), pp. 32, 149 (Husserl

1900), p. 41 (Trendelenburg 1840).

32 Łukasiewicz 1910, pp. 102–105.33 Łukasiewicz 1910, p. 149.34 ‘Łukasiewicz, Meinong and many-valued logic’ in Simons 1992.35 Kotarbinski also confirmed the influence of Marty and Husserl on Le´ sniewski in other places, like´

Kotarbinski 1933 and Kotarbi´ nski 1959.´

36 Marty 1908.37 Lesniewski 1912. Le´ sniewski was even planning to translate Marty’s book into Polish, a project that´

was never fulfilled.

38 Lesniewski 1913a, p. 329.´39 See, for example, Kotarbinski 1933.´40 E.g. Kotarbinski 1922.´41 Kotarbinski 1913, Kotarbi´ nski 1921.´42 Ajdukiewicz 1931, 1934.43 Ajdukiewicz 1931, pp. 103, 116, 136; Ajdukiewicz 1934, p. 147. All references are according to Ajdu-

kiewicz 1960.44 Ajdukiewicz first discusses the ambiguity of the concept of meaning, then presents a critique of associ-

ationism and of J. S. Mill.

45 Ajdukiewicz 1931, p. 103.46 Ajdukiewicz 1934, pp. 147–148.47 Ajdukiewicz 1921.48 Ajdukiewicz 1921, pp. 1–3.49 See Rojszczak 1994, 1998/1999.50 Ajdukiewicz 1935, p. 159.51 Czezowski 1927.˙52 Czezowski 1918.˙53 Czezowski 1918, p. 12.˙54 For more on this topic see Dambska 1979a.55 Wolenski 1994, p. 85.´56 Simons and Wolenski 1989.´57 Dummett 1988 [1993].58 Bolzano 1837 [1972].59 Brentano 1874 [1973].

Chapter 2

THE NOTION OF THE TRUTH BEARER

1. The Place of the Notion of the Truth Bearerin the Theory of Truth

Critics of the analytic position in philosophy state that when one does not knowhow to begin an issue, one begins with an analysis of the usage of a term inordinary language. I am not, however, in a position to begin such an analysis,for the term I am interested in, the ‘truth bearer’, does not belong to ordinarylanguage. It is one of those terms that are introduced for a special purposein a given theory: the ‘truth bearer’ is a term introduced for the purposes ofa general philosophical theory of truth. Thus, in order to verify whether theterm is useful for such a theory, one should take a look at the general frameworkof such a theory.

Recent philosophers commonly include under the notion of a ‘theory oftruth’ such general topics as the definition of truth, the criteria for truth, andthe question of the bearers of truth. Each of these topics receives separatetreatment in Bertrand Russell’s writings on truth.1 Thus, one can claim thatthe tradition in which the theory of truth consists of those parts is as old asanalytic philosophy itself. When we examine the literature on truth in the his-tory of philosophy it seems that there is also a fourth part of a general theoryof truth which should be taken into account, namely the theory of truthmak-ers. The view according to which the truth of a judgment or a sentence (or ofwhatever is true) depends on circumstances in the world is as old as the juridi-cal and rhetorical uses of terms such as ‘status rerum’ in the ancient world.The philosophical statement that truth has an objective correlate on the side ofthe world goes back as far as Aristotle.2 The classical correspondence theoryof truth is taken by some philosophers to support the view that such worldlycorrelates of truth demand more theoretical attention than is usually given tothem. In the twentieth century, the theory of truthmakers found support among

23

24 CHAPTER TWO

such prominent philosophers as Edmund Husserl, and it is presented even inthe work of Russell, although in those parts of his writing that are today com-monly neglected.

I would insist that we need to seriously consider each of the four parts ofa general theory of truth mentioned above if we are to do justice to the subjectmatter. However, a considerable number of theories of truth ignore some ofthese parts. Tarski’s theory of truth for formalized languages, for instance,ignores the question of a criterion for truth, and since his theory presents anextensional definition of truth, according to some critics it does not deal withthe issue of an explanation of the concept of truth either. Similarly, but inanother respect, some of the so-called ‘criteriological theories of truth’, suchas pragmatic theories or theories based on the concept of evidence, do not paymuch attention to the problem of a formally correct definition of truth. The partof a general theory of truth that focuses on the issue of the truth bearer is veryoften not treated seriously. Lorenz Puntel, for example, makes the followingattempt to contribute to reflections on truth that try to avoid the issue of thetruth bearer:

The expression ‘truth bearer’ (. . .) should be used here only with the remark that, be-cause of connotations that lead to apparent questions, it would be better to avoid italtogether. (Puntel 1987, pp. 14–15—my translation)

The purpose of Puntel’s theory is to offer an exhaustive explanation of thenotion of truth as it has appeared in the history of philosophy. He wants to dothis without raising the question of truth bearers. Yet not only explanationaltheories of truth deny the importance of the notion of the truth bearer. Someproponents of the theory of truthmakers also claim the right to ignore otherareas in looking at truth: they propose a theory of truth without truth bearers.3

A malicious response to a truthmaking theory without truth bearers would beto ask what in this case is supposed to be made true? At this stage, however,I would only like to mention that this is what Puntel sees as a semi-problemand what Armstrong wants to avoid completely, i.e. the question of the truthbearer, which, in my view, involves important philosophical issues. That thisis the case is sufficiently clear when we consider the Brentanian tradition withrespect to the theories of truth and its bearers. I think that the choices madewith respect to the entities that may serve as truth bearers are linked to, or areeven the plain results of, a considerable number of philosophical investigations.For Kazimierz Twardowski, for example, ‘a definition of truth assumes a viewconcerning the essence of the judgment.’4 In the Brentanian tradition the topicof the truth bearer was also quite strongly connected with the problem of the‘reality’ which makes them true. The issue of the objects of judgments aspresented in theories such as the theory of objectives or the theory of states ofaffairs not only implied a definite view on truth but was also connected withspecial investigations concerning truthmakers. Generally speaking, I am of the

The Notion of the Truth Bearer 25

opinion that the theory of the truth bearer played and still plays an importantphilosophical role in the theory of truth. The subsequent chapters of the presentwork are an attempt to show to what extent this is the case.

2. The Problem of the Truth BearerWhat then is the ‘problem of the truth bearer’? I cannot turn to its usage inordinary language; I can, however, look at how people use the predicates ‘true’and ‘false’, respectively, in ordinary usage. This shows us a path to the issuewhich I call here the problem of the truth bearer. Since I am going to con-centrate upon a selected philosophical tradition, i.e. the tradition of Brentanianphilosophy, I shall take the liberty of using the words of Franz Brentano whosuperbly described the situation of the usage of the words ‘true’ and ’false’ inGerman:

We call many thoughts, ideas, or presentations true, and we call others false (hallucina-tions, for example, we call false); we call concepts true or false, we call judgments trueor false; we call conjectures, hopes, and anxieties true or false; we call a heart, a mind,true or false (un esprit faux); we call external things true or false; we call sayings trueor false; we call conduct true or false; we call expressions, letters of the alphabet, andmany other signs, true or false; we call a friend, we call gold, true or false. We speak oftrue happiness and of false happiness, and the latter locution, in turn, may be used forvery different purposes, sometimes because we only seem to be happy, and sometimesbecause the happiness we have had has treacherously forsaken us. Similarly, we say onoccasion: a false woman, namely when she is a flirtatious girl teasing us; but in anothersense a false woman would be a man posing as a woman, as in the case of a thief whowas wearing women’s clothes when he was arrested; and still in another sense a falsewoman would be a man who has no thought of pretending to be a woman but neverthe-less is taken for one, a thing that actually happened to me at dawn one morning in theentrance to the Würzburg fortress. At the time I was wearing a cassock, and the horrorand bafflement of the man was all the greater, and the more comic. (Brentano 1930[1966, p. 5])

Hence, the problem of the truth bearer relies here on the standard formula-tion of examples as far as the ambiguity of the notion of truth is concerned.However, I am not primarily interested in these ambiguities, but rather in whattruth is predicated of. Thus, given the examples described by Brentano, it ispredicated of the following entities: thoughts, ideas, presentations, concepts,conjectures, hopes, anxieties, the heart, the mind, things, sayings, behavior,letters of the alphabet, signs, friends, gold, happiness and so on. As one caneasily see, the situations that Brentano originally describes in German also takeplace in other languages, such as English or Polish. The variety of uses of thewords ‘true’ and ’false’ leads philosophers like Brentano to consider the shadesof meaning of these words and to ask questions such as the following: Is thereone or more correct ways of using these words? Why can we predicate thesame word ‘true’ of different entities? This is what I call here ‘the problem ofthe truth bearer.’ These and similar questions arise not only regarding the ad-

26 CHAPTER TWO

jectives ‘true’ and ‘false’, but also with respect to their adverbial forms, ‘truly’and ‘falsely.’ One can truly or falsely predict the weather, truly or falsely an-swer a question, truly and falsely judge, etc. Saying that ‘truth’ is ambiguousdoes not exhaustively answer such questions.

3. The Definition of the Truth BearerThe entities of which the words ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘truly’ and ‘falsely’ are af-firmed can be named ‘truth bearers.’ Thus, we can formulate a definition ofthe truth bearer that I would like to call the linguistic definition of the truthbearer (LDTB):

(LDTB)The truth bearer is that of which one affirms that it is true (of which thepredicates ‘is true’ and ‘is truly’ are affirmed).5

Therefore, everything of which we are accustomed to say that it is true, false,truly or falsely is a truth bearer. Alternatively, one can formulate another de-finition of the truth bearer, which I shall call the ontological definition of thetruth bearer (ODTB):

(ODTB)The truth bearer is an entity that can possess the attribute of being true orof being false.6

Because of the standards of contemporary semantics such attributes are todayvery often called ‘truth values.’

The definitions LDTB and ODTB, however, are not equivalent. For in-stance, the truly judging person in Brentano’s theory of (der wahr Urteilende)satisfies the linguistic definition of the truth bearer without satisfying the onto-logical definition of the truth bearer. We say about people that they are truly orfalsely judging persons. Yet in saying this we do not, according to Brentano,refer to any special property of being a truly or falsely judging person. In otherwords the truly judging person is not different from the merely judging person.Thus, truly or falsely judging persons are not truth bearers according to theODTB. Using Twardowski’s distinction between determining and modifyinguses of adjectives, one can predicate truth of an entity in a non-determiningway, i.e. in a way that does not ascribe any attribute to it.7 The Brentanianact of judging is thus not true in an attributive sense, i.e. ‘being true’ is notthe name of a property of a mental act of judging as it is in the case of suchexpressions as ‘being evident’ or ‘being apodictic.’

When considering the non-equivalence of these two definitions I shall usethe following hybrid definition of the truth bearer, which I believe is also theimplicitly accepted definition of the truth bearer in the Lvov-Warsaw School:


(HDTB)The truth bearer is an entity of which the predicate ‘is true’ can be affirmedin a determining way.

The definition is a hybrid since it combines the linguistic and ontological de-finitions into one. The HDTB is useful when one wants to exclude as truthbearers entities where predication using ‘true’ or ‘false (‘truly’ and ‘falsely’)does not refer to a special property of theirs.

Now, if one looks at various analogies between the problems of knowledgeand truth (such as, for example, the problem of the objectivity of knowledgeand the objectivity of truth)8 one can propose another definition of the truthbearer which I shall call the epistemic definition of the truth bearer:

(EDTB)The truth bearer is an epistemological tool of which we can attribute theepistemic evaluation of being true.

Here the expression ‘epistemological tool’ should be understood broadly, so asto include all that can be useful for an act of cognition. An additional assump-tion is that not the truth but true (or correct) knowledge is understood here asthe primary notion. The epistemological notion of the truth bearer usually re-lies on such bearers as the judging thing (Brentano and Kotarbinski), the actóf judging (Brentano and Twardowski), the sentence (Lesniewski and Tarski),´the proposition or other ideal meanings (the standard view on what knowledgeconsists of in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophical world).

4. The Variety of Truth BearersOne can inquire what we are to do with the fact that the range of applicabilityof the predicates ‘is true’ and ‘is false’ in ordinary language is quite broad?One of the solutions can be the following: One can judge that the variety ofthe entities which serve as truth bearers, especially when truth bearers are un-derstood according to the linguistic definition of the truth bearer, lead to therecognition of the notion of the truth bearer as vague. Continuing this line ofthought, it might at first glance appear that we are dealing with a mere am-biguity of the term ‘truth bearer.’ Therefore, speaking of truth bearers meansraising problems that cannot contribute anything to the notion of truth.

Moreover, and this would be a second solution to the problem of the truthbearer, one can use the hybrid definition of the truth bearer and add to the pre-vious solution the modification that the occurrence of the variety of the usesof the predicates ‘true’ and ’false’ in ordinary language has nothing to do withtheir semantic function. This means that the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ refer tonothing when used as predicates. Thus, the variety of their uses and the vague-ness of the notion of the truth bearer show only an expressive function of lan-guage with its unlimited possibilities of decorating sentences with the help of

28 CHAPTER TWO

words such as ‘true’ and ’false’, a decorating which for unknown reasons stillremains an object of philosophical interest. As a matter of fact, according tothis view the usage of the predicate ‘true’ is not different from drawing a heartin a diary, which is a way of expressing our feelings about the objects to whichour registration refers. Since the predicate ‘true’ has no semantic function, onecan fully omit the problem of the truth bearer, unless one is interested in theexpression of our feelings by using words like ‘true’ and ‘false’ under a varietyof circumstances. I call both of these views, in accordance with the history ofthe notion of truth, the ‘nihilistic’ approach to the problem of the truth bearer.In fact, for such views, the problem of truth bearer never comes into existence.

A contrary view is the position that I call a ‘pluralistic’ approach to thenotion of truth bearers. A pluralist would claim, following the LDTB, thatall entities of which the word ‘true’ can be affirmed, provided they satisfy thegrammatical constraints of a given language, are truth bearers. According tothis view we should not limit the scope of expressions in which the predicate‘is true’ occurs. We cannot pass over any of these expressions in silence, sinceall of them can contribute to the understanding of the notion of truth. Thispluralistic attitude, whose point of departure is the opposite to that of the ni-hilistic approach, leads to very similar conclusions: it seems to guarantee thatthe problem of the truth bearer never appears. Thus, I call both of these ap-proaches, the nihilistic and the pluralistic, ‘redundant’ approaches to the prob-lem of the truth bearer. For these theories the problem of the truth bearer isredundant. A redundant approach to the problem of the truth bearer thereforeincludes every deflationary theory of truth, for example, such as those proposedby Ramsey, Austin, Belnap and Strawson. Moreover, it also includes theorieswhere ‘anything goes’, i.e. theories where every entity can serve as the truthbearer provided it fulfills the grammatical constraints of a given language. Thiskind of attitude is represented by heuristic investigations of truth (such as thatof Puntel) and every kind of linguistic classification of ordinary usage (suchas, to some extent, that of Austin).

The problem of the truth bearer becomes a philosophical problem only if oneaccepts that the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ (and, respectively, ‘truly’ and ‘falsely’)fulfill various functions in the expressions in which they appear. Moreover, itshould be recognized that some of these functions are more worthy of attentionthan others. Do we not have something different in mind when we predicateabout a coquette after an unsuccessful flirtation that she is a false woman andwhen we say ‘false woman’ in trying to learn whether a female witness’s tes-timony has any value in a trial? Thus, one can try to determine the ways inwhich the predicates ‘is true’ and ‘is false’ are affirmed of different entities. Ifone is interested in the ordering of the uses of truth-predicates, then one cancarry this out in at least two ways.

First, the goal of one’s investigation concerning truth bearers would bea classification of the functions of the words ‘true’ and ’false’ in the expres-


sions in which they occur. The task seems to be difficult for philosophers.At Quine’s insistence I would prefer to leave it to linguists, whose methodsfor analyzing contexts and finding synonyms are more appropriate here. I amafraid, however, that the use of their taxonomy proposals would again lead usto a pluralistic approach to the problem of truth bearers, i.e. to pluralism at allcosts with regard to the entities serving as truth bearers in order to perfect anexplanation of the notion of truth.

Secondly, one can deal with the phenomenon of ordinary language, lookingfor the ‘correct’, ‘right’, ‘proper’ or ‘genuine’ use (or uses) of truth-predicates,and not only from the grammatical point of view.

The pluralistic view claims that every grammatically correct expression inwhich truth-predicates occur is a correct use of these words. Nihilistic viewsclaim that the correct use of the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ is any expression inwhich these words occur in the function of a heart in a diary. Yet there are alsoother descriptions of the correct use of these predicates. These are, as we shallsee, partly the issue of this study. Roughly speaking, the following ways ofdealing with the choice of the correct bearer of truth exist: the reductionisticapproach, the selective approach, and the selective-reductionistic approach.

The reductionist claims that there is only one correct use of the predicate‘is true.’ A reductionist chooses one correct truth bearer and all other bearersof truth are seen as secondary (but not redundant) bearers with regard to thiscorrect one. For example, the act of judging can be seen as the primary truthbearer of which the predicate ‘true’ is correctly affirmed. Sentences, utter-ances, or persons can be true, in this example, only with respect to the true actof judging. The relation of the latter to the former, however, demands explana-tion: how are the truth-values of sentences, utterances, and persons related tothe truth of an act of judging?

One answer could be, for instance, that the judger is a truly judging personbecause he or she makes a true judgment; an utterance or a sentence is truebecause it expresses a true judgment, and so on. Thus the reductionist is alsoobligated to explain (to reduce) all other uses of truth-predicates in terms of theproper one. In the example of a correct act of judging and secondary bearersof truth such as sentences, utterances and persons, it means that a reductionisthas to answer such questions as why the predicate ‘is false’ is affirmed both ofgold and of women. (One possible answer is to say that the expression ‘falsewoman’ is to be used when a female witness makes false statements underoath and ‘false gold’ when we make false judgments about the real marketvalue of a yellow piece of metal.) Brentano, for example, held this kind ofreductionistic view.9

The selective approach is the view according to which only one entity, suchas, for example, the act of judging, can serve as the bearer of truth in the propersense. To say about any other entity that it is true is a kind of mistake or, atmost, an unimportant phenomenon of everyday language without significance

30 CHAPTER TWO

for a theory of truth. Thus, there are no secondary truth bearers in this account.Selectivists such as Quine and Horwich choose only one entity (the formersentences and the latter propositions) of which we can predicate that ‘it is true’and, therefore claim that ‘it is the truth bearer.’

Finally, the selective-reductionistic approach to the problem of the truthbearer presents an account where there is one correct way of affirming truth-predicates of an entity, but there are also secondary truth bearers. What dis-tinguishes this account from pure reductionism is that there are incorrect waysof using these predicates. As an example of such a view we can take, follow-ing the previous example, the act of judging as the genuine bearer of truth.Sentences and persons then are secondary bearers, and predications like ‘truewoman’ or ‘false gold’ are incorrect uses of truth-predicates. (This is, accord-ing to the hybrid definition of the truth bearer, because in these cases they arenot used in a determining way.) In fact, the selective-reductionistic accountis nowadays a standard view in dealing with the problem of the truth bearer.When speaking about truth, contemporary philosophers committed to Englishas a philosophical language must choose one of the following truth bearers: as-sertions, statements, sentences or propositions. In choosing one of them as thegenuine entity serving as the truth bearer, for instance propositions, the remain-ing entities, statements and assertions, are treated as secondary truth bearers.This is because propositions are the meanings of sentences, and propositionsare what is stated in statements and asserted in assertions, understood withinthe context of the propositional attitude.

An entirely different problem is to seek the entity that is to serve as thecorrect, genuine, or primary truth bearer. The reasons for choosing such anentity do not always rely only on a linguistic description of the usage of truth-predicates. Despite the ambiguity of the uses of ‘true’ and ‘false’, several otherissues are involved in this kind of choice. Those who propound reductionis-tic or reductionistic-selective approaches are therefore obligated not only topresent a way of reducing the variety of bearers for truth to one correct way ofsaying that something is true; they are also obligated to give a reason for thechoice of the correct or primary truth bearer. This also seems to be the casewith regard to the selective attitude to the problem of truth bearers. Some ofthe reasons for choosing the correct truth bearer are described in the chaptersthat follow.

Notes1 See Russell 1912, especially the chapter on truth and falsity.2 Categories 14b, 14–22.3 Armstrong 1998, p. 5.4 Twardowski 1975, p. 254.5 Compare with Nuchelmans 1973.6 Compare with: Morscher, Simons 1982.


7 I shall use the helpful distinction between determining and modificational uses of adjectives in the waydefined by Kazimierz Twardowski (Twardowski, 1894, 1927). ‘An adjective is called determining, ifit completes, enlarges—be it in a positive or in a negative direction—the meaning of the expression towhich it is attached. An adjective is modifying if it completely changes the original meaning of thename to which it is attached.’ (Twardowski 1894 [1972, p. 11]). The word ‘firm’ in ‘a firm handshake’is used determinatively, whereas the word ‘declined’ in ‘a declined handshake’ is used as a modifyingadjective. For more information also see chapter 4 below.

8 See chapter 7 below.9 See more on this topic in chapter 3.

Chapter 3

DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY: THE THEORYOF JUDGEMENT AS THE THEORYOF COGNITION AND KNOWLEDGE

1. Franz Brentano (I): The Act of Judging as the TruthBearer

Franz Brentano was conscious of the problem of the truth bearer in that he wasable to describe it in the way cited in the previous chapter. He also gave gen-eral reasons for choosing acts of judging as the entities serving as truth bearers.In what follows I shall present some of these reasons. Since Brentano’s argu-ments can be seen as a part of the science of descriptive psychology that hefounded, as well as a part of what we would nowadays call linguistic investiga-tions, I shall divide his argumentation into two parts. In the first section of thischapter I shall present the descriptive-psychological part of Brentano’s argu-mentation. I shall briefly describe their linguistic counterparts at the beginningof the next chapter.

It is quite difficult to make unambiguous statements about Brentano’s philo-sophical views. This is because he belongs to the group of philosophers whohave changed their views more than once in the course of their philosophi-cal activity. Moreover, since most of Brentano’s writings are given in statunascendi, it is difficult to give an ultimate interpretation. I shall try to distin-guish as clearly as possible Brentano’s reistic philosophy from his earlier pe-riod (or periods—as Brentanian interpreters hold). Hence the previously men-tioned two sections introducing two different chapters concerning Brentano’sview on the truth bearer in his earlier period of philosophical activity. His reis-tic arguments as to the truth bearers are included in another chapter (Chapter6) which focuses exclusively on this much stronger philosophical position.

1.1 The Variety of Entities Related to the Act of JudgingIn order to understand Brentano’s first argument regarding the choice of the actof judging as the truth bearer, we can use his own words:

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34 CHAPTER THREE

It is with reference to the truth or falsity of judgment that the other things which bearthese names may properly be said to be true or false: some things because they expressa true or a false judgment, such as a false assertion, or a false utterance; some thingsbecause they produce a true or false judgment, as in the case of hallucination, or a slipin uttering or in writing word, or a metal which is taken for gold because of similarityin colour; some things because they are intended to produce a true or false judgment,as for instance a true spirit or a false mannerism; and some things because one whoconsiders them real judges truly or falsely—for example, a true god, or a true stone incontrast to one that is painted. Some concepts are called true or false with respect to thatwhich coincides, or fails to coincide, with their content, since here a true or erroneousjudgment turns upon a discovery about this content; thus we may speak of rectangularfigure as not being the true notion of square, and so forth. (Brentano 1930, p. 6 [1971,p. 6])

The observation in the passage cited in the previous chapter regarding thediagnosis of the problem of the truth bearer, i.e. that there are several linguisticuses of the words ‘true’ and false’, is not exhaustive for Brentano. FollowingAristotle, he seeks a unique usage for these words. He finds that all expres-sions of ordinary language in which the words ‘true’ and ‘truth’ occur possessa unique relation to the act of judging at the cognitive level. All mental actsthat we say to be true and all objects of which we can say that they are true,are so because of their relation to an act of judging. In other words, all entitiesof which we predicate ‘true’ rely, according to Brentano, on acts of judging,and they are reducible to these acts in the way described above by him. Judg-ing on the basis of the usage of truth-predicates in ordinary language Brentanopresents, therefore, a reductive account as to the problem of the variety of en-tities that seem to serve as bearers of truth.

1.2 The Primacy of the Notion of Knowledge in Relationto the Notion of Truth

It seems, however, that the main philosophical issue with which Brentano isconcerned is not the notion of truth, but rather general epistemological ques-tions. One of those questions is how we come to know something withoutfalling into error. Since, for Brentano, knowledge is inseparable from acts ofknowing in the sense in which we nowadays distinguish acts of cognition andtheir products, knowledge is for him equivalent to a certain set of acts of judg-ing. Hence, the above question can be reformulated in the following manner:how is cognition without error possible? The description of acts of knowingand their classifications are the subject of descriptive psychology. For Brentanothe latter was a new branch of empirical science devised to carry out researchon mental acts in general, a part of which consists of acts of knowing. Thestatements concerning the methodology of this science may be found in thefirst volume of Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.1

The concept of knowledge as used by Brentano, however, is ambiguous.For him ‘knowledge’ means ‘acts of knowing.’ In the first sense knowledge

Descriptive Psychology 35

consists of a class of judgments to which there belong two different types ofacts of knowing: directly evident judgments (for example, judgments aboutour mental activity such as ‘I judge that x’ or ‘I see y’) and indirectly evi-dent judgments (such as, for example, judgments of the form ‘If Socrates isa man and all men are mortal then Socrates is mortal’). In the second sense,Brentano takes ‘knowledge’ (also as an act of knowing) to mean only directlyevident judgments. These two different senses of what Brentano refers to as‘knowledge’ are distinguished with respect to the judgments which Brentanocalls indirectly evident judgments, i.e. with regard to the judgments which arederived from directly evident judgments with the use of logic and probabilisticrules (such as, for instance, ‘Given x and y it is possible that z’). These arejudgments that do not belong to knowledge in the second sense of ‘knowledge.’

In both cases, however, the class of acts of knowing is that of judgments.Moreover, in both senses of ‘knowledge’, the different classes of acts of know-ing rely on one single type of judgment, i.e. on directly evident judgments.(Thus, for example, the syllogism with Socrates is based on the logical scheme‘If S is P and P is Q then S is Q’; and the x’s and y’s above must be directlyevident judgment.) Since directly evident judgments also play a crucial role asregards the concept of truth (true judgments, as we shall see later, are definedby Brentano with the help of the notion of directly evident judgments in thesense that truths are directly evident judgments and judgments that would cor-respond to the directly evident judgments), one can ask about the primacy ofthe two notions of truth and of knowledge.

On the one hand, according to Brentano all acts of knowing are true. Onthe other hand, however, not all true judgments can be properly called ‘knowl-edge.’ There are, namely, true judgments which are blind, i.e. made withoutevidence and whose truth, since it is not guaranteed by evidence, is accidental.Therefore, it is not surprising that Brentano, in concentrating on the notion ofevidence and directly evident judgment, was primarily interested in knowledgeand not in truth. This comes out quite clearly when one looks at Brentano’sclassifications of judgments.

Judgements, according to him, possess various epistemic qualities: they canbe correct or incorrect, probable or certain, evident or non-evident, a priorior a posteriori, affirmative or negative, and assertoric or apodictic. Brentanoholds that each of these dual characteristics represents an actual differencein the acts of judgment themselves. The epistemic qualifications on whichBrentano’s classification of judgments relies refer to a real difference in theact of judgment, i.e. to some property of such an act. These properties canbe objects of descriptive psychology. Thus, these epistemic qualifications aremore worthy of attention than predications of judgments that reflect no realproperty of judging acts. As we shall see later this is the case with the clas-sification of judgments into true and false judgments. The latter do not referto something that could be an object of descriptive psychology. ‘Is true’ does

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not refer to a property of an act of judging, such as ‘being true.’ This lack ofa real difference between true and false judgments on the level of descriptivepsychology has, in Brentano’s account, its explanation on the level of linguisticanalysis. Brentano characterizes the words ‘true’ and ’false’ as syncategore-matic words.2

1.3 An Argument Based on the Gnoseological Conceptof Truth

Brentano insists that the classical correspondence theory of truth that comesfrom Aristotle and was later held by Scholastics is in this respect indefensible.3

Alfred Kastil, one of Brentano’s students whose views are very close to thoseof his teacher, describes the result of Brentano’s rejection of correspondencetheory of truth as follows:

Thus, this ‘ontological concept of truth’ should be rejected as fictitious. If there is to bea concept of the truth, then it can be only a gnoseological one, i.e. a concept which canbe obtained, as all other concepts of the differences of judgment, from the perceptionof our judging attitude. (Kastil 1934, p. 6—my translation)

The only way to explain the concept of truth, then, is by means of a carefuldescriptive-psychological analysis of differences in judging acts which makethem such that they are true in the proper sense. The expression ‘in the propersense’ means that the class of judgments which are to be identified as trueshould coincide exactly with the class of the directly evident judgments, a no-tion which relies on the empirical notion of evidence.

1.4 An Argument Based on the Idiogenetic Theoryof Judgement

Descriptive psychology as carried out by Brentano offers another crucial ar-gument for the choice of the act of judging as the truth bearer. This argumentrefers to the so-called idiogenetic theory of judgment. The idiogenetic theory ofjudgment states that judgments present a specific and basic type of mental phe-nomenon. However, before any classification of mental phenomena is carriedout, we need a clear demarcation of the mental acts that present the objectsof descriptive psychology. In order to identify mental phenomena, Brentanoclaims that we need some unique property which would distinguish the mentalfrom other types of phenomena. Hence Brentano’s much-mooted principle ofthe intentionality of the mental states that a mental act (which, for Brentano,means a mental event) is always an act of or about something. A presenta-tion is always a presenting of something, a judgment is always a judging ofsomething and a phenomenon of love, and hate is always a loving or hating ofsomething. Then, using the distinction between different types of intentionalattitudes, Brentano identifies three basic types of mental or intentional phe-nomena: presenting, judging, and the phenomena of love and hate. Each of


these three types of mental phenomena is determined by its own characteristicintentional relation or intentional directedness.

A presentation is an act in which the subject is conscious of an object with-out taking up any position concerning it. ‘To be present’ means simply ‘to beconscious of’, and such an act may be either intuitive or conceptual. That is,we can have an object before our mind either in sensory experience (and invariant forms thereof in imagination), or conceptually—for example when wethink of the concepts of color or pain in general. Presentations may be also ei-ther (relatively) simple or (relatively) complex, a distinction which recalls theBritish empiricists’ doctrine of simple and complex ideas. A simple presenta-tion, for example, is that of a red sensum, while a complex presentation is thatof an array of differently coloured squares.4

On the basis of a presentation, now, new sorts of intentionality can takeplace. Above all, the objects given in presentations can be either accepted (inpositive judgments) or rejected (in negative judgments). In other words, oneof two diametrically opposed modes of being related to this object, which wemay call ‘acceptance’ and ‘rejection’, respectively, may be added to the simplemanner of being related to an object in presentation. Both are, for Brentano,specific events of consciousness. Brentano did not distinguish clearly enoughbetween states of belief, on the one hand, and the acts thereof, on the other.This is because every act takes place only at a certain point in time. Brentano’sconcept of acceptance comes close to that which is expressed by the Englishterm belief, which means that Brentano also did not distinguish judging fromffbelieving. A judgment is, somewhat crudely put, either a belief or a disbeliefin the existence of an object. Hence all judgments have one of two canonicalforms: ‘A exists’ and ‘A does not exist.’ This is Brentano’s famous existentialtheory of judgment. Its importance consists, among other things, in the fact thatit is the first influential alternative to the combination theory of judgment, a the-ory that had long remained unchallenged. The combination theory of judgmentwas strictly connected with an atomistic view of the construction of conceptsheld by the British empiricists, on the one hand, and with the subject-predicateform of judgments as described by Aristotle’s syllogisms, on the other. Forthe purpose of this study, however, it is fairly important to see Brentano’s id-iogenetic and existential theory of judgment in its relation to the concept oftruth and its bearer: what can be true, then, is believing or disbelieving in theexistence of an object.

Taking Brentano’s view on judgment as a specific basic existential mentalphenomenon which serves as the genuine bearer of truth, it is also possibleto explain theories of truth in the sense of being (or, what here amounts tothe same thing, the theories of being in the sense of truth). Brentano sees themoment of acceptance (and, respectively, the moment of rejection) as a cer-tain way of the intentional taking of an object [intentionale Aufnahme einesGegenstandes], which determines judging acts as constituting a specific class

38 CHAPTER THREE

of mental phenomena. Each accepting judging act is, according to this view,a certain way of holding something as true. ‘To accept something’ means, thus,‘to hold something as true’ or ‘to accept something as truth’ (and respectively,‘to reject something as false’). Hence the judging act presents an intention inwhich something is stated as true or false. This, according to Brentano, is theonly way in which the notion of being in the sense of truth can be correctlyunderstood.

1.5 The Definition of the Act of Judgingas the Truth Bearer

In the early period of his philosophical activity Brentano held the act of judgingto be the primary bearer of truth. The act of judging is a mental act that iseither the accepting or the rejecting of something. We must now determinewhat exactly this ‘something’ which is rejected or accepted in a judging actis. Brentano calls what he sees as rejected or accepted in the judging act thematter of the judgment. The mode in which the matter is judged (accepted orrejected) he calls the judgment’s quality. Each judgment has an underlying(simple or complex) presentation, and the matter of a judgment is that which ispresented. Now, the next question is what the notion ‘that which is presented’means?

There are, I think, at least two ways of answering this question. The firstway, using Twardowski’s terms, is to determine whether that which is pre-sented is the content of a judgment or the object of a judgment.5 In other words,is the accepted or rejected matter of a judging act an object immanent to themind or is it, so to speak, a target of a judging activity external to the mind?This kind of interpretation of Brentano’s notion of the matter of a judgmenthas, however, its difficulties for at least two reasons. First of all, Twardowski’sdistinction between content and object was made in the middle of Brentano’sphilosophical activity (around 1894), i.e. between the two periods that I haveroughly split into the early period and the period of reism. Secondly, it is hardto determine whether Brentano’s notion of the matter of a judgment taken as anexternal object would be the same as the object of a presentation in Twardow-ski’s terms. This is because even the latter can be interpreted as an immanentobject.6

The second way of explaining the notion of ‘that which is presented’ is onewhich makes use of the concept of intentionality. Unfortunately, the famouspassage from Brentano’s Psychology leaves room for a variety of possible in-terpretations of precisely this concept.7 Here again, the interpretation of thispassage possesses at least two dimensions. The first concerns the relationaland non-relational interpretations of the property of ‘being directed towards anobject’, as a gloss on the phrase ‘being intentional.’ The second has to do with


questions such as what the object of each type of mental act is and how theydepend on each other.

Let us consider the first dimension of the interpretation of intentionality.The relational interpretation of intentionality sees all mental acts as directedtowards objects as their transcendent targets. That this interpretation is some-what problematical can be seen by reflecting on the acts involved in readingfiction or on those cases where our acts rest on mistaken presuppositions ofexistence. What, then, are the objects to which we are related intentionallyin our mental activity? The thesis that all mental acts are directed towardsobjects in the relational sense, to objects external to the mind, seems to beclearly false, unless, with Meinong, we presuppose another mode of existenceof objects.8 However, a careful reading of Brentano forces a non-relational in-terpretation, which sees intentionality as property of mental acts, the propertyof their being directed. Somehow, the immanent ‘object’ in this context is tobe understood simply as the ‘correlate of presentation’, a notion embracingsimple and complex data of sense in particular. Thus, when Brentano speaksof ‘objects’, he is not referring to putative transcendent targets of mental acts.He is referring, rather, to immanent ‘objects of thought’, and in fact no dis-tinction is drawn in Brentano’s treatment in the Psychology between ‘content’and ‘object’ in the sense in which Twardowski does this in his later work.Brentano insists that what is thought of has a merely derivative being. The actof thought is something real (a real event or process), but the object of thoughthas being only to the extent that the act which thinks it has being. The ob-ject of thought is according to its nature something non-real which dwells in[innewohnt] a thinker.9

While Brentano’s statement of the intentionality principle in the often quotedpassage from the Psychology is not entirely clear, he himself appends a foot-note to this in which he states explicitly that for him the intentionality relationalways holds between an act and an object immanent to the mind. He points outthat the speech of mental in-existence is to be found in Aristotle, and he goeson to elaborate Aristotle’s theory according to which ‘the object that is thoughtis in the thinking intellect.’ Brentano’s more detailed formulations of the samethesis may also be found in his Descriptive Psychology [Descriptive Psychol-ogy] where ‘immanent objects’ are explicitly assigned to what Brentano callsthe ‘parts of the soul in the strict or literal sense.’10

Occasionally Brentano gives grounds for accepting the first, relational inter-pretation. In the second edition of his Psychology Brentano rejects his earlierassumption that the objects of mental acts exist immanently. He uses the term‘content’, which used to be understood by his successors in the manner of animmanent object. As he points out, the term ‘content’ should not stand forsomething immanent to the subject, and he himself used to use this term to sig-nify the object of mental phenomena. He therefore shares the later distinctionbetween object and content as described by Twardowski.

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For the purposes of this study I have chosen this last interpretation of the no-tion of ‘that which is presented.’ I have chosen this interpretation of Brentano’s‘intentionality’ for the following reasons. First, I have no doubts that this in-terpretation should be taken into account in the reistic phase of Brentano’sphilosophy. Thus, I shall not change Brentano’s notion of intentionality in thecourse of this study. Secondly, this interpretation is consistent with Twardow-ski’s distinction between the content and the object of presenting acts, whichI can therefore use without any ambiguity for the purposes of this study. De-spite these methodological motivations there are also general philosophicalreasons to share this interpretation of intentionality as far as the early period ofBrentano’s philosophical activity is concerned. Thus, thirdly, an immanentisticreading of Brentano’s concept of intentionality leads to the following problem:If the objects of the judging act were taken as immanent objects (as the contentof presentations in Twardowski’s terminology), then it would be possible tojudge only about mental phenomena (about concepts). This would be equiv-alent to the statement that our perception is limited only to inner perception,which is not the case even in Brentano’s introspective psychology. For exam-ple, the sentence ‘The red rose exists’ is not about concepts such as rose andredness but about the rose as a transcendent target. According to Brentano,we also judge about the external world in external perception. Fourthly, wecannot exclude external perception from our acts since it plays a crucial role inthe genesis of all general presentations (concepts). Brentano states, and in thisrespect he follows his predecessors, the British empiricists and Kant, that allconcepts which he considers to be general presentations come from externalperception. The contents of presentations are in this sense secondary. Theyare secondary as regards the external object of presentation. Fifthly, an imma-nentistic reading of Brentano’s concept of intentionality, and therefore of ‘thatwhich is presented’, faces other difficulties, especially in dealing with negativeexistential judgments such as ‘God does not exist.’ Such a judgment seems, onthe face of it, both to have and to lack an object. These difficulties were in partthe reason why Brentano and his immediate successors began to reconsiderthe original thesis that acts of judgment get their external objects (contents,matters) from underlying acts of presentation.

This leads us to an additional argument for using Twardowski’s distinctionbetween object and content when referring to the early Brentano. This argu-ment has to do with the aforementioned second dimension of interpretations ofthe notion of intentionality, which is related to the three basic types of mentalphenomena, i.e. to the presentations, judgments, and the phenomena of loveand hate. Interpretations of Brentano’s concept of intentionality also differwith respect to the assertion that all acts are directed towards (immanent ortranscendent) objects in their own right. In one interpretation some acts bor-row their directedness from other acts, on which they are founded. Accordingto this interpretation, it is presentation that does the job of securing directed-


ness toward objects in every case. Judgements, emotions, and acts of the willare then intentional only because of the underlying intentionality of presen-tation. A second interpretation sees ‘being directed towards an object’ as anindependent property of all mental acts.11 The intentional relation involved injudgment and in phenomena of love and hate differs here from that involvedin acts of presentation, although—on Brentano’s own account—the object ofa judgment or of the phenomena of love and hate remain the object of pre-sentation. Confusion here is due to the co-existence in Brentano’s account ofthese matters of the thesis that judgments and phenomena of love and hateare dependent upon presentations in the sense that there is no judgment with-out presentation and of the thesis that loving or hating something cannot takeplace without both presentation and judgment. We cannot love or hate redroses without their being presented and without judging them first.

Now, taking Brentano’s notion of ‘that which is presented’ as standing forthe external target and understood in the sense of Twardowski’s object of pre-sentation, we can formulate a more adequate definition of the truth bearer asseen by Brentano: the truth bearer is an act of judging, i.e. a mental act whichis an acceptance or a rejection of the object of presentation on which this judg-ment relies.

2. Kazimierz Twardowski (I): Act-Content-ObjectI have introduced into my discussion of Brentano’s notion of the truth bearerthe distinction between the content and the object of a mental act, a distinctionthat comes from Kazimierz Twardowski. His Habilitation from 1894, pub-lished under the title Vom Gegenstand und Inhalt der Vorstellungen [On theObject and Content of Presentations]12 belongs to the most important works inthe field of descriptive psychology. On the one hand, it is a book that is onlyindirectly related to the problem of the truth bearer upon which I am focusinghere. This is due to the fact that, apart from some notes which I shall mentionbelow, it does not include Twardowski’s theory of truth. However, the studyfrom 1894 seems to be crucial for Twardowski’s own theory of judgment ingeneral. It is also indispensable for the understanding of several philosophicalsolutions presented in the tradition upon which I focus. Twardowski’s study isimportant not only in the context of intentionality or the theory of judgment butalso in other respects, such as, for example, the problem of psychologism. Itis also this work which is responsible for the rediscovery of Bolzano’s philos-ophy in the Brentanian tradition. Bolzano’s Theory of Science, together withhis On the Object and Content of Presentations, strongly influenced EdmundHusserl and Alexius Meinong. Twardowski’s act/content/object distinction oc-cupied an important place in the vocabulary of descriptive psychology for thenext few decades.

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2.1 PresentationIn his study Twardowski observes ambiguities in the term ‘presentation’ and inthe expression ‘that which is presented.’ ‘Presentation’, remarks Twardowski,at times stands for an act (i.e. for an act of presenting); at other times it standsfor ‘that which is presented’ (i.e. for the content given in an act of presenting,which is understood by Twardowski as an immanent object). A similar am-biguity appears in the expression ‘that which is presented.’ At times it standsfor the immanent object of the presenting act (i.e. its content, a mental pic-ture of something external to the presenting subject); at other times it standsfor something which is external to and independent of the presenting subject.Thus, holds Twardowski, what we need are precise distinctions that will avoidthese ambiguities.

Following Brentano, the act of presenting is, for Twardowski, a mental eventor process which is related to an object. Hence, he insists that for every act ofpresenting there is an object and, in consequence, that there are no presentingswithout objects. Twardowski described the object of presentation as follows:

Everything which is, is an object of a possible presentation; everything which is, issomething. (Twardowski 1894 [1977] p. 34)

Whether an object exists or not is undecided in Twardowski’s account.13 Itis, however, problematic how to understand Twardowski’s notion of an object.As Twardowski himself pointed out, an object is not understood as if it werea thing in itself in the Kantian sense; Twardowski’s ‘object’ in Kantian termswould be, rather, a phenomenon. On the other hand, however, Twardowskicompares his notion of an object to the Aristotelico-Scholastic term Ens.14

There is no doubt that an object should be not understood as if it were a thingin an ordinary sense of this word, i.e. as a ‘reistic’ object of the external world.Twardowski defines an object as follows:

Everything that is presented through a presentation, that is affirmed or denied througha judgment, that is desired or detested through an emotion, we call an object. Objectsare either real or not real; they are either possible or impossible; they exist or do notexist. What is common to them all is that they are or they can be the object (not theintentional one) of mental acts, that their linguistic designation is the name (. . .) Every-thing which is in the widest sense ‘something’ is called ‘object’, first of all in regard toa subject, but then also regardless of this relationship. (Twardowski 1894 [1972], p. 37)

In order to avoid an immanentistic reading of his notion of an object, Twar-dowski gives a number of reasons for emphasizing the difference between thecontent of the presenting act and its object. Above all there are properties thatwe attribute to the objects of acts of presenting which are not properties of itscontents. This, for example, is the case with entities like colors. A red rose isred, but the redness of the rose is not a property of the content of the presentingact which presents it. Contents cannot have any colors. Secondly, the differ-ence between an object and a content can be seen in the fact that the object can


be real or unreal, while the content is always unreal and dependent on the mind.The next argument for the differentiation comes from the phenomenon of thevariation of a presentation: the same object can be presented in different actsof presentation with different contents. The same building, for example, al-though it can be seen from different sides remains the same building. Fourthly,it is possible to present different objects with the same content. For example,the same imagined tree can be used to refer to other trees. The fifth argumenthas to do with judgments: Twardowski observes that we can judge truly abouta non-existent object (for example that Pegasus has wings). Hence, if the con-tent were not really different from the object, it would be impossible for thereto be content where the object does not exist.

Twardowski describes the content itself as:

. . .that link between the act and the object of a presentation by means of which an actintends this particular and no other object. (Twardowski 1894 [1972] p. 28–29)

2.2 The JudgmentThe distinction between an act, its content, and its object is also valid as far asjudgments are concerned. Twardowski considers judgments along Brentano’slines, i.e. as acts of judging. In On the Content and Object of PresentationsTwardowski sees the act of judgment as having a special content of its own,but as inheriting its object from the relevant underlying presentation. For Twar-dowski, as for Brentano, therefore, the content of the judgment is the existenceof the object in question. Judgement-objects are the same objects that are ob-jects of presentations: the same object can be presented and judged. This isbecause Twardowski, following Brentano, sees an act of judging as an act ofacceptance or rejection. In the acceptance of an object the statement of the ex-istence of the underlying object is included; likewise, the rejection of an objectincludes the rejection of the existence of that object:

. . .likewise that which is affirmed or denied through a judgment, without being theobject of the judging behaviour, is the content of the judgment. The content of thejudgment is thus the existence of an object, with which every judgment is concerned;for whoever makes a judgment, asserts something about the existence of an object.(Twardowski 1894 [1977, p. 7])

However, this becomes problematic when one tries to take seriously the anal-ogy between the content of a presentation and the content of a judgment. Thecontent of a presentation is strongly dependent on the act of presentation. Thisis not the case as regards the content of the judging act. The existence of theobject of an act of judging is not dependent on its underlying act: the judgedobject exists or does not exist independently of the act of judging. Thus, eitherthe analogy between the content of a presentation and the content of a judgmentcannot be taken to be as strong as it seems to be at first glance, or one has tosolve this problem in another way. An alternative seems to be either to look for

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another kind of theory for the content/object distinction regarding judgmentsor try to solve the problem by accepting another kind of judgment-object. Infact, this problem was the object of consideration of many of Twardowski’scommentators including Daniela Tenner and Elzbieta Paczkowska-Łagowska.˙On the one hand, Tenner saw the content of the judging act in the judgment,which she understood as an ideal or abstract object that is the product of a judg-ing act (and which later was often called ‘a judgment in the logical sense’). Onthe other hand, Paczkowska-Łagowska saw the content of a judgment in itsjudgment.15 Three years after publishing his habilitation, however, in a let-ter to Meinong, Twardowski suggests that one should also recognize a specialobject of the judging act, in addition to the judgment-content.16 He thereby ef-fected a generalization of the content-object distinction to the sphere of judgingacts, thus yielding a special kind of judgmental object and opening the way forexclusive investigations of that type of entity.

2.3 The Truth of the Object of PresentingAs was mentioned above, in On the Object and Content of Presentation Twar-dowski also includes several remarks regarding the notion of truth. Those areremarks that consider the notion of truth as related to the notion of object,i.e. the problem of being in the sense of truth (or truth in the sense of being).Twardowski above all argues against the view which claims that an object ofmental activity can be named by the term ‘truth.’ According to the criticizedview ‘truth’ is interchangeable with ‘object’ because an object can be judged ina true judgment. This thesis would mean, Twardowski claims, that the truth ofan object depends upon the truth of a judgment. This, however, is not the case;it is rather the case that a positive or negative judgment is true because its un-derlying object exists or does not exist. According to Twardowski, saying that‘an object is true’ is derived from the sentence ‘an object can be the object oftrue judgment’ is the result of a misunderstanding of the scholastic view on thetruth of an object. For Twardowski, the scholastic notion of truth in the senseof being (which he calls also ‘the metaphysical notion of truth’) claims ratherthat an object can be called ‘truth’ because it can be the object of a judgment.The truth of an object is then derived from a judgment (regardless of whetherit is true or false) and not from a true judgment. Therefore, according to themetaphysical theory of truth, it is the ability to be judged, i.e. the intelligibilityof an object, that makes the object be capable of being called a truth, even ifnobody judges truly about this object. The primary bearers of truth are, then,acts of judging, while truth in the sense of being is truth in a secondary sense.Twardowski then relates this problem, also known as the scholastic theory oftranscendentals, to the theory of judgment:

This version of the doctrine amounts to nothing else but that an object is called truein that it is intended by a judgment and that it is called good in that it is intendedby a feeling. And since every object can be subjected to a judgment, to a desire or


an abhorrence, truth and goodness belong to every object of a presentation, and thescholastic doctrine proves correct in the sense that every ens is verum as well as bonum.(Twardowski 1894 [1977, p. 36])

3. Alexius Meinong (I): Thinking and True Objectives

3.1 Thinking

Judgements, for Brentano, were purely mental phenomena. The judging actis an act of consciousness in which an object of presentation is accepted orrejected. For Brentano ‘judgment’ and ‘belief’ are synonymous terms, whichmeans that Brentano was unable to explain complex hypothetical judgments,phenomena which appear in logic and epistemology such as, for example, con-ditionals. It was Alexius Meinong who drew attention to this problem.17 In re-working Brentano’s classification of the types of mental phenomena, Meinongchanges the basic types. According to him there are four classes of mental ac-tivities: presenting, thinking, feeling (das Fülen) and desiring (das Begehren).18

The notion of presenting is similar to the notion used by Brentano. Thinkingincludes phenomena that Brentano called acts of judging, and which are char-acterized by Meinong in the same way as by his teacher. Yet thinking alsoincludes phenomena that Meinong wants to treat as a separate class of mentalactivity, which he calls ‘suppositions.’ There are several reasons for seeing un-derlying suppositions as an independent class of mental phenomena. These arethe topic of Meinong’s Über Annahmen [On Assumptions]19—a book writtento argue for the new class of mental phenomena in the Brentanian tradition.Some of them remain important as regards the theory of judgment in its re-lation to the problem of the bearer of truth. As in the case of Brentano andTwardowski, Meinong also considers linguistic arguments that should corre-spond to their descriptive-psychological counterparts. I shall consider this inthe next chapter.

Remaining on the level of psychological investigations Meinong urged, first,that there are mental phenomena which, while bearing some resemblances toacts of presenting, on the one hands and to acts of judging, on the other hand,are in fact different from both. An example is supposing that something is suchand such (like supposing that there are dinosaurs in the twentieth century). Ina supposition we consider a possibility that some such and such exists. Weneed not, however, believe that this such and such exists. The moment ofbelief (or, as it is called by Meinong, beliefness [Überzeugheit]) is preciselythis singled out moment which differentiates an act of supposing from an actof judging.20 Moreover, supposition also differs from presenting because it isaffirmative or negative, and this kind of polarization does not exist in the caseof presenting. The quality (yes or no) of a supposition is highly visible in thenegative suppositions, such as the supposition that something is not the case.21

A negative supposition cannot be claimed to be a negative presentation. The

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latter lacks a quality—we can present ourselves a negative object of a higherorder, but we cannot predicate any positive or negative quality of the act ofpresenting itself.

Meinong also claims that acts of presentation are in a sense passive, unlikeacts of judgment and supposition. The latter are more ‘active’ in comparison topassive impressions. Therefore, given their active character, acts of suppositionand judgment are called ‘thinking’ by Meinong.22

Thus, suppositions present a certain basic class of psychic phenomena thatcan be placed between the phenomena of presenting and those of judging.Since they belong to the class of thinking and because of their lack of a momentof belief they are also called ‘semi-judgments’ by Meinong (Urteilssurogate).23

3.2 The Object of ThinkingMeinong was aware of Twardowski’s distinction between act, content, andobject in the case of mental acts.24 In a mental act we grasp objects, where‘grasping’ [Erfassung] is, for Meinong, a neutral term which refers to all men-tal functions.25 For the grasping of an object, it is irrelevant whether or notthis object exists. According to Meinong, there are several ways of being ofan object, such as existence, subsistence (das Bestehen) and external-being(Ausserseein(( ).26 In distinguishing four basic types of mental acts (presenting,thinking, feeling and desiring), Meinong claims that all types of acts have theirown types of objects. He names these types of objects as follows: objects (dasObjekt), objectives (die Objektive), digitatives, and desideratives. It is quiteinteresting that Meinong’s crucial reason for placing judging and supposinginto the same category of thinking is that they are directed to the same type ofobjects, i.e. to objectives.

The objectives, however, are not objects in the ordinary sense of this term,such as trees, people, or books. They are objects of a higher order, i.e. theyare objects constructed of and dependent on other objects. The objects outof which objectives are built are, according to Meinong, ‘that of which wejudge’ [das beurteilte Objekt] or ‘that of which we suppose.’27 For example, inthe sentence ‘The tree is without leaves’ we judge about a tree and its leaves.In this example, the tree and the leaves are objects, and the being withoutleaves of the tree is an objective that is built upon the tree and its leaves. Theobjective can also be an object, namely, an object of thinking. The objectiveas the object of thinking is called by Meinong ‘that which is judged’ (das,was geurteilt wird) or ‘that which is supposed.’28 Thus, for example, in thejudgment expressed in the sentence ‘The rose is red’, that which we judgeabout is the red rose, and the objective of the judgment (that which is judged)is the state of affairs that the rose is red. Similarly, to take another example,when we judge about Pegasus that it does not exist, Pegasus is the object of thisjudgment and the objective is the state of affairs that Pegasus does not exist. In


respect to that which is judged we can say, as Meinong put it, that the objectof judgment is the fact that something takes place. The object of suppositionis that something can take place.29

3.3 Cognition and KnowledgeIt was said that it [the evidence—AR] may be predicated not only of judgment but alsoof objective: more natural and pleasant is to say that true is an objective which is cog-nized in an evident justified judgment, and probable is an objective which is cognizedin an evident unjustified judgment. The reason why so long one has looked at the objectof which truth (cum grano salis also probability) could be predicated correctly in a realand strong sense is that the objective was left outside the investigations. As regards thesingle word ‘knowledge’ it arises to me an important question whether it really meansthe evident judgment or rather the objective which is cognized in this judgment: in thelast case the theory of knowledge is etymologicaly nothing else as the theory of someobjects. (Meinong 1902, p. 192—my translation)30

The theory of knowledge considers, among other things, such notions astruth, necessity, reason, and conclusion. Meinong, unlike his predecessors andhis teacher Brentano, considers that all these epistemic terms are predicatesthat are predicated in a natural way of objectives rather than of mental acts,and in particular of acts of judging. Thus, one can ask about the proper objectof the theory of knowledge: does the object of epistemology consist of judg-mental activity, as Brentano and Twardowski hold, or might the proper objectof epistemology be seen in the correlates of these judgments, i.e. in objectives?For Meinong, a theory of knowledge should also consider objectives among itsobjects. This is because we should make a distinction between cognition (anact of cognition and, in particular, an act of knowing) and knowledge. ForMeinong, a complete theory of knowledge should focus on both types of in-vestigations. The theory of knowledge includes as its proper part a theory ofcognition as a theory of acts of knowing, on the one hand, and a theory of theirobjects, on the other hand. The former part of the theory should be based onpsychological investigations. The latter part of theory of knowledge should be,continues Meinong, a theory of objects as a theory of the domain of objectives.The ontology of epistemology is part and parcel of the latter.

According to Meinong, however, objects of thinking are logically prior tothe acts of their cognition. For him objectives have to exist independently ofjudging subjects. Thus, the objective which is judged in an evident judging actis in that sense prior to the act of judging. Like Brentano, Meinong considersevident judgment to be the way we come to know something, i.e. the cognitiveact that leads us to knowledge. Unlike Brentano, however, Meinong arguesthat the predicate ‘is true’ should be predicated of the objects of mental acts.This is because the latter are prior to the acts that are directed to them. In theprimary sense objectives are true. Only in a secondary sense are acts of judg-ing also true. As we shall see, this is not Meinong’s only argument defendingthe view that we should predicate ‘true’ of objectives rather than of the acts

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which consider them. Also unlike Brentano, but in agreement with Twardow-ski, Meinong treats ‘true’ as a determining adjective, i.e. he sees truth as a realattribute of objectives.31

3.4 A True Objective and a True Act of JudgingAnother of Meinong’s arguments for the primacy of the truth of objectives (orof true objectives) with regard to the truth of mental acts can be formulatedas follows. Suppose that we have some objective that something exists. Now,how should one express the true judgment in which this objective is judged?The answer is ambiguous. According to Meinong, this objective can be judgedin two different judgments with regard to their content. It can be judged eitherin an evident judgment which is expressed in the form ‘A exists’, i.e. it can beevidently accepted that A; or it can be judged in the evident judgment expressedin the sentence ‘It is true that A exists’, i.e. in an evident acceptance of theobjective that A exists. Thus, we are dealing with two different true judgmentsin which we judge about two different objects. In the first case we judge aboutA. In the second case we judge about A’s existence. Meinong, however, seesboth judgments as directed to the same objective, i.e. to the existence of A. Thelatter is the objective to which both judgments are directed. If this is the casehow can these two judgments with different contents about the same state ofaffairs be true?

Suppose, now, that the objective the existence of A does not obtain. In thiscase the objective must be judged in a negative evident judgment of the form‘A does not exist.’ However, Meinong seems to claim a difficulty here, since

But it is hardly understandable why this, which actually refers to the objective ‘that Adoes not exist’, is predicated of the objective ‘that A exists’ which is contrary to theformer as regards its quality. (Meinong 1902, p. 192—my translation)32

For Meinong there is another judgment whose sentential linguistic form wouldbe more appropriate in this case: ‘It is not the case that A exists.’ Once again,we repeat our question: In this clearer example, how is it possible for twojudgments that are different in content to be true with regard to the same stateof affairs? (About the non-obtaining of the existence of A) Meinong’s answeris that we must assume states of affairs before we make judgments about them.If states of affairs were not prior to the judgments in which they are judged, theabove would not be a satisfactory answer to the question. That they are indeedprior can be seen from the fact that when the underlying objective obtains,its ‘truth’ can guarantee the truth of several possible judgments in which it isjudged.


4. Anton Marty (I): The Adequate Act of Judgingas the Truth Bearer

4.1 The Ambiguity of the Notion of the PrimaryTruth Bearer

When one takes a look at the argumentation concerning the true judgment(Brentano) or the true objective (Meinong) as the entities of which truth shouldbe predicated, one finds solutions which rely on the concept of primacy. Theseare, in the examples given above, the primacy of knowledge in relation to truthin Brentano’s theory of truth, the primacy of true objectives in relation to thetrue judgments in which they are judged in Meinong’s view, in short, the pri-macy of one truth bearer with regard to another. Anton Marty, another ofBrentano’s students, noticed that the solution of the problem of the ambiguityof the notion of the truth bearer that makes use of the notion of primacy itselfrelies on an ambiguity. For him the notion of the primacy of truth and, respec-tively, the notion of secondary truths as notions connected with mental acts andtheir objects are themselves ambiguous. Moreover, there are at least two levelson which these notions lose their clarity. What exactly does it mean to say thatsomething is true in a primary sense?

The first level of saying that something is true in a primary sense is, accord-ing to Marty, the level of things (sachlicher Sinn). On this level the primacyeither of a true act or of true being depends upon an answer to the question ofwhat decides the correctness of our judgments, i.e. of our knowledge.33 Ac-cording to Marty, among the possible answers to the question of what decidesthe correctness of a judgment is the reply that what decides is that which makesthe judgment true. Thus, in the first sense of ‘primacy’, something is primarywhen it decides about the truth of a judgment. In other words, what decides thetruth of a judgment is its truthmaker.34 Since, as we shall see below, in Marty’sview ‘truthmaker’ has rather clear ontological connotations, primacy would bea kind of primacy of truth in an ontological context.

Now, on one occasion, says Marty, primacy as related to the notion ofa truthmaker is stated of true judging acts. True cognition should be true pri-marily with regard to other entities such as, for example, (true) being. This,however, can mean several things. First, it can mean that what decides aboutthe truth of an act of judging is the cognitive act itself. This extreme view,according to which something is true if, for example, we believe that it is true(if we hold it to be true) recalls, claims Marty, the ancient saying that man isthe measure of all things. According to such a view something is true or evenexists as long as someone accepts it in a true judgment or, even worse, as longas it is believed to be true or is believed to exist. This conclusion is unaccept-able for Marty: something exists or is true not because we believe that it is so.A truthmaker is, rather, a transcendent correlate of an act of judging.

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Secondly, the primacy of true judging acts with respect to the truthmaker canbe connected with a view called the correspondence theory of truth. The ad-equation theory of truth—this is Marty’s name for such a theory—denies thatwhat decides about the truth of a judgment belongs exclusively to the sphere ofthe judging subject. In this theory intellectus is not the measure of the truth ofa judgment. Judgments are sometimes directed toward something outside thesubject, upon an external existent object. The correctness of such judgmentsdepends upon what they are directed towards. The truthmaker, according toadequation theory of truth, is something external to the cognitive subject, onthe part of the world. ‘Transcendent’ correlates of acts of judging exist inde-pendently before we make judgments. An object can exist before obtaininga true judgment. The independence of the existence of the judged object, i.e.its primacy in the order of existence, still does not, of course, mean its primacyin the order of truth. However, saying that a judged object is a true being isactually derived from saying of judgments that they are true.

Such a concept [of true being] can be obtained only with regard to the concept [of truth]and only in this sense would it be the meaning of ‘truth’ as predicated of objects whenmediated by the meaning of ‘truth’ as predicated under certain circumstances of thejudging act. (Marty 1908, p. 312—my translation)

On other occasions, the primacy of truth with regard to the truthmaker isstated of being. In opposition to the former case, here a judgment is said tobe true only with regard to a true being. This would mean, however, claimsMarty, that we would have to get to know a true being before judging it ina true judgment, and this is not the case. In other words, we would have toknow of the existence of an object before accepting its existence in an act ofjudging. Knowledge consists of (correct) judging acts.

4.2 An Argument Based on the EpistemologicalNotion of Truth

This leads to the second level on which, according to Marty, one can talk aboutthe primacy of truth, the epistemic level. Here, along the lines of Brentano, oneassumes that knowledge of what exists is based on the psychological experi-ence of judging acts and their evidence. Therefore, the direct issue on this levelis no longer the truthmaker, but, rather, the mental phenomenon of a correct actof judging which can serve as a true judgment.

However, Marty’s notion of knowledge (and of the act of knowing, respec-tively) is not based only on the notion of evidence as it was considered byBrentano. According to the latter knowledge is a certain class of correct, i.e.(direct and/or indirect) evident judging acts. Brentano’s evidence is to be un-derstood as a certain co-experience that comes into being with certain judgingacts under certain circumstances. Now for Marty, the experience of evidencethat the judging act accomplishes presents only a part of the experience of


knowledge (of an act of knowing). The act of knowing consists, he continues,of at least two different accomplishing co-experienced moments: the momentof the co-experience of evidence and the co-experience of the adequation ofwhat is judged (or, as it is called by Marty, of the adequation of the contentof a judgment). More precisely, the act of knowing is, according to Marty,a mental act of judging which is accomplished by both co-experiences, of theevidence and of the grasping [Erfassen] of the adequation of its content. Inhis philosophical jargon, which is somewhat difficult, Marty says that in theact of knowing the adequate content is grasped as adequate together with theexperience of evidence. This co-experienced grasping of the adequate contentin a judging act Marty also calls co-perception [Komperzeption].

Now, Marty explains the primacy of a true judging act with respect to thesecondary notion of true being in the following way:

And since we grasp the being [das Sein] or the existence [das Existieren] only in andby means of an (accepting) judging act, the rightness of which flows to us from it itself[sich uns kundgibt], the concept of being [das Seiende] can also not be obtained ina way other than through a reflection on such judging. Being and existence mean, aswe repeatedly emphasize, that which can rightly be accepted. (Marty 1908, p. 314—mytranslation)

The bearer of truth in the primary sense is thus, for Marty, the mental act ofjudging. The class of true acts of judging consists of acts of knowing, i.e.correct (evident and adequate) acts of judging. What is new here, however,is Marty’s notion of adequation and, above all, his notion of the content ofa judgment, which differs from that presented by Twardowski.

4.3 The Content of a JudgmentThe notion of a correct judgment as presented by Marty is understandable onlywhen we consider the notion of judgment-content. I cannot focus on all theaspects of the notion of the content in Marty’s theory of judgment. What isof principal importance here is the relation between the content of a judgmentand its correctness.

As we have already seen, for Marty the entities that are the primary truthbearers are acts of judging. True acts of judging are those acts of knowingof which correctness can be predicated. For Brentano, the condition of thepredication of correctness was a co-experience of evidence. Marty, as it hasalso been mentioned, adds another condition for the possible correctness ofa judging act, adequation. Now, a correct judging act is one that is evident andis adequate to its content. Marty’s judgment-content serves here as a standardor measure to which an actual act of judging must conform, i.e. it plays therole of the truthmaker. This is, first of all, because the content of a judgmentconstitutes a necessary condition of its correctness:

In other words, the natural description of the concept of the content of a judgmentseems to me to be that which objectively grounds the correctness of our judgings. More

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precisely, it is that without which such an attitude could not be correct or adequate.(Marty 1908, p. 295—my translation)

The content of a judgment thus constitutes a necessary condition of its cor-rectness in the sense in which it represents the condition of the adequation ofa judgment.

The judgment-content consists, furthermore, of moments that are the coun-terparts of the moments that belong to an act of judging. Along the lines ofBrentano Marty includes the following among the latter moments: a) the mat-ter of an act of judging, b) its quality (i.e. acceptance or rejection), c) its mode,assertion or apodicticity, d) its certainty or uncertainty, and e) its evidence ornon-evidence. The counterparts of the last four of the above in the contentof a judgment are, respectively, b) being or non-being, c) contingency or ne-cessity, d) probability or impossibility, and e) evidence or non-evidence. Nowaccording to Marty, the act of judging is correct if it is adequate to its contentwith respect to all of these moments.

For example, if someone making a judgment accepts apodictically that a redrose exists, he does it in a way that is not correct. This is because the being ofthe red rose is not necessary. In other words, it is not necessary that a red roseexists. It is a contingent fact, just as the fact that it is red and not, for example,yellow is also contingent. This judging act, however, need not be false. It isnot false when the red rose about which we have judged actually exists. Theact of judging is in this case true but blind and, therefore, not correct.

Furthermore, the content of a judgment is, according to Marty, independentof the judging subject. He recalls here, for example, Brentano’s notion ofthe inexistence of an object (Marty interprets Brentano’s object of a judgingact as an object immanent to the mind). Brentano’s matter of judgment (i.e.the object to which we are intentionally directed) is dependent on the judgingsubject. Unlike Brentano’s matter of judgment, Marty’s content of a judgingact does not demand the assumption of the existence of a judging subject.35 Inthis respect Marty’s judgment-content is similar to Meinong’s objectives in thatboth entities mediate between judgments, on the one hand, and their objects, onthe other. A judgment-content is, however, dependent on the judging subject inthe sense that it takes place only when a judging act occurs. Generally we cansay that whereas the existence of judgment-contents is dependent on judgingsubjects, they are, however, not determined by judging activities.

Marty’s judgment-contents, not determined by judging subjects and existentin time are, however, not real. They are not real in the sense that they do notsuffer effects, i.e. they do not belong to a causal realm either within the mindor within the physical world.

A more precise description of the notion of the adequation of a judgmentto its content must refer to descriptions which cross the borders of descrip-tive psychology along the lines drawn by Brentano and must go in directionswhich are the subject of the next two chapters: the linguistic counterparts of


the descriptive-psychological analysis and the ontology of judgment. I shallthus return to Marty’s notion of judgment-content below.

5. Summary of Chapter 3: the Epistemic Notion of Truth

In the Brentanian tradition the notion of truth was strongly related to the no-tion of knowledge. Since epistemology at this time was commonly embracedas a proper part of psychology, the basic notions of epistemology were thoseof thinking and judging. Moreover, the rejection of the classical formulationof the adequation theory of truth developed by Brentano was stimulated by in-vestigations in the area of descriptive psychology. The basic conditions for theconception of truth of Brentano and his followers led to epistemological ques-tions. The characteristic feature of the Brentanian tradition in this respect is theprimacy of the notion of knowledge in relation to the notion of truth. Amongall the acts of judging present in the domain of descriptive psychology, Brenta-nians distinguished the subclass that usually consisted of acts of knowing. Bymeans of them Brentanians later define the notion of truth. Despite some ex-ceptions (such as Meinong), and despite the existence of various differencesamong the Brentanian theories of truth, one can state that acts of knowing,above all, served as bearers of truth. The latter were described variously as‘correct’ or ‘adequate’ judgments and defined in terms of descriptive psychol-ogy as a theory of cognition. Investigations concerning the entities that serveas the bearers of truth are part of the theory of knowledge, even in Meinong’saccount of objectives as truth bearers.

Remark. As was already mentioned in Chapter 2, the definition of the truthbearer often appears in either its ontological or linguistic form. Concerningthe primacy of the notion of knowledge as related to the notion of truth inBrentano’s, Twardowski’s, Meinong’s and Marty’s views, the epistemologicaldefinition of the truth bearer defined in the previous chapter finds its justifica-tion. To the ‘epistemic qualifications’ predicated of epistemic instruments wecan add, among other things, the experience of evidence or the adequation ofthe content of a judgment.

Remark. Given the epistemological notion of truth, the choice of the truthbearer requires at least two crucial decisions. First, we have to choose the in-strument of knowledge that serves best for cognition. In the case of descriptivepsychology, the best epistemic instrument is the act of judging, for it, aboveall, can be the object of psychological investigation. Secondly, we have todecide what epistemic characteristics the chosen epistemic instrument shouldhave as its properties in order to guarantee its desired epistemic value in a sys-tem of knowledge. In this respect Brentano’s descriptive psychology looks

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to co-experiences such as evidence and the experience of adequation whichaccompany judgmental activities.

Notes

1 Brentano 1874 [1973].2 See the next chapter for more about this.3 Brentano 1930, pp. 7–29. 1971, pp. 6–25.4 See Brentano 1874 [1973] pp. 79f., 88f.5 As regards the distinction between the object and the content of a mental act see Twardowski 1894 and

next section of this chapter.

6 See, for example, Blaustein 1928, pp. 11–18, 22.7 Brentano 1874 [1973], pp. 88f.8 See, for instance, section 3.2. of this chapter.9 Brentano 1930 [1961], p. 27.10 Brentano 1982, esp. pp. 10–27. This volume consists of Brentano’s notes to lectures given by him in

Vienna around 1890, i.e. before his subsequent turn to ‘reism.’ Recently this view has been defendedvery strongly by Dieter Münch in his ‘Intention und Zeichen’ (Münch 1993).

11 x is independent of y iff x can exist without the existence of y. x is dependent on y iff x is notindependent of y.

12 Twardowski 1894/1982 [1977].13 This remark was later transformed by Alexius Meinong and Ernst Mally into the principle of the inde-

pendence of the ‘being-so’ and the ‘being’ of an object.14 Some Twardowski’s interpreters even see the Scholastics as the key to understanding his object/content

distinction. See Cavalin 1997.

15 See Tenner 1914, Paczkowska-Łagowska 1980, pp. 202–208.16 Meinong 1965, pp. 143f.17 As he himself states, he owes his assistant Mila Radakovic his interest in a special type of mental event

or process that was later called a ‘supposition.’ She directed his investigations to this problem around1899. See Meinong 1902 [1983], Vorwort.

18 It is perhaps worth mentioning that Meinong first divided Brentano’s phenomena of love and hate intotwo types: feeling and desiring. Secondly, he includes in the class of the phenomena of thinking twodifferent types of activities, supposing and judging. In virtue of these classifications there are, in fact,according to Meinong, five classes of mental phenomena: presenting, supposing, judging, feeling anddesiring. It is also worth adding that Meinong’s notion of thinking is narrower than the notion of thinkingdescribed by Brentano. The latter called all mental activities thinking, whereas Meinong includes in thisclass only certain types of cognitive mental acts, such as supposing and judging.

19 Meinong 1902.20 Meinong 1902, pp. 1–5, 1976, pp. 1–8.21 Meinong 1902, pp. 6–15, 1976, pp. 9–21.22 Meinong 1902, p. 278. 1976, p. 263.23 Meinong, 1902, p. 270, 1976, p. 256.24 See, for example, Meinong 1899, Meinong 1902, Haller 1979.25 It is beyond the scope of this study to describe in detail Meinong’s notion of object, as well as its various

classifications. In order to do this it would be necessary to probe deeply into Meinong’s ontology; thisstudy is not devoted to such an analysis. It is well to mention, however, that the term ‘object’ as itappears in Meinong’s writing is similar to that of Twardowski, especially in that its scope is very broad,for everything thinkable is an object.

26 See, among others, Findlay 1963, Haller 1979, Chisholm 1982 and Pasniczek 1998.´27 In the English translation of Meinong’s On Assumption these are objects of judgments-of. See, for

instance, pp. 252f.

28 In the translation mentioned above, objectives would be objects of judgments-about.29 Meinong 1902, pp. 150–212, 1976, pp. 144–206.


30 These lines are not included in the second edition of Meinong’s Annahmen that serves for Englishtranslation.

31 Meinong 1902, pp. 195–197.32 Here, again, it is the passage which is not included in the second edition of Meinong’s Annahmen.33 For Marty ‘correct judgment’ can be replaced by ‘true judgment’, and a ‘true being’ (das Wahre) should

rather be named simply a ‘being’ or an ’existent object.’34 Here a truthmaker is that in virtue of which a judgment is true. For more about this notion, see Mulligan,

Simons, and Smith 1984.

35 Marty 1908, p. 295.

Chapter 4

JUDGEMENT, PSYCHOLOGY, AND LANGUAGE

1. Franz Brentano (II): Linguistic AnalysisVery often in his writings the argumentation given by Brentano in his descrip-tive-psychological investigations concerning the truth of judgments has its co-unterparts in linguistic analysis. The growing interest in the linguistic justifi-cation of the thesis of descriptive psychology in the late phase of Brentano’sphilosophy is usually seen as an outcome of the already mentioned1908 workof his pupil Anton Marty Untersuchungen . . . However, it is quite difficultto state how far Marty alone is responsible for Brentano’s growing interestsin language and how important such an analysis was for him before Marty’stexts about language appeared. Brentano’s early linguistic analyses are in-cluded, among other places, in his lectures on logic,1 in the paper ‘On theconcept of truth’,2 and in the text ‘Miklosich on Subjectless Propositions.’3

All of them were worked out in the 1880’s, i.e. after Marty published his Überdie Ursprung der Sprache [On the Origin of Language].4 The fact is that thelinguistic part of Brentano’s philosophy became even more important duringhis later activity. A linguistic analysis presents above all an important part ofBrentano’s later period of reism. However, since in Brentano’s account reism isfundamentally a metaphysical view on mind, I shall present Brentano’s reisticarguments about truth and its bearer in Chapter 6 below.

1.1 Language and ThinkingFor Brentano, the connection between acts of thinking and their expressionsin language cannot be a one-to-one relation. If there were a strong correla-tion between language and acts of thinking one would have to make clear whythere are so many different languages within which one can find different ex-pressions (different phonetically as well as in their grammatical form) for thesame mental acts, whereas the classes of mental acts are, Brentano insists, the

57

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same for all human beings. Brentano remarks that even within one languagethere are different expressions that refer to the same act of thinking. In the end,if the relation between language and thoughts were strong, one would have toaffirm that creatures which do not use language cannot think. In consequenceone would have to deny that deaf-mutes possess the ability to think.

On the one hand, Brentano attributes an incidental role to linguistic expres-sion in his complete theory of judgment, a view that is in accord with thestandard view of the nineteenth century. Acts of presentation, on such a view,are expressed by the names that occur in our language. Acts of judging can beexpressed by means of more complex linguistic expressions whose meaningsdepend on the meanings of the constituent names and on the function of thecopula. These linguistic phenomena were, however, of interest only insofar asthey shed light on the underlying cognition and not in themselves. A judgmentcan be brought to expression, but the act is primary, its expression secondary.The only purpose of the speaker is the communication of his mental acts. Theact need not have been brought to expression if the judging subject had re-mained content to think for himself. It is not ultimately important what yousay; it is important what you think.

However, Brentano does not want to deny that language is associated withthinking. Yet the association between the grammar of a language and mentalacts is built conventionally and without planning. Language presents, on theone hand, a helpful tool for thinking. On the other hand, however, languageas a tool brings with it disadvantages which have a negative influence on ourthinking, such as the ambiguity of linguistic expressions, to mention only one.

Thus, it is clear to Brentano that the logical or deeper structure of an actof judging can differ from its linguistic or surface structure as determined bythe grammar of a given language. For Brentano, however, this difference is ofa twofold sort. First, the structure of the underlying mental act can be misap-prehended when judged on the basis of its linguistic expression. It is not alwaysthe case, for example, that when one utters the sentence ‘There was no winterthis year’ one judges that it never snowed and the temperature never fell belowzero. Secondly, the logical structure of a linguistic expression can itself be dif-ferent from its surface grammar. The aforementioned sentence has, accordingto Brentano’s existential theory of judgment, a form which should rather beexpressed as ‘There was no snow this year’ or ‘There was no day when thetemperature fell below zero’ or something similar. Fundamentally, however,we can say that for Brentano there is no difference between the logical struc-ture of a mental act and the logical structure of its concomitant expression.For the latter, as mentioned, is what it is only because of the former. There-fore the analysis of the logical structure of judgments ultimately belongs to thesphere of descriptive psychology. The linguistic counterparts of that analysiscan still be helpful and the importance of linguistic analysis in the work ofBrentano and his followers is remarkable. Brentano seeks, for example, a lin-

Judgement, Psychology, and Language 59

guistic justification for his existential theory of judgment. In this connection hediscusses the phenomenon of subjectless sentences, especially the meteorolog-ical expressions ‘It’s raining’, ‘It’s snowing’, and other families of examplesstudied by linguists such as Miklosich. As to the theory of truth and its bearersBrentano used linguistic arguments similar to those described in what follows.

1.2 The Use of Linguistic ExpressionsIn the passages which consider the descriptive-psychological part of Brentano’stheory of true judgment I pointed out his observation of the different uses ofthe word ‘true’ in ordinary language. The ways in which this word can beused, however, refer to one usage singled out by Brentano, which he calls the‘proper’ or ‘primary’ usage of the word ‘true.’ Thus, he can say that:

Truth and falsity in the strict or proper sense, therefore, are found in judgment. Andevery judgment is either true or false. (Brentano 1930 [1966, p. 6])

The bearer of truth is, for Brentano, primarily the act of judging and the va-riety of ordinary uses of the word ‘true’ as applied to different types of entitiesin principle mirrors the variety of relations of different mental acts to the act ofjudging. For Brentano, a linguistic observation serves as a sign of this varietyon the psychological level. Thus, what is reflected by language is Brentano’sidea that all mental acts of which we say that they are true are, in fact, reducibleto acts of judging.

Some things [bear names of truth and falsity] because they express a true or false judg-ment, such as a false assertion, or a false utterance; some things because they producea true or false judgment, as in the case of hallucination, or a slip in uttering or in writinga word, or a metal which is taken for gold because of a similarity in colour; some thingsbecause they are intended to produce a true or false judgment, as for instance a truespirit or a false mannerism. (Brentano 1930 [1966, p. 6])

Every linguistic phenomenon, according to Brentano’s view regarding theconnection between language and thinking, seeks a descriptive-psychologicaljustification that is to be found in the aforementioned variety of the relations ofdifferent mental acts to the act of judging.

1.3 ‘Truth’ as a Syncategorematical ExpressionA crucial distinction for Brentano’s analysis of linguistic expressions is thedistinction between categorematical and syncategorematical phrases. Syncate-gorematicals are words that have meaning only in association with other wordswithin some given context. The simplest examples of syncategorematicals aresuch expressions as ‘and’, ‘when’ and so on. They refer to nothing unlessthey are put into the broader context of a sentence or into a sentential expres-sion. Brentano, however, also includes among syncategorematicals a numberof expressions which in ordinary usage seem to have their own meanings. Asregards the notion upon which this study is focused, i.e. the notion of truth,

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this is very remarkable, for according to Brentano the word ‘true’ is a syncate-gorematical. This means, among other things, that there is also nothing real invirtue of which a true judgment differs from a mere judgment. In other words,there is no property of judging acts to which the predicate ‘true’ refers.

Once again, this linguistic phenomenon must be justified on the level of de-scriptive psychology. The thesis that there is no property that differentiatesa mere judgment from a true judgment is a thesis which comes out as a resultof descriptive psychology, but it has also further repercussions for linguisticanalysis. For instance, once the word ‘true’ is taken as a syncategorematical itis impossible to state that there is a sense in which we can understand truth assomething real in the sense used by the Scholastics. The role of truth as a tran-scendental is excluded when truth is taken as a syncategorematical predicate.In such a view there is only something of which we can predicate that it is true.Furthermore, for Brentano, it is exclusively of the act of judging that we canproperly predicate that it is true.

Remark. It is worth noting that Brentano’s successors applied this same kindof analysis using the distinction between syncategorematical and categoremat-ical expressions to other examples. Kazimierz Twardowski, for example, ap-plied it to the word ‘nothing.’ It is also worth noting that linguistic analysisin Brentano’s school usually begins with an analysis of the linguistic expres-sions for presentations, i.e. with an analysis of nouns, and not with an analysisof sentences. Thus, the basic bearers of meanings for the Brentanians werewords.

1.4 A Note on Brentano’s Theory of Meaningand Reference

All linguistic expressions that are expressions of presentations belong, accord-ing to Brentano, to the grammatical category of names. For Brentano, thedifference between what we call sense and reference, following Frege, is thedifference between ‘to mean’ [bedeuten] and ‘to name’ [nennen]. What a namenames is the object of presenting. What names mean are concepts, i.e. contentsof presenting.

For Brentano, it is sentences (Aussage(( ) that express judging activities. A sen-tence, according to Brentano, is a judging act expressed in words. It is not clearwhether in Brentano’s account a sentence, as a complex of words, is a collec-tion of sounds (utterances), inscriptions, or both. It seems that ‘uttering’ and‘writing’ would be good words for sentences as expressions of judging activ-ities in Brentano’s sense.5 It is important that on the level of the sentence thedifference between the matter and the quality of a judging act appears:

By matter we understand that which is judged as such, something that is named bya name included in some sentence. By form we understand the way in which one


judges. The form is not a linguistic layout, but refers to the moment that makes thejudgment a judgment. (Brentano 1956, p. 103—my translation)

1.5 An Argument from the Reducibility of SentencesOn the linguistic level, sentences in which a judging act comes to light havedifferent forms. Sentences, for example, may have a categoric form (‘Thisrose is red’) or a hypothetic form (‘If you look at this rose, then it will beperceived as red’) and so on. The judging act itself, however, has only twopossible qualities: the judging can be affirmative or negative.6 The proper formof judging acts on a linguistic level would then be the existential form, forexample, ‘x is’ or ‘x is not’ (or, respectively, ‘x exists’ and ‘x does not exist’;where x stands for names.) These forms present, Brentano claims, the simplestform of a sentence which is sufficient to express the act of judging. What, then,is the relation between the aforementioned categorical or hypothetical forms oflinguistic sentences and the existential form of such sentences?

Once again Brentano’s explanation of the occurrence of different forms ofexpressions of judging acts on a linguistic level recalls his general view re-garding the connections between language and thinking. As far as the act ofjudging is concerned, its linguistic layout is not crucial. There is no differ-ence, Brentano urges, between the different forms of sentences (existential,categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive, etc.) with regard to the underlying men-tal phenomenon of judging. According to Brentano’s existential theory, thejudgment expressed in the sentence ‘Franz sees a beautiful autumn leaf that iswet and has the color of red lacquer’ ought properly to be expressed as fol-lows: ‘The lacquer-red, wet, and beautiful, autumn leaf seen by Franz is.’ Oneshould proceed similarly with every other sentence. Using Brentano’s own ex-ample, a hypothetical normative sentence such as ‘If a man behaves badly, heharms himself’ can first be transformed into the categorical form: ‘All menwho behave badly harm themselves.’ Thus, the sentence should be reduced toan existential form that would sound something like: ‘There is no such thingas a man who behaves badly and does not harm himself.’ As Brentano puts it:

The reducibility of categorical sentences, indeed the reducibility of all sentences whichexpress a judgment, to existential sentences is therefore indubitable. (Brentano 1874/1924 [1973, p. 218])7

This new existential reading of every judging act, a reading which will belater called the ‘existential (logical) form of judgment’, led to one of the firstattempts to reform traditional logic as known from Aristotle’s syllogistic.8

2. Kazimierz Twardowski (II): Determining andModifying Adjectives

Twardowski also makes an attempt to offer a linguistic explanation of the re-sults that he obtained on the level of descriptive psychology. In this respect

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he follows his teacher Brentano. Similarly, Twardowski adopted Brentano’sviews that there is no strong parallelism between thinking and language, onthe one hand, and that linguistic analysis can help in diagnosing and under-standing psychological investigations, on the other hand. It must, however, bementioned that Twardowski argued for a much stronger dependence betweenthinking and language. Clear thought has, according to him, its counterpartin clear linguistic expression. Thus, clarity of thinking affects the clarity ofphilosophical writings.9 I shall return to this problem when speaking aboutTwardowski’s theory of acts and products, which is crucial in this respect.Here I shall concentrate exclusively on the parallel linguistic investigationsof Twardowski which support the descriptive-psychological issues in his Ha-bilitationsschrift.

2.1 The Meaning and Function of NamesWhen one looks at the terminology used in psychological investigations con-cerning the object of presentation, one will recognize the way in which lan-guage disguises thoughts. It is to be expected that, on the one hand, the lackof a strong parallelism between thinking and its linguistic expression will leadto numerous misunderstandings and ambiguities, as in the case of the expres-sion ‘what is presented’ (either a content or an object). On the other hand,Twardowski’s distinction between an act, its content, and its object becomesits linguistic support, which he infers from his theory of names.

For Twardowski a name is a categorematic sign of a given language. Thecategorematic sign is described by him as an entity in virtue of which we referto (name or assign) something and, in order to narrow the category only to non-complex words, which is not an expression of a judgment or of a phenomena oflove or hate. Judgments and phenomena of love or hate are mental correlatesof written or uttered sentences as a combination of signs.

The function of names is triple: communication, meaning and naming. Firstof all, a speaker communicates to a receiver his mental event or process ofpresentation, i.e. he communicates the fact that he presents something to him-self. This is the basic function of a name: the communication of an act ofpresenting. Furthermore, according to Twardowski’s view, the speaker evokesin a receiver a mental content. This content Twardowski calls the ‘meaning ofthe name.’ Thus, the meaning of a linguistic sign is a mental content evoked inthe hearer of a speech act. Finally, in its third function (that of naming), a namenames or assigns an object which is the object of the act of presenting.

2.2 Attributing and Modifying PredicatesAs we have seen, in his On the Content and Object of Presentations of 1894,Twardowski puts forward a series of arguments in defense of the distinctionbetween the contents of presenting acts on the one hand, and their objects, on


the other. His whole investigation begins with an analysis of the linguistic us-age of the terms ‘presentation’ [Vorstellung] and ‘that which is presented’ [dasVorgestellte] in the way in which these terms were used by the earlier Brentani-ans. Twardowski found both terms ambiguous. At times, ‘presentation’ refersto an act of presenting; at other times, however, the same term refers to thecontent or immanent object of this act (understood by Twardowski roughly asthe image of the real thing). ‘What is presented’, in turn, sometimes refersto the immanent object; at other times it refers to the real thing as it existsindependently of the judging act.

On the linguistic level of his analysis Twardowski remarks that, dependingon what is understood by ‘what is presented’ (the real object or the content),when one utters a complex expression which consists of a predicate (adjective)and of a name, one can change the function of the adjectives in the utteredexpression. Thus, for instance, if one says ‘the painted view’ the adjective‘painted’ can function in two ways: as a determining or as a modifying adjec-tive.

It functions as a determining adjective when, in the sentence in which theexpression ‘the painted view’ occurs, one refers to the object of the judgment.That is, ‘painted’ is a determining adjective if one refers in the expression ‘thepainted view’ to that part of reality which was presented to the painter whenhe painted the view. When the adjective ‘painted’ is predicated of this part ofreality, then it functions in a determining way.

On the other hand, when one refers to the picture in which the part of realitynamed ‘view’ is presented, then the adjective ‘painted’ functions as a modify-ing adjective. It modifies the meaning of the word ‘view’, since the view isno longer the view that is part of the mind-independent real world. A similarsituation takes place when we predicate about the content of our presentationsor of other mental contents, for instance, when we say ‘colorful garden’, refer-ring to the mental content of the presentation of a colorful garden, which weare looking at. The predicate ‘colorful’ then modifies the meaning of the word‘garden’ as referring to the content which would normally stand for the gardenwe see. This is because the content of the presentation of the garden cannot becolorful at all.

A determination is called attributive or determining if it completes, enlarges—be itin a positive or in a negative direction—the meaning of the expression to which it isattached. A determination is modifying if it completely changes the original meaningof the name to which it is attached. (Twardowski 1894 [1977, p. [11])

For the purposes of this study a very important example of the ambigu-ity of the function of adjectives is the case of the word ‘true.’ In expres-sions like ‘false friend’, ‘false gold’ the adjective ‘true’ appears as a modi-fying adjective—it changes the meaning of the predicated words since a falsefriend is not friend at all and false gold is not gold at all. Twardowski thereforeoffers a linguistic explanation of why the multiplicity of predications of the

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word ‘true’ of entities other than judgments should be treated as secondary bysaying that a judgment is true in the primary sense. This is because Twardow-ski, unlike Brentano, claims that ‘true’ as predicated of judgments functionsas a determining adjective. Thus, for Twardowski, the bearer of truth in theprimary sense is the judgment, which he understood at that time as a mentalevent, along lines drawn by Brentano.

2.3 The Logic of AdjectivesTwardowski returns once again in 1927 to the determining and modifying func-tions of adjectives.10 This time, however, he refers to the widest group of lin-guistic categories, adding to adjectives both adverbs and adverbial phrases.The function of determining is, according to Twardowski in 1927, a simplefunction which adds to the content of a presentation (which is expressed by thesubject in an expression) either a positive or a negative property. The modi-fying function of an adjective is a complex function that consists of two mo-ments: first, it is the function of removing one of the parts of the content and,secondly, it is the function of replacing it by another positive or negative char-acteristic.

Recalling the difference between both functions of adjectives as known fromOn the Content and Object of Presentation, Twardowski remarks that the di-vision of the functions of predicative expressions into determining and modi-fying is not exhaustive: they are not parallel in the sense that determining isa simple function and modifying is a complex function. Thus, when describ-ing other ways in which these groups of grammatical categories can function,he now speaks of four types of functions. The first type presents the afore-mentioned complex function of modifying which Twardowski calls now the‘removal-determining function.’ An example of modifying in the manner ofa removal-determining function is the adjective ‘former’ in the expression ‘for-mer minister’: it removes a part of the content of ‘minister’ (since the personis no longer a minister), but it also adds a new characteristic which is attributedonly to former ministers. The second type of function is a simple function ofdetermining, as in the case of the adjective ‘young’ in the expression ‘youngperson.’ It adds simply the new characteristic of being young. The third typeof function is the simple modifying function of removing a part of the con-tent. An example of this, which Twardowski called the ‘abolishing adjective’,is the adjective ‘alleged’ in the expression ‘alleged Gestalt.’ Finally, the fourthtype of function is the confirmation of the characteristic of a content. In thisfunction there is no removal or addition of any properties of the content nordoes it change the meaning of the noun. Examples of such ‘restitutive adjec-tives’ are ‘real’ and ‘true’ as they occur in expressions like ‘real fact’ and ‘truefriendship.’


For Twardowski, the proper use of the predicate ‘true’ is the usage in whichthis predicate functions in a determining way, i.e. when ‘true’ is predicated ofacts of judging. However, it is worth noting in this context that the word ‘true’can also belong to the fourth group of adjectives, which function as restitutive,confirming or preserving adjectives. This would be the case of Franz Brentano,who treated this predicate as syncategorematic. Using Twardowski’s analysisof the functions of adjectives, we can answer the question of why Brentanocould speak about the proper contexts in which the predicate ‘true’ can occuron the linguistic level. Using the new characterization of the functions of ad-jectives given by Twardowski in 1927, Brentano maintains that the context inwhich ‘true’ is used in the proper sense is when the predicate occurs in its con-firmative function. These contexts are, for Brentano, the contexts in which thepredicate ‘true’ is predicated of acts of judging, even if this predicate refers tonone of the properties of the judging act.

3. Alexius Meinong (II): Truth-Predicates in Ordinary Use3.1 An Expression and Its MeaningFor Alexius Meinong there are two major functions of language when the lat-ter is taken as a sign. In the first, similar to the standard view of language atthis time, language expresses our mental acts. In this sense the noises of lan-guage are expressions. In the second, the meanings (Bedeutung) of linguisticexpressions are objects of our thinking.11

Although all signs that have meanings are, in Meinong’s view, expressions,not all expressions have meanings.

A word means [‘signifies’ in the standard translation—AR] only as far as it expresses.(Meinong 1902/1910 [1983, p. 25])

There are meaningless expressions such as, for instance, ‘Oh’ or ‘Yes’ (or‘No’). They are meaningless since we do not know anything about the objectsof thinking expressed by them. This view is somehow surprising when oneconsiders the fact which follows from Brentano’s principle of intentionality,accepted by Meinong, that all mental acts have their objects. Along these linesall expressions of mental acts should have meanings. Surely the existence ofmeaningless expressions must be considered from the point of view of theirreceiver in their function of communication rather than from the point of thefunctions played by linguistic phrases as signs. I shall come to the point ina moment. Here it is worth mentioning that the meaninglessness of expressionsseems to be, in Meinong’s view, an epistemic notion.

As regards meaningful expressions, however, their meanings are connectedwith (or, in other words, ascribed to) certain linguistic expressions which arenot without ambiguities. This is because the ascription of a sign to an objectalways takes into account the circumstances in which the meaningful expres-sion appears such as time, place, society, family or even the individuals who

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utter the expression.12 Thus, the same object of thinking can be signified bydifferent expressions (there are, however, several ways of naming objects orof saying that something is the case) and the same expression under variouscircumstances can mean something different (such as, for instance, the alreadyused expression ‘Today it is snowing’).

However, despite its indexical nature there are regularities in the function-ing of language as expressions and in the ascription of linguistic sounds to theirmeanings. Words or complexes of words are usually expressions of acts of pre-senting. Words such as ‘rose’ or ‘Meinong’s teacher’ are in Meinong’s viewexpressions of acts of presenting. Their meanings are, according to him, ob-jects of presentations. Thus, ‘the rose’ means a concrete rose and ‘Meinong’steacher’ means Franz Brentano. Whereas words and their complexes stand forobjects of presentations, Meinong also distinguishes another class of complexlinguistic phrases, sentences.

Sentences, as well as words, are considered by Meinong to be either com-plex sounds (utterances) or inscriptions. Whether we talk about utterancesor inscriptions depends on what we prefer to speak about, i.e. whether abouta speaker (who makes sounds or, simply, utters something) or about an author(who usually writes on paper, even if only destined for his desk drawer).

Sentences, when considered as signs from the point of view of their func-tion, are expressions of mental acts such as thinking (judgments and assump-tions), but they are also expressions of wishes, orders, hating and so on. Here,however, one can ask the following questions: First, what is the difference be-tween a complex of words that expresses presenting and a complex of wordsthat expresses thinking, wishing or hating? Is the complex of words ‘Red rose’an expression of the presentation of a red rose or it is an expression of the judg-ment that a rose is red (a shorthand for ‘The rose is red’)? Secondly, how canwe differentiate between expressions that express thinking, wishing, or hat-ing when they have the same syntactic structure? Does a complex of wordssuch as ‘This rose isn’t purple’ express thinking of the color of a rose (in thesense of excluding other colors), or does it express the wish that the rose havea purple color, or the fact that the person who is uttering or writing this sen-tence hates roses which are not purple? Here the reason for distinguishingsentences as a separate class of linguistic phrases is not, as one might expectfrom Meinong’s psychological investigations, only their different syntacticalstructure, but, as we shall see, also different kinds of objects which are theirmeanings.

Indeed, Meinong answers the first question by assuming the existence ofspecial types of objects, which are the meanings of sentences, i.e. by the as-sumption of higher-order objects. Complexes of words differ in the types ofmeanings they have: they mean either simple objects that are the objects of ourpresentations or they mean complex objects that are judged, assumed, wished,


or hated. Thus, the complex of words ‘red rose’ can mean either a simple objector the higher-order object that a rose is red. In the first case it is an expressionof presenting, in the second it is an expression of thinking. Now, by assumingdifferent kinds of higher-order objects, i.e. by further distinguishing betweenobjectives, digitatives and desideratives, Meinong is able to speak about sen-tences as expressing a different kind of mental phenomenon and therefore isalso able to distinguish expressions of thinking from other kinds of expres-sions possessing the same syntactic structure as sentences. Here, for example,‘This rose isn’t purple’ either expresses a thought of the objective that the colorof a rose is not red (a negative fact), or it expresses a wish of the desidera-tive that a rose have a purple color, or it expresses a digitative that the personwhose mental act it expressed hates roses which are not purple. But here, as inthe case of meaningless expressions, we can distinguish between the question‘how would we know that a sentence which is an expression of thinking, suchas judging, is not an expression of, for example, assuming, wishing or hating?’and the question ‘when does an expression express thinking, wishing or hatingwhen it has the same structure?’ The latter question, however, relates linguisticnoises to a receiver rather than to the speaker.

But, even if we distinguish sentential expressions of thinking from sententialexpressions of other mental phenomena, the answer to the question of when anexpression expresses thinking, wishing or hating when it has the same structureremains incomplete. We also need explain how to distinguish an expression ofassumption from an expression of judgment? Both acts of thinking, i.e. sup-posing and judging, refer to a similar type of object, i.e. to objectives. Thus,the latter are meanings of linguistic expressions of both supposition and judg-ment. Expressions of both types of thinking cannot, therefore, be distinguishedby means of their meanings. The same grammatical structure of the form ‘Therose is red’ can mean the same objective that the rose is red, but it can alsoexpress both a judgment and an assumption which differ from each other.

As far as judgment is concerned, every expression of a judgment is, inMeinong’s view, a sentence. On the other hand, however, not every sentence isan expression of a judgment. The class of sentences includes many subclasses.Expressions of judgments, statements (Aussage(( ), are only one of them. Thus,it is the name ‘Aussage’ (translated here as ‘statement’) which is properly usedfor expressions of judgments (even if Meinong himself very often calls sen-tences ‘expressions of judgment’). On the level of descriptive psychology,what differentiates judgments from other types of mental phenomena are themoments of assertion or of rejection. However, how are these moments pic-tured in the language if not in the grammar?

When there is a failure to distinguish expressions of judgment from senten-tial expressions of supposition by means of either their syntax or their mean-ings, is there, perhaps, a method for identifying expressions of supposition?As we saw when we spoke about Meinong’s theory of hypothetical judgments,

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assumptions are placed by Meinong between acts of presenting and acts ofjudging. Thus, assumptions can be expressed by both expressions of presenta-tions (i.e. in words and their complexes) and expressions of judgments (i.e. insentences). Therefore, the test of what is expressed in a sentence—an assump-tion or a judgment—relies on the transformation of a sentence into a noun-phrase. However, properly expressed assumptions are so-called ‘that-clauses’(daß-Sätze), i.e. clauses that are dependent (or subordinate) from a grammati-cal point of view. Meinong’s distinction between expressions of judgment andexpressions of assumption seems to refer back to syntactical methods.

Meinong’s distinction between expressions of acts of presenting and ex-pressions of other types of mental phenomena, made with the help of distinctmeanings (objects of expressed phenomena), is possible because of his strongassumptions. Meinong assumes that there are no meaningless sentences. Thisstatement relies on the principle, known later as the ‘principle of composition-ality’, which states, roughly, that higher-order objects are made up of lower-level objects, which in Meinong’s theory can be transformed into the thesisthat the meaning of a sentence is made up of the meanings of its parts (words).

To be sure, there is normally never a lack of meanings [translation: significations] wherethere is a sentence. These meanings [translation: significations] seem to consist in themeanings [translation: significations] of words, the words united into a complex inthe sentence, and to consist in the objects of higher order that are based on these word-meanings [translation: significations] and which have them as their inferiora. (Meinong1902/1910 [1983, p. 29])

3.2 CommunicationThe above description of functioning linguistic phrases considers language tobe a system of signs. However, Meinong was conscious of the limitations ofseeing language as subsumed under the notion of sign. The meaninglessnessof expressions, for example, would be inexplicable without considering otherfunctions of linguistic phrases. One of the most important functions playedby language, in this respect, is its communicative function. This function oflanguage is excluded from an analysis of language only from the perspective ofsigns. Because language plays the role of a tool of communication, Meinongdistinguishes between the linguistic function of expressions (which is related toa speaker or to a writer) and the pragmatic function of language, which relateslinguistic phrases to their receivers.13

The pragmatic function of language is in this respect an evocation of a men-tal act such as, for example, a thought in the receiver of a sign. This is, as putby Meinong, an understanding (Verstehen) of the speaker on the side of thereceiver, which plays the crucial role in an act of communication. This act ofunderstanding relies on an act of grasping (Erfassen) the meaning of a spokenor a written expression, i.e. on an act of judging or at least on an act of as-suming of an objective.14 Thus, once again, Meinong’s theory of special types


of objects for different types of mental phenomena plays a crucial role in histheory of communication. It is the object which I mean when uttering an ex-pression of my mental act and which is the most important factor in the act ofcommunication: A receiver of my speech understands me when he or she isdirected towards the same object that I am directed towards.15 I communicatesimple objects (when uttering single words or their complexes) and objectives(when uttering sentences) and not, respectively, my act of presenting (or itscontent) or an act of thinking (or its content). But, this communication of anobject cannot take place when one utters a meaningless expressions such as‘Oh’ or ‘Yes’ which, when taken alone, without a context, cannot direct anyreceiver to a communicated object. It is, thus, unclear in Meinong’s view whatare the conditions for directing a receiver to a communicated object. How arewe to decide, then, whether I have communicated an object in a proper way,i.e. that I have not uttered something meaningless (to the receiver)?

3.3 Meinong’s Argument from the Ordinary Usageof Epistemic Operators

For Meinong neither sentences nor acts of judging are bearers of truth. This isbecause mental events and processes and their expressions play, in Meinong’sview, only an incidental role in acts of cognition and communication. Thecrucial role is reserved, in these respects, for objectives. Similarly, Meinongchooses objectives as the entities of which we should predicate truth and false-hood in the proper sense. This statement of Meinong is supported by twofurther assumptions which he makes: that the notion of truth is, as it was forBrentano, an epistemic notion, and that ordinary language can be decisive asfar as some philosophical statements are concerned.

An ordinary (inner) experience is helpful when considered prior to an inves-tigation on the level of descriptive psychology, claims Meinong. It is ordinaryinner experience that constitutes the basis of the science of psychology. Simi-larly, ordinary language can be considered at least as helpful in a proper evalua-tion of some phenomena, and it constitutes the basis for constructing linguistictheories, and thereby artificial languages. On the other hand, an ordinary lan-guage, however, can be improved by means of artificial languages. An analysisof language, and especially its ordinary uses, presents therefore a preliminarystep to an analysis which uses, for example, the technical language of descrip-tive psychology.16 In this valuation of common sense experience and language,Meinong follows his master Brentano.

Meinong distinguishes, roughly speaking, three types of sentential expres-sions: primary sentences, that-clauses and secondary sentences. Meinongholds that all secondary expressions of judgments can be divided into twoclasses. Thus the sentence a) ‘The man is sick’ is a primary sentence in thesense that it expresses a judgment. But, ‘The man is sick’, which for Brentano

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means that the sick man exists, can mean, for Meinong, two different objec-tives as expressed in two different sentential expressions: b) ‘The sick man is’and c) ‘The man is sick.’ Here, b) and c) have different meanings: the fact thatthe sick man exists is here different from the fact that the man is sick.

I do not think, as it is along the lines of Brentano, that the whole meaning or even theprimary meaning of the sentence ‘This man is ill’ can be pictured by the sentence ‘Theill-man exists.’ Ununderstandable seems to me, however, that in the sequence of words‘the ill-man’, which does not even make a sentence, there is included in the strongsense the whole objectual material which is included in the sentence ‘The man is ill.’(Meinong 1902, p. 25—my translation)17

Thus, for Meinong both sentences, b) and c), since they are expressions ofsomeone’s thoughts, can be expressed in sentences such as ‘I think that thesick man is’ and ‘I think that the man is sick.’ These are secondary sen-tences of my thought. In these secondary sentences the sentences b) and c)are transformed into that-clauses ‘that the sick man exists’ and ‘that the manis sick.’ That-clauses are, according to Meinong, no more than expressions ofjudgments. They are proper expressions for assumptions and, actually, in thesecondary sentences they are names of objectives (complexes of words whosemeanings are objectives).18 The first class consists of sentences (‘Aussagen’),which state something direct about mental phenomena, i.e. sentences whichbegin with such phrases as ‘I know that . . .’, ‘I believe that. . .’, or ‘I assumethat. . .’, and which are nowadays called ‘psychological’ or ‘intensional’ sen-tences. The second class of expressions of judgments consists of sentencesabout properties of these phenomena, such as, for example, expressions thatbegin with the phrases ‘It is obvious to me that. . .’, ‘It is evident to me that. . .’Unlike the former group, the second group of sentences is capable of beingtransformed from a personal form into a non-personal form. In our example,the sentence that begins with the phrase ‘It is obvious to me that. . .’ can betransmuted into a sentence that begins with a following phrase: ’It is obvi-ous that. . .’ Similarly the sentence which begins with the phrase ‘It is evidentto me that. . .’ can be transformed into ‘It is evident that . . .’ In virtue of thisability to be reformulated in a way which relies, as it were, on the depersonifi-cation of a sentence, the property of one’s judgment comes to be a property ofthe object of this judgment, i.e. of an objective. In the second example, whenspeaking about evidence, it seems to be even more natural to say that ‘It is ev-ident that. . .’ And, indeed, for Meinong, this is the natural way of saying thatsomething is evident.19

I have used examples of mental acts which Meinong names ‘thinking.’ Thus,all predications of these mental phenomena are epistemic. It follows thatMeinong sees epistemic predications of objectives and not of mental acts asmore natural from the point of view of ordinary language. They becomemodal properties of objectives. (The modes of judgments that are objects ofthe descriptive-psychological theory of judgment can therefore be expressed


in language by referring to modalities of objectives). Epistemic predicationsof judgments or assumptions are, according to Meinong, an outcome of theconstruction of artificial languages for the purpose of philosophical theories ofknowledge:

Evidence is surely as much a matter of the judgment as, say, certainty is; nevertheless,it is more natural—if not for a theorist, then certainly for a layman, at least—to say,‘It is evident that 3 is greater than 2’ rather than, e.g., ‘The judgment on this matter isevident.’ (Meinong 1902/1910 [1983, p. 63])

Meinong’s notion of truth seems to be not far from Brentano’s epistemicnotion of correct (evident) judgment. Thus, the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ are,in the end, similar to other epistemic operators predicated of mental acts, suchas ‘obvious’ and ‘evident.’ The latter appear in sentences about the propertiesof mental acts such as ‘It is obvious to me that. . .’ and ‘It is evident to methat . . .’ and can be transformed into sentences about objectives: ‘It is obviousthat. . .’ and ‘It is evident that. . .’ Meinong treats the translation into sentencesabout objectives as natural from the point of view of ordinary language. ‘True’and ‘false’ are, therefore, also naturally predicated of objectives from the pointof view of natural or ordinary language: expressions such as ‘It is true of myjudgment that. . .’ or ‘It is true for me that. . .’ should be transformed in favorof sentences of the form ‘It is true that . . .’

Yet it seems to me that upon further consideration it is impossible to doubt for a momentthat the locution ‘It is true that a exists’ or ‘It is false that. . .’ is a far more natural man-ner of speaking, and in the final analysis the only really natural one. [‘True’ and ‘false’are, strictly speaking, attributes of objectives.] (Meinong 1902/1910 [1983, p. 63]—mytranslation)20

3.4 An Argument from True HypothesisWe can also present another argument that supports the view presented above,which refers to the ordinary use of language. What is to be predicated as true inthe case of the following expression: ‘If A is B and B is C then A is C’? It isan expression of a hypothetical judgment. According to Meinong, it is in factthe expression of a conditional that does not rely on judgments but rather onassumptions. Can, therefore, assumptions be called true and false? Even if so,it is unclear how to decide which are true and which false: that A is B and thatB is C and that A is C or, maybe, the whole constituted with the help of theconnectors ‘If. . . then. . .’ and ‘and.’ Can complexes of assumptions make upa whole of which ‘true’ or ‘false’ could be predicated? It seems that negativeanswers are appropriate here.

Meinong proposes the choice of objectives as truth bearers in this case. Theycan be combined into higher-level objects when we have to do with severalobjectives which are the meanings of the parts of the sentence ‘If A is B and Bis C then A is C.’ The whole sentence, expressing more than one assumption,expresses only one collection of objectives. This is because there exists an

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operation on objectives which forms unities out of them, and it can be naturallypredicated in a proper sense of the objective that it is true that if A is B and Bis C then A is C.21

4. Anton Marty (II): Speech ActsWhen Marty published his Untersuchungen. . . in 1908 the book was designedto be a presentation of Brentano’s ideas applied to the linguistic domain ratherthan a systematic overview of the results of descriptive psychology.22 Marty’sbook is known for its influence on his teacher Brentano as far as latter’s in-terests in linguistic investigations are concerned. But Marty’s Investigationswere, in fact, very influential not only on Brentano’s own views on languagebut also on such philosophers as Karl Bühler, Roman Jakobson and, what is im-portant for this study, Stanisław Lesniewski. It also presents the first attempt´to explain in a systematic and complete way the relations between cognitiveactivities (or mental activities in general) and language, even if, in most of itsparts, it contained ideas which had long been well grounded among Brentani-ans. It is interesting from a contemporary point of view that Marty’s name forhis investigations, i.e. ‘semasiology’, was in use until the thirties in Poland asthe term for investigations that are nowadays called ‘semantics.’

4.1 Autosemantic Expressions and the Basic Typesof Mental Phenomena

Following Brentano, Marty divides psychological phenomena into the threebasic classes of presentation, judgments and phenomena of love and hate.Their characteristics, as well as their relations to each other, are for Martysufficient and taken for granted in the way in which they were described byBrentano. Like Brentano, Marty does not suppose that the basis for this funda-mental division is to be found in language. Marty even considers the view thatpsychology is dependent on language to be a dogma of vulgar psychology.23

The nature of the language should not decide about the characteristics of men-tal phenomena. It is rather, he holds, that the basic classes of linguistic formsare themselves dependent on the basic types of mental phenomena. Moreover,in order to express the results of descriptive psychology properly, we shoulduse an adequate language. Such a language should unambiguously describethe relation between linguistic forms, on the one hand, and suitable mentalphenomena, on the other.24 In language the basic classes of linguistic formsshould be the counterparts of basic classes of mental phenomena. Marty callsa linguistic entity which, when taken by itself, fully expresses a communica-ble mental experience, an ‘autosemantic linguistic entity’ [autosemantischesSprachmittel]. The language that, as we would say nowadays, would presentan appropriate apparatus for the science of descriptive psychology should con-sist of autosemantic linguistic noises. The construction of such a language


demands an improvement of ordinary language, and only an account of thelatter based on a descriptive-psychological analysis can make this possible.

4.2 Linguistic Forms and their Basic FunctionsMarty explains the relation between a sign and experience by means of an ac-count of what he calls the ‘communicative functions of language.’ First of all,given the notion of intentionality of the mental, a linguistic entity can be usedunintentionally. In such a case one says that a linguistic instrument manifests[äußern] one’s mental life. Here the linguistic entity is properly called a ‘man-ifestation.’ [das Anzeichen].25 It is the manifestation of a mental experience.However, if one judges by the manifestation itself, one rarely knows what sortof experience it manifests.

A linguistic entity can, furthermore, be used with an intention, with a pur-pose, as it is in most cases in ordinary life when we perform acts of commu-nication. This function of linguistic entities is twofold: on the one hand theyare expressions (their function is to express something [Ausdrucksfunktion[[ ]),on the other hand they are meaningful entities (they mean something [Bedeu-tungsfunktion]). A spoken linguistic entity is an expression if and only if it isused purposely in order to communicate a mental experience. Such an expres-sion is, so-to-speak, an intentional manifestation, and that which is expressedis the mental experience of a speaker. A spoken linguistic entity is also usedto evoke [Erlebnissugestive] an analogous mental experience on the part of thehearer. Marty calls the evoked mental experience on the part of the hearer ‘themeaning.’ The meaning of Marty’s term ‘meaning’ is, as we shall see, ambigu-ous (the meaning is, according to Marty, not only the actually evoked mentalexperience, i.e. what we have communicated, but also what is intended by thespeaker, i.e. what we want to communicate.), and at this stage I will call it‘meaning I’ or a ‘suggestion.’

When speaking about the twofold function of the intended use of a linguisticentity, Marty recalls the scholastic distinction between primary and secondaryintentions. On the one hand, Marty sees in the suggestion of a mental experi-ence, i.e. in the evoking of an experience in the receiver, the primary intentionof our speech. The secondary intention of our speech is then the expressedmental experience. On the other hand, however, because of the order in whichthese mental experiences occur in time, the expressed mental experience isactually primary, whereas the suggested experience (meaning I) is secondary.

An intentionally used, autosemantic linguistic entity which functions in theways described above has different grammatical forms. Above all, it has theform of a name. Names, roughly speaking, properly express and suggest pre-sentations. The proper linguistic entity for the expression and suggestion ofjudgments is an utterance [Aussage[[ ]. The phenomena of love and hate areexpressed and suggested by what Marty calls ‘emotives’ (for example ‘I am

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hungry’). Marty also includes among emotives questions, wishes, orders, andso on.

According to above description the function of names is twofold: to express(to communicate) a presentation on the part of the speaker and to suggest thesame presentation on the part of the receiver. Names are words, says Marty,which can stand as subject or as predicate in a sentence. Thus ‘red’ and ‘rose’are names because we can say both ‘The rose is red’ and ‘Something red isa rose.’26

Similarly, the function of emotives is expressing and suggesting phenomenaof love or hate. There is, however, a problem with the function of suggestion asregards emotives, since it is hard to believe that when I intentionally express ina phrase the pain that was caused, for instance, by a campfire, I want to evokethe same or a similar experience in someone with whom I spend the time ata camp. (In fact, I would not wish anybody skin burns, something which,apart from psychiatric cases, seems rather normal to me.) This, however, isa marginal problem for the purposes of this study. Here I only wish to notethat every emotive is implicitly also a sign of a presentation and of a judgment.This is clearly connected, I think, with the one-sided relation of dependencebetween the basic classes of mental phenomena as known from Brentano.

The most important kind of linguistic entity for our purposes is an utter-ance (Aussage(( ): its function leads us directly to the problem of the notion ofjudgment-content. At first glance it seems that, as in the case of names, thefunction of utterances is also double: on the one hand, an utterance expressesthe occurrence of a judgment on the part of the speaker, and, on the other hand,it suggests a judgment on the part of the receiver of the speech. The meaningI of the utterance is thus, according to Marty, the judgment evoked in the re-ceiver. When I say ‘This rose is red’ I express my judgment and suggest thesame judgment to the hearer.

4.3 Communication of ContentTherefore, what I can communicate when uttering the sentence ‘This rose isred’ is only the matter of the expressed judgment and its quality. For Marty,who in this respect also follows Brentano, the matter of the judgment is whatis judged, i.e. the object which is judged. The quality of the judgment is, aswe recall in Brentano, the character of the judging attitude, i.e. acceptance orrejection. Hence, when I say ‘The rose is red’ I communicate only the matterof the judgment (a red rose) and its quality (my acceptance of the red rose).The judgment evoked on the part of my hearer can be, thus, determined bymy expression only as to the object (what is judged in this judgment, i.e. thered rose in the example) and as to the mode in which it is judged (assertionor rejection, i.e. assertion in the example of the rose). My judgment, however,has several other moments that are not pictured in the expression I uttered. It


follows that, taking a sentence only in its functions of expressing and suggest-ing, one cannot communicate a number of other properties of judgments suchas being evident or not being evident, being assertive or being apodictic andso on.27 All of those properties or moments of judgments, as Marty puts it,are included in the content of a judgment. Therefore, Marty also adds to thefunctions of an utterance given above an additional function, which he callsthe ’communication of the content of the judgment.’28

When one says ‘The rose is red’ one expresses, claims Marty, one’s affir-mative judgment about the red rose and at the same time one suggests that thehearer make ‘the same’ affirmative judgment. In some sense, then, what wewant to communicate is the existence of this red rose, which, in turn, may bedescribed as the content of the judgment. In this sense Marty calls the beingred of the rose the meaning of the utterance, which can be distinguished fromthe meaning I which was, according to the descriptions given above, the sug-gested mental experience. Thus, a third function of utterances is the functionof the communication of judgment-content:

We have heard that the meaning-function of an utterance is not only the suggestion ofa judgment on the part of the hearer, but that what the utterance also means is the beingand non-being and, respectively, the being such and such of something, i.e. also thatwhich is called the content of a judging act. (Marty 1908, p. 360—my translation)

We have also seen that the content of a judgment also includes moments forwhich a sentence has no related signs by means of which it can communi-cate them. What can be communicated in language very often tells us nothingabout the properties of our mental experiences. In particular, we do not knowthe modes in which the speaker made his judgments. Whether the judgmentwas made with apodicticity, certainty, or evidence is normally unexpressed.Moreover, the content of a judgment also contains the moments of its object,not only the communicable existence or non-existence of something, but also,for instance, its necessity or impossibility.

What I can directly suggest to someone with the help of language is only that one ac-cepts something as existent or non-existent, as past or as future, as A or as B, but not thatone judges it apodictically (or with a priori evidence). This limited content is thereforecalled, perhaps appropriately, the content of a judgment, which is simultaneously thecontent of an utterance; in opposition to this every broader content is called the contentof the judgment itself without reference to its linguistic communication. (Marty 1908,pp. 360–361—my translation)

As we have already seen, Marty introduced the content of a judgment inorder to explain its correctness. Now, from a linguistic point of view, whatBrentano sees as the matter and quality of a judgment is only a part of thejudgment-content: it is precisely that part of the judgment-content which canbe communicated by means of language. The content of an act of judging,taken apart from its linguistic function of communication, is rather a state ofaffairs. This state of affairs can be seen as a condition for the correctness of the

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act of a judging subject: the judgment-content must obtain for a judgment to becorrect. Now, the notion of adequation decides not only about the correctnessof a judgment but also about whether the utterance of a judgment communi-cates its content:

If a judgment is correct then it conforms in a peculiar way to the content, i.e. there issome content that is adequate to it. In this case the utterance [Aussage] of this judgmentcommunicates its content in the proper sense of a sign (similar to a scream due to pain).In the case where the manifested judgment is incorrect, the utterance is in the propersense not a sign of judgment-content, but (usually) only a sign of that the speaker judgesin this way and that he has the intention of evoking an analogous judgment in the hearer,and eventually, that he intends to communicate the judgment-content. (Marty 1908,pp. 293–294—my translation)

4.4 The Truth of ObjectsAs was already mentioned, Marty’s term ‘the content of a judgment’ is in someways similar to Meinong’s ‘objective.’ While acknowledging the similaritybetween Marty and Meinong as far as their notions of content and objectiveare concerned we should, however, remember that they differ in views as totheir expressions. In particular, Meinong and Marty see different functionsof that-clauses as parts of sentences. According to Meinong, truth should bepredicated of objectives. Thus, in Meinong’s view, the attribute of being trueor of being false should be primarily a property of things, and only secondarilyan attribute of judgments. Meinong teaches us that in the sentence ‘It is truethat A exists’ the that-clause (‘that A exists’) stands for an objective. On thisaccount the whole sentence expresses this objective’s property of being true(or of obtaining). For Marty, on the contrary, the phrase ‘that A exists’ is nota name. It would be a name if and only if it were the name of the judgment‘A exists’ which is not the case: the judgment expressed in ‘It is true that Aexists’ differs from the judgment expressed in ‘A exists.’ Yet the expression‘that A exists’ is also not a sentence. Thus, it cannot express a judgment and,therefore, it also does not mean any judgment-content, Marty claims. A fullsentence which includes a that-clause should have the form of an expression ofindirect judgment such as ‘I know that x exists’, and especially, ‘It is true that xexists.’ In this sentence, however, the that-clause refers to the object to whichthe whole sentence in which this that-clause appears refers. The object, inthis case, is not an objective but a presentation of the content of the judgment,claims Marty.

It follows from this that if there is a way of speaking about objectives asif they were true or false, it is by using the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ as re-ferring to objects. ‘True’ and ‘false’ as predicated of objects are, in Marty’sview, synonymous with one of the following words: ‘real’, ‘existent’, ‘be-ing’, ‘subsistent’, ‘positive’, etc.29 Yet how can we come to know whether thepredicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ or nouns the ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ are predicated


of objects in the same way in which we use words ‘being’ or ‘existence’, i.e.when can we replace them without a change of meaning? Marty solves thisproblem by giving us a kind of instruction for translating phrases that consistof the truth-predicate predicated of nominative expression:

In this linguistic respect it can be said with some certainty that the words ‘true’ and‘truth of’. . . usually are connected with names which are understood as predicates—the words ‘being’ and ‘being of’, on the contrary, are connected with names of whichthis is not valid. (Marty 1908, p. 309—my translation)

Thus, one can ask whether the nouns in expressions like ‘false gold’ and‘a true friend of mine’ are thought of as predicates. For Marty, they are syn-onymous with the expressions: ‘something which is falsely gold’, and ‘some-one who is truly my friend.’ Hence, while ‘gold’ and ‘friend’ function clearlyas predicates, truth-predicates can be replaced by one of their synonyms, asin the expressions: ‘something which is really gold’ or ‘someone who is actu-ally a friend of mine.’ When the noun cannot be transformed into a predicatewe usually use terms like ‘real’ or ‘existent’ or similar terms, e.g. when ut-tering ‘God exists’ or ‘God is real’ (unless we are skeptical or atheists askingwhether there is someone like God among beings: ‘Is there someone who istruly God?’)

4.5 The Truth-Predicate in Expressions of Directand Indirect Judging Acts

For Marty, the difference in the functioning of the predicate ‘true’ in sentencessuch as ‘It is evident that a exists’ and ‘a exists’, which was described above,can also be explained using the notions of direct and indirect judging. Whenwe predicate ‘true’ of the subject of a sentence such as ‘a exists’, which isan expression of direct judging, i.e. when we utter ‘a is true’, then we in factpredicate truth of the objects of this sentence. In such a case the predicate‘true’ appears as synonymous with such words as ‘existent’ or ‘being.’

We have a different situation when the expression of an indirect judgmenthas a form such as ‘It is evident that a exists’, i.e. when truth-predicate occursin the following way: ‘It is true that a exists.’ Here, claims Marty, where weare dealing with the expression of an indirect judging act, the predicate ‘true’is predicated of the content of this indirect judgment. The judgment of which‘true’ is predicated is, however, different from the judgment that is expressedin this sentence. For Marty, it is incorrect to say that the sentence ‘It is truethat a exists’ expresses a judgment about a judgment. This sentence expressesa judging about the content of an act of judging, i.e. it expresses a judging actabout the content that a exists.

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4.6 On Arguments from the Natural Use of AdjectivesThe former sections presented Marty’s view on the functioning of the adjec-tives ‘true’ and ‘false.’ First, they function differently, Marty observes, de-pending upon the function of the noun in the sentence in which they appear,i.e. depending on whether the noun functions as a name or as a predicate. Sec-ondly, their function depends on the expression in which they occur, i.e. onwhether it is an expression of a direct or an indirect judging act. Both observa-tions lead Marty to conclude that the function of the truth-predicates dependson the grammar and the stylistic elements of a given language. In light of this,however, Marty rejects the view that the study of ordinary language, especiallyof the usage of predicates, leads to crucial conclusions that can be of use inepistemology. He is, therefore, opposed to Meinong’s statement that the mostnatural way to use the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ is when they are predicatedof objects. In Meinong’s view, it was natural to say that something (real) is trueand it was unnatural to say that this or that judgment is true. Moreover, Martyis opposed to the more general statement that the study of natural language isdecisive for philosophy. Marty draws upon the fact that the usage of words ina certain language depends on its grammar and the stylistic elements of thislanguage. On the one hand, both of these elements of a language are very im-portant for the purposes of philosophical investigations, as it show examplesof changes in the function of truth-predicates. However, one should rememberthat grammar and stylistic elements are secondary, and they should not press usto eliminate psychological investigations. This is because epistemology shouldnot be based only on linguistic analysis of ordinary language. These analysesare important provided that the analyzed details on the boundary of grammaror stylistics do not lead us to wrong epistemological assumptions such as the‘natural’ way of using truth-predicates.

5. Summary of Chapter 4In the Brentanian tradition the linguistic standpoint regarding the choice ofthe bearer of truth presents an analysis of speech acts and of the usage of thepredicates ‘true’ and ‘false.’ However, the arguments that rely on observa-tions of ordinary language are rather vague. Arguments based on the usage ofthose predicates seem to build an argumentation only when they refer to otherpsychological and linguistic presuppositions. The linguistic presuppositionsinclude, among other things, first, the relation between language and thinking,and secondly, the view of the function of a linguistic sign. As far as the re-lation between thought and language is concerned, all figures of Brentano’sschool introduced a quite clear separation between thinking and language. Theview that the way in which thought is expressed is conventional was commonin this school. The strongest position in this respect was taken by KazimierzTwardowski, whose view on a strong dependence between the clarity of think-


ing and the clarity of language seems to be exceptional. On the one hand,the common view includes the belief that language can be more or less ade-quately related to thinking. On the other hand, however, language disguisesthoughts. How far this disguising takes place is explained by various theoriesof the functions of language. Thus, as far as these theories are concerned, theirbasic investigations belong to the field of descriptive psychology. Since de-scriptive psychology is the basic science even with regard to linguistic theory,it is quite obvious that language was penetrated by Bretanians especially inits functions of the expression and communication of thoughts (or, more pre-cisely, of thinking). What we nowadays call semantic relations was of interestto Brentanians only insofar as it stands in a significant relation to ontologicaland descriptive-psychological distinctions and preferences. From the contem-porary point of view, Marty’s work is closest to what we might today call thesemantics of speech acts. Furthermore, from the historical point of view themost influential work in its linguistic respect was that of Anton Marty which,on the one hand, was not new and original in the sense that it contained a num-ber of views taken for granted for a long time by Brentanians. On the otherhand, most of the concepts and distinctions formulated by Marty became stan-dards for the subsequent development of the Brentanian tradition.

80 CHAPTER FOUR

FIGURE 1. (The functions of linguistic entities (L) in generaland of sentences (S))

LANGUAGE THINKING OBJECT HEARER (READER)

BRENTANO:

L ——————— thinkingexpression

L ——————— contentmeaning

L —————————————– objectnaming

TWARDOWSKI:

L ——————— thinking (with regard to the hearer)communication

L ————————————————————- contentmeaning

L —————————————– objectnaming

MEINONG:

S as sign ————- thinkingexpression

Sign in the narrow sense ————- object/objectivemeaning

Sign in the narrow sense ————- object/objective ————- thinkingcommunication by evoking

(e.g. grasping of meaning = understanding)

MARTY:

L ——————— thinkingmanifestation

L as a sign ———- thinking —————————————— thinkingdirect expression suggestion (meaning I)

S ——————— communicable judgment-contentmeaning II (with regard to the hearer)

S —————————————– content of an utterancemeaning III


Notes

1 Published in Brentano 1956. The lectures were published by Franziska Meyer Hillebrand and the im-portant fragments come from Franz Hillebrand’s notes from Brentano’s lectures.

2 Brentano 1930.3 Brentano 1883/1889.4 Marty 1875.5 I am therefore opposed to the usual translation of the German terms ‘Aussage’ and ‘Satz’ in Brentano’s

writings as ‘proposition’ in English. It is entirely unclear to me why one should speak about propositionsin Brentano’s philosophy. In his early period he often refers to uses of language such as uttering andwriting. See, for example, Brentano 1930. Moreover, the argument against a strong association betweenthinking and language when Brentano refers to deaf-mutes becomes understandable only if language isunderstood as consisting of utterances as complex sounds. (See above, section 1.1). During Brentano’slast, i.e. reistic, period of philosophical activity, such entities as propositions are completely excludedfrom his vocabulary. Thus, if one insists on using the terminology of propositions, then in some inter-pretations ‘Aussage’ would have to be translated as ‘propositional attitude’ rather than ‘proposition.’

6 Brentano 1956, p. 104.7 Unlike in the English translation of 1973 I use ‘sentence’ instead of ‘proposition.’8 See Hillebrand 1891 and Simons 1992.9 See his ‘On Clear and Obscure Styles of Philosophical Writings’ of 1919.10 Twardowski 1927. ’Issues on the Logic of Adjectives’ presents a summary of the lectures that Twar-

dowski gave in 1923 during the first Polish philosophical meeting in Lvov. It is noteworthy that TadeuszCzezowski and Alfred Tarski took part in the discussion.˙

11 Meinong 1902/1910 [1983, pp. 22f.] Translators of Meinong’s On Assumptions used the term ‘signi-fication’ here to translate ‘Bedeutung.’ This choice is dictated, as far as I can see, by the fact that inthe English-speaking philosophical world the term ‘meaning’ is reserved usually for Frege’s ‘Sinn.’ Italso preserves Meinong’s wish that ‘what I mean by an «objective» then, does not belong to psychol-ogy, and there will be even less reason to give up the name «objective» in favor of «state of affairs» or«proposition in itself», if I cannot be sure that I would not also have to reinterpret these latter terms inorder to give them the signification that seems to me to be demanded by the facts.’ Meinong 1902/1910[1983, p. 77] I, however, have chosen the terms ‘to mean’ and ‘meaning’ for, respectively, ‘bedeuten’and ‘Bedeutung’ in order to preserve the unity of translation of these terms from German into Englishin the case of all of the philosophers I consider in this study, and not only in order to be consistentwith Meinong’s translation. Thus, for example, the term ‘meaning’ used in this study refers to the sameGerman term ‘Bedeutung’ in Brentano and Meinong, even if it should be understood in different ways.I also think that reading Meinong along these lines enables one to understand why the reader of Meinonghas a problem with the clarification of his ‘objectives’ as to whether they are propositions or states ofaffairs, i.e. whether they are meaning- or object-entities. The term ‘meaning’ used by me, similar toMeinong’s ‘Bedeutung’, allows for both interpretations. I must, however, to admit that I prefer thereading in which the objectual correlates of expressions are meanings rather than an interpretation ofMeinong’s higher-order objects in terms of propositions.

12 Meinong 1902, p. 20.13 Meinong 1902/1910 [1983, pp. 22f., 33f.].14 It is well to note that, despite the fact that Meinong uses such notions as ‘understanding’ or ‘grasping’,

they are not basic notions as related to ‘judgment’ or ‘assumption.’ The notion of understanding relieson the notion of grasping. ‘Grasping’ seems to play the role of a neutral term for both ‘judging’ and‘assuming’, and, hence, it seems to be a term that can be replaced by ‘thinking.’ I therefore also use theterm ‘meaning’ which, we may recall, refers to objects of mental phenomena as expressed in linguisticphrases and not to a kind of content of these phrases or their meaning in the sense of Frege’s ‘Sinn.’

15 Meinong 1902/1910 [1983, pp. 33f.].16 See Meinong 1902/1910 [1983, p. 21].17 The passage is absent in the English translation based on the second edition of Meinong’s Annahmen.18 Meinong 1902/1910 [1983, pp. 44f.].19 See, for example, Meinong 1902/1910 [1983, pp. 63f., 67–68].20 The last sentence is absent in the English translation based on the second edition of Meinong’s

Annahmen.

82 CHAPTER FOUR

21 Meinong 1902/1910 [1983. pp. 150f.].22 Marty 1908.23 Marty 1908, p. 239.24 Marty 1908, p. 226.25 Marty 1908, p. 280.26 The view taken later by Poles, by Kotarbinski and Le´ sniewski in particular. It is worth noting that´

Marty, unlike Meinong, does not want to consider that-clusters in complex sentences (as, for example,in the sentence ‘He said that she does not want to go out with him’) to be names. Therefore, for Marty,that-clusters are not names of objects of presentations: ‘That she does not want to go out with him’ isnot the name of an object in the way in which it is the name of an objective (the object of an assumption)that she does not want to go out with him in Meinong’s view. The view of Meinong was also, along thelines of Marty, criticized by Ossowski. See Ossowski 1926 and sections on him in this study.

27 Marty 1908, p. 298f.28 Marty 1908, pp. 291–292.29 Marty 1908, pp. 307–309.

Chapter 5

THE ONTOLOGY OF JUDGEMENT

1. What is the Ontology of Judgement?1.1 The Link Between Psychology and LanguageWhat I shall call here the ontology of judgment constitutes a link betweenthe theory of judgment as investigated on the level of descriptive psychologyand the theory of the linguistic counterparts of judgments, i.e. a theory fo-cusing primarily on the functions of speech acts. The ontology of judgmentinvestigates the mental act of judging and its expression in relation to theirobjects. More particularly, the ontology of judgment investigates the relationbetween objects of judging acts, on the one hand, and the objects to which werefer in the speech acts in which the corresponding judgments are expressed,on the other. In what follows, I shall briefly present three theories of truth(bearers) based on the investigations of the ontology of judgment of EdmundHusserl, Anton Marty and Adolf Reinach. In these theories, a special kind ofobject called ‘a state of affairs’ is introduced. States of affairs are, on the onehand, objects of mental acts, and, on the other hand, objects of the linguisticexpressions of the underlying acts. I think that these theories deserve to bedealt with in a separate chapter not only because they span the divide betweendescriptive-psychological and speech-act based theories, but also because theypresent a new way of looking at truth within the framework of the correspon-dence theory of truth. Furthermore, it would be hard to explain them onlyin the context of the (descriptive) psychology of judgment and of the relationbetween thinking and language presented in those earlier chapters.

The ontology of judgment is, fundamentally, an ontology of Sachverhalt.The realistic attitude toward states of affairs defended by Husserl, Marty andReinach allows them to define a new link between psychological and linguisticanalyses of judgment. Their analyses culminate in sophisticated theories ofwhat is judged in an act of judging and, as its counterpart, of what we mean and

83

84 CHAPTER FIVE

what we refer to in speech. However, before their psycho-linguistic theorieswere able to accept the central role played by the concept of a state of affairs,the theory of judgment had to develop a theory of special objects of judgingacts and of their expressions.

1.2 Where Are Objects of Judgement?

The problem of what is judged arises in the context of Brentano’s theory ofintentionality, and especially in its immanentistic interpretation. It was broughtto the fore among other things by the fact that Brentano conceived judgmentsas forming one of the basic classes of mental phenomena. The theories ofjudgments which existed prior to Brentano differed in views as to the objectsof judgments falling, roughly speaking, into three basic types.

The first type theory is based on the Aristotelian view according to whichjudgment is a matter of a conceptual complex reflecting parallel combinationof objects in the world, a view which we find already in Aristotle’s Categories[14b] and Metaphysics [1051b]. Theories of judgments such as those embracedby Leibniz or Locke, following Aristotle, assumed that the phenomenon ofjudgment could be properly understood only within a framework within whicha kind of wider background of ontology is taken into account. Thus, a theorybased on this assumption claims that we should assume transcendental cor-relates of the mind-immanent phenomenon of judgment in combinations ofobjects in the world.

A second type of theory of the objects of judgment became dominant inthe nineteenth century with the German idealist movement. On this view theprocess of judging is to be understood entirely from the perspective of whattakes place within the mind or consciousness of the judging subject. The moreusual sort of idealism in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth cen-tury conceived the objects of knowledge as being quite literally located in themind of the knowing subject.1 It was, in fact, German idealism to which theBrentanian School stood in opposition, as did parallel movements in the Eng-lish speaking world.

A third account of the objects of judgment are views such as those rep-resented by Bernard Bolzano in his Wissenschaftslehre [Theory of Science]2,and later by Hermann Lotze3 and Frege.4 These theories distinguished betweenthe sentence expressed in the words on the one hand and an object which froma contemporary point of view can be called the meaning of the sentence, on theother. The latter is called the ‘sentence in itself’ (Bolzano) or ‘thought’ (Frege).These are ideal entities which exist neither in our minds nor in the real worldoutside the mind, but rather (perhaps) in some sort of Platonic realm. A judg-ment is, according to these theories, the thinking of a sentence in itself or thethinking of a thought. Nowadays we would say that in such a view the judg-

The Ontology of Judgement 85

ment is the propositional attitude, i.e. the attitude of a judging subject to theseideal entities.

Since the latter theory of judgment was in fact also very influential withrespect to other aspects of the history of the choice of the truth bearer in theperiod in question, I shall provide more details about Bolzano’s view on judg-ment and truth in a later part of this study, when I shall speak about the problemof the objectivity of knowledge and about the objectivity of truth. Here I shallturn to the problem of the objects of judgments as this arises on the basis of theimmanentistic reading of Brentano’s concept of intentionality.

1.3 The Immanentistic Reading of Brentano’s Doctrineof Intentionality

The immanentistic reading of Brentano’s doctrine of intentionality faces diffi-culties especially in dealing with negative existential judgments. For example,the judgment expressed in the sentence ‘God does not exist’, seems, on thestrength of the principle of intentionality, both to have and to lack an object. IfI deny the existence of God, how can it be that the object about which I judgedoes not exist? If the object does not exist then there is no such object. Howthen, can I make a judgment about it? According to the principle of intention-ality after all, I can only judge about something. But, if so, my judgment isfalse, since God must exist when I judge about Him in a negative judgment.Thus, either every negative judgment must be false or the principle of inten-tionality is false. It was as part of an attempt to solve these difficulties, knownbetter as ‘Plato’s beard’, that Brentano and his immediate successors began toreconsider one of Brentano’s original theses to the effect that acts of judgmentget their objects (contents, matters) from underlying acts of presentation.

2. Carl Stumpf (I): On Act and ContentThe problem arises in virtue of the fact that the ontological correlates of judg-ment, in Brentano’s view, are simply the objects accepted or rejected, re-spectively, in positive and negative judgments. In 1888 Carl Stumpf, anotherstudent of Brentano, suggested a solution of this and other similar problemsvia the assumption of what he called a ‘special content of a judging act’. Thecontent of a judgment, according to Stumpf, should be different from the con-tent of a presentation. Thus, Stumpf writes:

From the matter of the judgment we distinguish its content, the Sachverhalt that isexpressed in the judgment. For example ‘God is’ has for its matter God, for its content:the existence of God. ‘There is no God’ has the same matter but its content is: non-existence of God. (Stumpf notes to his logic lecture of 1888, Husserl Archive, Louvain,MS Q 13, p. 4)

Thus, when speaking about a judgment and what this judgment is aboutwe have to take into account at least two correlates of the judging act: its

86 CHAPTER FIVE

matter, which is the object of the judgment borrowed from the underlying actof presentation (Brentano’s ‘matter of judgment’) and the specific content ofthe judging act itself. It is also worth noting that what makes this passage veryimportant is the use of the term ‘Sachverhalt’, due to the role it played in thelater history of the problems in question.

In 1907 Stumpf, inspired most probably by Meinong, pointed out that thecontent of a judgment is at the same time expressed by that-clauses, in sen-tences such as ‘that John loves Mary’, or by substantivized infinitives, suchas ‘John loving Mary’.5 However, twenty years earlier, the ontology of theSachverhalt was for Stumpf still a branch of descriptive psychology rather thansomething connected with language. States of affairs as correlates of judgingacts were for him formations [Gebilde]. The latter, together with functionsand appearances [Erscheinung], were conceived by Stumpf as three ontologi-cal categories which can include everything which belongs to the domain in-vestigated by descriptive psychology.6 Functions are just mental acts (eventsor processes). Appearances are, roughly speaking, sense data. Formationsinclude not only states of affairs but also, for example, concepts, values andGestalt qualities.7 In contrast to appearances, formations do not exist some-where in the world as independent entities; rather, they are the contents of thecorresponding functions—only as such can they be described and investigated.States of affairs are then the contents of judging acts and do not exist withoutthe acts (functions) which are their hosts. Formations are thus immanent tothe knowing subject, i.e. they exist only ‘in the context of the living being ofthe mind’.8 However, in the course of time, the same technical philosophicalterm, ‘state of affairs’, which was used by Stumpf for the immanent part ofa mental act of judging came to stand for something independent of the know-ing subject, for something which is mind-independent and which exists on theside of the things outside the mind. This philosophical usage of the term re-quired another step in the development of a theory of the object of a judgment,which was made by Kazimierz Twardowski in his On the Content and Objectof Presentations of 1894.

Remark. In fact, the idea that there are special objects of judgment was notoriginal with Stumpf. He was merely the first to use it in the framework ofthe Brentanian theory of judgment. In 1880 Hermann Lotze in his Logic intro-duced his treatment of judgment by distinguishing relations between presen-tations and material relations, which he also calls the ‘content’ of a judgment.He argues that whenever we judge, then we presuppose that a kind of ma-terial relation obtains independently of us. We then picture it in a sentence.The idea of such a target of judging as an entity transcendent to the mind ofthe judging subject culminates in a Platonistic view of objects of judgment.The term ‘Sachverhalt’ itself was used earlier in a similar manner by JuliusBergmann in his General Logic of 1879.9


Remark. From a historical point of view it is important to know that Her-mann Lotze played the role of an éminence grise in the philosophical life oflate nineteenth-century Germany. The idea that there were different kinds ofrelations in which the judging act stands was developed by several students un-der the influence of Lotze’s writings or lectures. These include Gottlob Fregein Germany, who especially emphasized the Platonistic side of Lotze’s ideas,as well as Lotze’s idea of assertive force; George Friderik Stout in England,who introduced the theory of special objects of judgment (nowadays called‘propositions’) into the English speaking world; as well as two Brentanists,Carl Stumpf and Anton Marty.10

3. Kazimierz Twardowski (III): On the Object ofJudgement

It is Kazimierz Twardowski who made the crucial break with the immanentis-tic position as concerns the object of judgment. I shall not repeat once againthe object/content distinction introduced above in its descriptive-psychologicaland linguistic dimensions.11 It is, however, worth recalling one of Twardow-ski’s theses to the effect that an object and a content should be distinguishedin the case of every mental act. Thus, in the case of judgment, too, the distinc-tion must be valid. For Twardowski, whose view remains along the lines ofBrentano, the content of a judgment is the existence of the object in question.However, as has been noted, while the judged object exists or does not exist in-dependently of the judgment, its content cannot be strictly dependent upon thisunderlying act. Among the solutions of this problem there is one which I havenot yet mentioned. This is the interpretation of Twardowski which assumesthat the act of judging has not only a special content of its own but also a spe-cial object. According to this interpretation, the act of judging does not takeits object from the relevant underlying presentation. Rather, there is a specialjudgment-object in addition to the special judgment-content. The justificationfor this interpretation is given in the letter to Alexius Meinong which Twardow-ski wrote three years after his On the Content and Object of Presentations.12 Inthis letter he suggests a generalization of the content/object distinction to thesphere of judging acts. In relation to judgments, too, we should recognize thatthey have special objects. By making the object/content distinction valid forjudgments, Twardowski moves Stumpf’s Sachverhalt from the domain of act-dependent contents to the domain of act-intending transcendent objects. Theschema given by this interpretation has thus the following form:

Act: Content: Object:

Presentation: the awarness of a tree the image of a tree a tree

Judging: the acceptance/ the tree exists the existence of the treerejection of the tree

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Once the distinction between an act, its content and its object has beengranted, a new type of investigation of special objects of judgment becomespossible. This, in turn, influenced the investigations of truth (and, thereby, ofits bearers) on the part of Brentanians, changing the directions in which truthhad until then been explored.

4. Edmund Husserl (I): The Psycho-Linguistic Contentof Judgement

4.1 Formal OntologyIt was Edmund Husserl who placed the accent on Twardowski’s idea of a theoryof objects. The objects to which Husserl pays principal attention are the statesof affairs which arise as new objects of judging acts. The notion of a stateof affairs, Husserl claims, should be seen as a formal notion. ‘Formal’ heremeans that it is a notion which applies to all domains without any restriction.The science which focuses on investigating such notions as states of affairs iscalled ‘formal ontology’ by Husserl. Formal ontology is rooted in psychology,and it becomes a part of descriptive psychology, especially when investigatingobjects of mental activities, and more specifically, when investigating statesof affairs. Husserl argues for a view of states of affairs as the correlates ofjudging acts in a way which is analogous to the way in which objects serve astranscendental targets of presentations. For Husserl, however, states of affairsserve as correlates not only of acts of judging but also of other non-judgmentalacts of wishing, questioning, doubting, and so on.13 Since I am interested in thebearers of truth, I shall concentrate only on the correlates of acts of judging.Yet Husserl adds new elements to his account of states of affairs as objectsof judgments. For Husserl, states of affairs are above all connected with actsof using language, i.e. they cannot be targeted without using language. Asregards language, there are also other reasons for the acceptance of specialobjects of judging activities (which then become part of the subject-matter offormal ontology).

What was quite unclear among Brentanians before Husserl was how to con-ceive properly the form, or as we would say today, the logical syntax of mentalacts. It is not clear how far (and whether at all), when introducing his id-iogenetic and existential theory of judgment, Brentano was conscious of thesyntactical difference between acts of presenting and acts of judging as thisbecomes visible on the level of their linguistic counterparts, in the syntacticaldifferences between names and sentences. Should we accept the interpretationaccording to which Brentano’s psychological moment of assertion or rejectiondistinguishes judgment from presentation also in the sense of mental gram-mar, i.e. that they change the form of the mental act? It seems that Brentano’sprinciple of reducing all linguistic expressions of judgment to their existentialforms meant that Brentano distinguished between the (deep) logical and the


(superficial) grammatical form of language, where the logical form of the lin-guistic phrase depends upon the form of the underlying judgment. If this isso, then why do we assume that only acceptance and rejection and not alsoother moments of judging acts influence the form of their superficial linguisticexpression? Why, for example, cannot negation or implication be expressionsof a kind of judgment-form? Brentano’s view is that the only moment whichcan influence the form of a judgment is the moment which is connected withintentionality. He speaks as if new and special types of intentionality (withrespect to presentation) took place in a judging act, and these are rejection andacceptance. Despite the relation between the form of a judging act and its lin-guistic garb, however, in Brentano’s view the judging act refers to the matterof a judgment, i.e. to the object of presentation.

In opposition to Brentano, Husserl conceives the objects of judging acts asstates of affairs. Only in this way, according to Husserl, can the complexity ofthe ontological objective correlates of judgments reflect the complexity of anact of judging—a complexity expressed in a linguistic manner in the form ofa sentence.

4.2 The Theory of MeaningThe new dimension to the distinction between an act, its content and its objectwhich Husserl adds in comparison to the work of earlier Brentanians is thus histheory of meaning. On the one hand, Husserl’s theory of the linguistic coun-terparts of mental acts is rooted in an analysis of the function of language andof the relations between language and thinking. On the other hand, the theoryof meaning as presented by Husserl is grounded in an ontology of judgmentthat is part and parcel of a descriptive psychology. The postulate of formalontology is, in fact, only one of the results of Husserl’s theory of meaning,alongside such ideas as that of categorial grammar or that of the theory of thescience of sciences.

For Husserl, as for all Brentanians, a speech act is an act of meaning (a mea-ning-bestowing act): we express our mental acts in language and these acts, inaccordance with the thesis of intentionality, refer to objects. We use languageonly when we have an object given in our perception or in our thought. This isthe sense in which Husserl speaks about giving meaning to expressions and inwhich, for him, speech acts are meaning-bestowing acts.14

Since the objects of presenting acts are different from the objects of judgingacts, there are, for Husserl, two different types of uses of language—those inwhich we use names, and those in which we use sentences. The use of a nameis connected with an act of presenting whereas the use of a sentence is asso-ciated with an act of judgment. Furthermore, the use of a name is possiblewithout the use of a sentence; thus the act of nominal meaning is independentof that of propositional meaning. The meaning itself of this nominal meaning-

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act is, according to Husserl, a presentation in specie (a concept). The meaningof a complex (nowadays we call it ‘propositional’) meaning act, such as theexpression of a judgment, is a species of acts of judgment. Thus, every act of(nominal or propositional) meaning is an instantiation of the meaning (of thespecies of presentations or of the species of judging acts). However, when con-sidering meaning acts we are dealing with the speech acts involved. Thus, ifwe consider the theories of meaning sketched in Chapter 4 above, where mean-ings almost always played a role in association with individual mental acts (ofthe speaker or of the hearer), we can see that Husserl’s theory of meaning asa species of mental acts is a continuation of those theories. Marty and othersnotoriously had problems with the identification of acts fulfilled by a speakerand his or her receiver. For Husserl the identity of meaning is the identity ofthe species of mental acts. This solves, in Husserl’s view, the problem of theidentity of meanings in particular acts of communication. His account alsochanges the view of the relation between speech or language and their mean-ing: uttered names or sentences are not only the ‘media’ which are needed totransfer meanings in the sense, for example, that they ‘transfer’ acts of presen-tations or acts of judgments from the speaker to the hearer. In Husserl’s viewmeanings are strongly connected with these utterances. These utterances arein a sense the ‘creators’ of those meanings. There is no need for meaningswithout acts of communication. The latter, however, not only present them,but also create them.

It is common nowadays in philosophy, in particular in that of language, tomake the meaning of a sentence (a proposition) the object of our attitude. Thelatter is called the ‘propositional attitude’. The theory of meaning presentedby Twardowski and that of Husserl in Logical Investigations are similar in thatmeaning is not the object to which we are directed in mental acts. It is not theattitude (such as the propositional attitude) that decides about the grasping ofa meaning. For Husserl meaning is a mental event or process taken in specie:it is not their object. The clear difference between the Brentano-Twardowskitheory of meaning and that of Husserl, however, is the fact that in the caseof the latter acts of judging refer to objects different than those to which theunderlying acts of presenting refer. Furthermore, in Husserl’s account the com-plexity of these objects (i.e. the complexity of states of affairs) is expressed inthe act of meaning, i.e. in the utterance of a sentence taken in specie. Thus, themeaning (as a species) of a sentence expresses the complexity of the state ofaffairs to which an underlying mental act of judgment refers. That is why wecan concentrate on a meaning itself in order to see how things (states of affairs)can be. Thus, a kind of propositional attitude is needed only when we concen-trate on the meaning itself and not in the nominal act of communication. Inorder to judge how things are and to communicate this we do not need to makemeanings the objects of our reflection. Only when we are interested primarily


in the possibilities of the complexity of the state of affairs in question do weemploy meanings.15

However, expressing the complexity of the correlates of judgments consti-tutes only one of the functions of meanings in a language (as a species), justas it presents only one of the functions of a general theory of meaning (asa species). In this context it is worth keeping in mind the quite obvious dif-ference between the function of meanings (as a species) and the function ofa general theory of meaning (as a species). We can build a general theory ofmeaning (as a species), as Husserl does, making these meanings (as a species)the objects of our reflection. Now, the function of such a theory of meaningcan vary, depending on what the indirect object of our theory is; the directobject of a theory of meaning here are these meanings themselves. In otherwords, having an ontology of meanings we can put them into different con-texts, for various purposes, trying to explain different phenomena. First, forexample, we can look at meanings (as a species) in order to see the complexityof the objects to which acts refer via the sentences expressing them. To lookat the sphere of meanings is, as it was stated above, to look at the possibilitiesof obtaining states of affairs in the world. Secondly, since science consists,according to Husserl, of a set of acts of cognition which are related to eachother, the theory of meaning which takes meanings as idealized structures ofsimple and complex cognitive acts of various sorts is a descriptive theory ofscience. Thirdly, such a theory of meaning as the theory of science in its nor-mative sense investigates the conditions under which a certain group of simpleand complex cognitive acts of various sorts count as a science: this is whatHusserl calls logic. Fourth, a part of logic is the theory of meaning categories,i.e. the theory of the highest species in the realm of meanings. Thus, it is worthnoting that every theory of meaning (in specie) is, in Husserl’s view, a theoryof both the underlying mental acts which are instantiations of those meaningsand of the objects to which these acts refer. What is most important, however,is that act-species are idealizations made not from particular mental acts (ofthe speaker or of the hearer) but from their linguistic instantiations, i.e. fromthe particular acts of meaning given in speech. In particular, the theory ofthe meanings of sentences (i.e. the theory of the species of expressed acts ofjudging) is a theory of judging acts and a theory of their correlates, i.e. states ofaffairs. The species of judgment acts are idealizations taken from the particularacts of utterance made in a special act of ideation.

4.3 The Theory of the Cognition of Meaning

It would appear that the species of an act is determined by the particular speechact. Why do we not assume that they are there anyway? The problem whicharises here is thus whether species exist even if no one apprehends them theo-retically? Are the questions ‘how do we idealize meanings?’ and ‘how do we

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empirically know about the sphere of meanings as species?’ one and the same?Husserl writes:

Every time we fulfill acts of conceptual presentation we also have concepts; presen-tations have their ‘contents’, their ideal meanings which we can abstractively grasp(bemächtigen) in an idealization by abstraction (ideirende Abstraction). (Husserl 1900/1901, p. 187––my translation)

and,As one species has ideal identity over against its manifold possible cases (which are notthemselves colours, but instances of one colour), so meanings or concepts have identityin relation to the conceptions of which they are the ‘contents’. (Husserl 1900/1901[1970, p. 128])

If the content of a presentation is identified with the meaning of its expres-sion, then the question arises whether in the act of ideation we grasp (appre-hend) the species or whether we rather create them? In other words, are ourparticular mental acts strictly referential, whereas their contents are what wecreate with the help of an accomplishing act of ideation (what we later, usinglanguage, call ‘meaning’)? Or are contents, so to speak, given in the mental actitself, whereas in the act of ideation we can only grasp (apprehend) them? Thealternatives are either that we assume that act-species are our suppositions, i.e.products of our act of ideation, or that act-species exist independently of ourcognition of them. The same questions and alternatives arise both for acts ofjudging and their contents and for the meanings of the sentences which are theexpressions of these acts.

The basic question is whether ideal objects of thought are––to use the prevailing jargon––mere pointers to ‘thought-economies’, verbal abbreviations whose true content merelyreduces to individual, singular experiences, mere presentations and judgments concern-ing individual facts, or whether the idealist is right in holding that (. . .) all attemptsto reduce ideal unities to real singulars are involved in hopeless absurdities. (Husserl1900/1901 [1970, p. 193])

Husserl gives us two different answers to this question, affirming both ofthe alternatives in different places of his Logical Investigations. In the Prole-gomena he clearly opts for the Platonic version of meanings as species evenif they are dependent of our acts of ideation. Even so, on no account are theyonly theoretically supposed, since a supposition of something does not entail,for Husserl, its existence.

It is not a mere hypothesis which should be justified by its explanational power, butwe take it for granted as the immediate grasped truth following in this respect the lastauthority in all questions of epistemology––the evidence. I have an insight that in therepeated acts of presentations and of judgments I cognize and I am able to cognizethe same concept and the same sentence. (Husserl 1900/1901, I, pp. 128–129––mytranslation)16

In the second volume of the Logical Investigations, in ‘Ausdruck und Be-deutung’, however, Husserl clearly differentiates between species and mean-ings, the former existing independently of a speaking subject. One could say


with some justification that this view is not necessarily in opposition to theview from the first volume of his work, since the Platonistic view as far asspecies are concerned does not involve apprehending them as meanings onlywhen functioning in acts of meaning. In other words an empirical knowledgeof meanings is independent of their existence in a Platonistic fashion. On thisinterpretation being a species is something different from being a meaning-species, in that a Platonistic species can be viewed in a linguistic act. This canbe seen, however, in another way. The fact is that being an instantiation ofa species is an ontological fact, while being the meaning of an expressed men-tal act is a linguistic fact. But in Aristotelian fashion this ontological relationof instantiation cannot take place without an instantiation which is linguistic.Thus, as I understand it, we create meanings only in the sense that by means oflanguage we make instantiations of a species. It is therefore something differ-ent to recognize species as meanings in an act of ideation. In this sense Husserlshares the view of Aristotle rather than, as is explained in many commentarieson Husserl, the view of Plato.17

It seems that an empirical state of affairs which is the object of a judgingact can also be taken in specie in an act of ideation and become a species.What then distinguishes this species when expressed in language (i.e. in thespeaking of a sentence) from the species which is the act-species expressedin the same sentence and which is a meaning? In other words, what distin-guishes meaning-entities from object-entities where both happen to be speciesexpressed in language? It seems to be the case that object-entities are not ex-pressible unless they become meanings. Meaning-entities are species of whichparticular acts of speech are instantiations. This ontological relation betweenan act and an act-species as meaning is ‘brought into relief’ in an speech act.The object-entities as species instantiate particular empirical states of affairs.This relation of species-instantiation is ‘brought into relief’ by an ontologicalfact. However, when expressed by means of language it becomes a meaning.Now, opting for the correspondence theory of truth, as Husserl does, there ex-ists the possibility of mistaking a state of affairs for a species in a linguisticsense: namely, that the species of a state of affairs we mean can be differentfrom the state of affairs which actually obtains:

It is not a chance fact that a propositional thought [act in specie—AR], occurring hereand now, agrees with a given state of affairs: the agreement rather holds between a self-identical propositional meaning, and a self-identical state of affairs. (Husserl 1900/1901[1970, p. 195])

4.4 Truth as SpeciesI think that, in this respect, Husserl’s view becomes more understandable inrelation to empirical truth. Actually, Husserl was not very interested in thiskind of truth. He was interested rather in truths which are, as he eagerly calledthem, a priori. For Husserl, the latter, as well as all truth, belong to the sphere

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of meanings. They are objective, and it seems that the problem of the ob-jectivity of both truth and knowledge were crucial for Husserl in the LogicalInvestigations.18 Both empirical and a priori truths should be considered inspecie. Thus, for Husserl, to grasp (or to experience or to apprehend) a truthhas the same sense in which we grasp other species, i.e. it is an act of ideation.So, when speaking, we grasp the object of our act of meaning, the meaning isjust there (as a species of this instance, which is a speech act) and the truth ofthis act can be grasped, if at all, by a theorist such as the logician. Yet hereagain Husserl shows his ambiguous answer to the question of species univer-sals: On the one hand, Husserl’s truth is an idea (a species) that is independentof the knowing (or speaking) subject in the same sense as any other species—itneed not be recognized by anyone:

Each truth, however, remains in itself what it is, it retains its ideal being: it does nothang somewhere in the void, but is a case of validity in the timeless realm of Ideas.(Husserl 1900/1901, [1970, p. 149])

On the other hand, truth is, as Husserl put is, an ideal possibility which isinstantiated in particular truths, i.e. in acts of evident judging.

And just as, in other cases, the being or ‘holding’ of something general amounts to anideal possibility––i.e. a possibility in regard to the being of empirical cases falling underthe general Idea––so too in this case: the statements ‘It is the truth that. . .’ and ‘Therecould have been thinking beings having insight into judgments to the effect that. . .’, areequivalent. (Husserl 1900/1901 [1970, p. 149])

What is important here, however, is that in both cases it is not the act ofjudging which serves as the bearer of truth, i.e. it is not of act of judging that‘true’ or ‘truth’ are predicated. Truths that instantiate truth in specie are notjudging acts:

One should likewise not confuse the true judgment, as the correct judgment in accor-dance with truth, with the truth of this judgment or with the true content of judgment.(Husserl 1900/1901 [1970, p. 142])

Particular truths are thus not concrete acts of judging, but rather these judg-ing acts taken in specie, i.e. meanings. But these meanings can be, again,instantiations of a species of truth:

We do not ‘apprehend’ truth as we apprehend some empirical content which comesup, and again vanishes, in the stream of mental experiences: truth is not a phenomenonamong phenomena, but is an experience in that totally different sense in which a univer-sal, an Idea, is an experience. We are conscious of truth, as we are in general consciousof a Species, e.g. of ‘the’ Colour Red. (Husserl 1900/1901 [1970, p. 148])

If we are conscious of truth, then the instantiations of truth as species areact-species (contents of judgments or meanings). How, then, can particulartruth be the agreement between the judging act and what the judging act isabout? In other words, is truth a relation in specie or a judging act in specie?


It seems that there are several kinds of species which are to be called ‘truth’.The first kind of truth-species is the act-species, of which particular mentalacts are instantiations. But there is also a species truth (the species of species),which is the species of which truth-species understood as act-species are in-stantiations. The next kind of truth is the relation in specie between a judgingact and what this judging act is about. But there is also the species of suchspecies, the truth which is the species of those species.

Independently of what the right meaning of truth in Husserl’s view is, i.e.of whether truth is an act-species or a relation-species, it is unclear what theprimary notion in specie is: truth in specie (of which act-species are instantia-tions), or relations in specie; or, maybe the instantiation thereof, i.e. act-speciesor relations-species? In other words, is it the case that making act-species we‘bring into relief’ the species truth? Or, rather, is there truth of which thesentences we utter or write happened to be instantiations? The answer to thisquestion depends on whether we make nominalistic or realistic assumptionsconcerning the universal ‘truth’. Nevertheless, the predicate ‘true’, if it canbe predicated of anything at all, should, on Husserl’s account, be predicatedof the act-species. This is so because the epistemic notions of ideation and ofthe cognition of truth are connected with these acts. Otherwise, from the purepoint of view of the species-instantiation relation, the notion of truth wouldremain only an ontological notion. But, in a literal, ontological sense, despitethe problem of the cognition of truth, it is possible that in Husserl’s view thereare no bearers of truth, but only truth in specie which can be instantiated byspecies of cognitive acts.

The issue of truth and its bearers is then an issue of the choice between theepistemic and the ontological notions of truth. If we are interested only in thespecies-instantiation relation as far as truths are concerned, there is no need forany truth-bearers. Only if we want to link the notion of truth to its cognition,i.e. when we opt for an epistemic notion of truth, does the problem of the truth-bearer arise. It should also be noted that the problem of truth-bearers appears,in Husserl’s view, only for theorists and not for all language users. The problemof the bearers of semantic properties such as meaning and truth is connectedwith theorizing reflections on normal, communicative speech acts. Thus, onceagain, contrasting this view with the contemporary notion of the ‘propositionalattitude’, there would be no bearers of meanings (in specie) to which we canhave an attitude, unless we take a theorizing and epistemic attitude, which isnot the attitude of everyday language users.

5. Anton Marty (III): The Temporal Ontologyof the Content of Judgements

As we have seen, Anton Marty’s judgment-contents are similar in many waysto the objectives described by Meinong in his On Assumptions.19 Both the

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content of judgments and objectives are entities intermediate between judg-ments on the one hand and objects as presented in acts of presenting on theother. However, unlike Meinong, who seeks a descriptive-psychological ex-planation of hypothetical thinking, Marty, who in this respect remains faith-ful to Brentano, associates his theory of judgment rather with the concept oftruth. Moreover, as we have seen in previous chapters, Marty’s theory of truthrelies on the concept of correct judgment. In this respect Marty’s judgment-contents are comparable to Bolzano’s truths in themselves in that both serve asthe standard to which an actual judging act, if it is to be true, must conform.However, whereas Bolzano’s truths in themselves are ideal or extra-temporal,Marty’s judgment-contents exist in time. Moreover, even when Marty refersto Brentano’s epistemological concept of truth which, roughly speaking, relieson the notion of right or correct judgment, and even when his theory of truthshows some similarities to Bolzano’s account of measurement for truth, Marty,following Husserl, goes back to the classical correspondence theory of truth.Unlike Husserl, however, Marty was primarily interested in the truth of empir-ical judgments which occurs, for Marty, at a given moment of time. Thus, histheory of truth goes in a somewhat different direction than that developed byHusserl.

Yet what kinds of entities are to stand in the relation of correspondenceabout which Marty speaks when talking about truth? We must remember that,first of all, this correspondence is to be the standard to which an actual actof judging must conform, and secondly, the correspondence is to be expe-rienced. Besides the experience of evidence, the adequation between theseentities should also be grasped.

As regards the first requirement it is clear, at least for Marty, that these en-tities cannot be extra-temporal entities, for we have to make an actual act ofjudging in which we refer to an existent or non-existent object in time. A judg-ment is true, from this point of view, when there obtains an adequation in thesense of an actual correlation. The elements between which the adequationshould obtain in a true judgment are, for Marty, a particular judging act anda particular state of affairs. In adopting the descriptive-psychological point ofview, Marty also calls the latter a ‘judgment-content’, and it is an entity whichexists in time in the same way as Stumpf’s content of judgment, though it is not,as in the case of the latter, immanent to the act. Instead, judging-contents are,to put it on the linguistic level, entities which are the literal meaning III20 of theexpression through which we communicate our judging acts. It follows that, asfar as the theory of adequation goes, Marty uses the expression ‘communicatedcontent of judgment’ in at least two different senses, in a way similar to his useof the notion of meaning as meaning II and meaning III in two different senses.On the one hand, ‘content of judgment’ stands for all the moments which areincluded in a real act of judging (e.g. assertion, certainty and so on) and whosecounterpart on the linguistic level is only its communicable part as the meaning


II of the expression of the underlying judgment. On the other hand, ‘contentof judgment’ refers to an intended state of affairs. Its counterpart presents thecontent of the utterance to which I have referred above as the meaning III. ThusMarty seems to accept two different contents: the psychological content of anact of judging and the state of affairs as the meaning of the uttered sentence,and he asserts that the correspondence should take place between these twocontents. We may omit this ambiguity by introducing a distinction betweenmeaning-entities and object-entities. The impression that Marty was confusedon this matter is a result of the fact that on the linguistic level the difference isdescribable only in the above way. This is because both meaning-entities andobject-entities can be, as it was in the case of Husserl, expressed, or intended,or communicated by means of language. By making the meaning- and object-entities separate on the level of the ontology of judgment we avoid such animpression.

As regards the second requirement the answer is somewhat unclear but itmight go as follows: In cases when the correlation is realized, we might saythat truth itself is experienced (‘lived through’). The correspondence betweenan act of judging and a state of affairs produces the experience which is re-quired in order to call a judgment true. The assumption of the experience ofan act of judging and its content understood as the meaning of its utteranceseems to be reasonable, since the nature of what has to be experienced is de-pendent upon mental acts: both the content of a judging act and the contentof an uttered sentence are subject-dependent in the sense that both exist onlywhen judging occurs.

But, then, it is problematic not only how the experience of evidence andadequation as required in true judgment is caused by the obtained correspon-dence. It is also problematic that in the view described above both the psy-chological content of judgment and the state of affairs are, to some degree,dependent upon the judgment. Yet Marty defends the view that states of affairsor judgment-contents are that which objectively grounds the correctness of ourjudging. For Marty, therefore, states of affairs must be something whose ex-istence is independent of consciousness. Otherwise, how could Marty speakabout his view as a defense of the classical correspondence theory of truth?Perhaps the rei in the relation of adequatio must not be something completelyindependent of mind. Is it not the case that in Marty’s view the correspon-dence obtains between what we think and what we speak about, i.e. a corre-spondence which can obtain between a psychological content of judgment andthe meaning of what we actually uttered? Marty’s answer is that just as the actof judging itself relies on an act of presenting, so a state of affairs relies on anobject of presentation. The content of an utterance (a state of affairs) is basedon an object of presenting which underlies the act of judging of which it is anexpression. A state of affairs, thus, is not an object completely determined in

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the act of judging; rather, it is determined by the fact of expressing this judgingact.

But what is most important in the account of truth given by Marty is theconcept of truth itself. In Marty’s account truth is, as for Husserl, a species.It is, however, clearly a species of relation of correspondence. Yet the exis-tence of this species is, as in Husserl’s view, intermittent; it exists only in theinstances of the correspondence relation which are associated with the exis-tence of judging acts taking place at certain point in time. Unlike in Husserl’saccount, however, they must not be associated with an act of language use.Furthermore, the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of suchinstances is the co-existence of a process of judging and a corresponding stateof affairs. This is Marty’s ontological point as far as truth is concerned: forhim a world without judging acts is a world without truth. Now it is clear whyMarty claims that the ‘true’ should be predicated of judging acts rather than,for example, of objectives or act species. The latter are objects ‘created’ injudgments. Thus, Marty argues further, the states of affairs can play the roleof truthmakers rather than that of truth bearers (both roles are played, for ex-ample, by Bolzano’s sentences in themselves). Truth bearers are judging acts.Moreover, ‘true’ can be predicated of them not only in an indirect sense, for thebasic notions here are those of evidence and adequation. It seems that Martysaw a difference between the two accounts regarding the definition of truth, i.e.a difference between an explanation of the concept of truth and the extensionaldefinition of truth in which one attempts to define the set of what is true. Martyexplains the notion of truth in the same way as Husserl does, i.e. by referring tospecies. However, he defines truth extensionally along the lines of Brentano,i.e. by referring to the epistemic qualifications of judging acts such as evidenceand adequation.

Marty’s theory of judgment in terms of assimilation to actual states of af-fairs is not, of course, without its difficulties. Problems for such a theory ariseabove all with regards to false judgments, such as ‘The lines on this page arewritten in German’. Since Marty’s conception of truth presupposes the simul-taneous existence of both judgment and judgment-content, in a false judgmentthe correspondence could take place only between an act of judging and a stateof affairs which does not exist. But the non-obtaining states of affairs haveno place in Marty’s ontology of judgment.21 There are only states of affairs towhich true judgments conform. Does this also mean that expressions of falsejudgments do not have meaning III (understood on the ground of the ontologyof judgment as object-entities)?

Marty’s theory of correspondence faces similar problems with regards tojudgments about the past and judgments which are general. The former prob-lem arises when we refer to non-obtaining states of affairs, such as yesterday’ssnow blizzard. The latter problem arises when we refer to states of affairs suchas the meaning III of the sentence ‘There are beavers’, or, what is even more


problematic ‘There are no unicorns’. Marty’s solutions to such problems relyon his assumption of a distinction between ‘to exist’ and ‘to be real’, as knownfrom Twardowski and Meinong. Both real entities and non-real entities canexist. Thus, non-real past and non-real general states of affairs can exist ascorrelates of an actual judging act.

6. Adolf Reinach (I): A Platonistic Ontology of Judgement

In contrast to the theories of Husserl and Marty, Adolf Reinach defends a Pla-tonistic approach in the ontology of states of affairs. There is no doubt that hewas inspired in this account by Meinong’s objectives and Bernard Bolzano’ssentences in themselves. However, the new sort of sophistication Reinachreached consists of the fact that he clearly distinguishes between what we todaycall propositional meaning and the state of affairs (and what we approachedabove when introducing the distinction between meaning-entities and object-entities). The anticipation of this difference in the work of Husserl and Martywas unclear in that they could not clearly separate the content of a judging actand the (objectual) content of its expression (Marty) and between objects ofa judging act and the content of an act-species (Husserl). Reinach also intro-duces the totality of states of affairs, a realm in which not only every actual,but also every possible judgment and its expression, find their correlates. Therealm of states of affairs includes the correlates not only of the rejection orassertion of something but also every modal judgment, not only true, but alsofalse, and not only simple judgments but also judgments of any complexity.States of affairs are, in Reinach’s account, extra-temporal and unchangeable.Their role is similar to the role which they played in the theories of Husserland Marty: they are the truthmakers of every past, present and future judgingact.

Reinach, however, in contrast to Husserl and Marty, looks neither to speciesnor to expressions of meanings in language, but (as he saw it) out into theworld, to the objectual correlates of judging acts. Reinach solves the problemof the cognition of meanings such as act-species or contents by arguing thatstates of affairs are accessible in ordinary acts. We see that the rose is red, wehear that this or that tone are a part of this melody and so on.

This unproblematic access to states of affairs seems to be troublesome whenthey are considered as objects of logic. Are objects of logic accessible in thesame sense in which tones and roses are? Here, on the one hand, Platonism aspredicated of the Reinachian realm of state of affairs also means that states ofaffairs are not only outside of and independent of the mind but also that theyare not in the spatio-temporal world. Therefore, in the Reinachian account,logical relations obtain among these state of affairs themselves. On the otherhand, they are higher order objects in the sense of Meinong, i.e. they are for

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the most part built up out of ordinary objects. Therefore, the cognition of stateof affairs involves the cognition of the ordinary objects of experience.

What is worth noting is that the domain of states of affairs in Reinach’saccount is complete, which means that there are already given existent statesof affairs for every possible judgment and for every possible expression of it.The reason for the assumption of completeness for the realm of states of affairswas that Reinach here wanted to hold the correspondence theory of truth forevery kind of judgment, even those that are problematic in other theories, suchas negative judgments or judgments about impossible objects. Among statesof affairs in such a reach realm there are truthmakers for every judgment.

Unlike the theories of Husserl and Marty, which we can call psycho-linguis-tic theories in the sense that content- and object-entities are dependent uponpsychological acts of judgments and their linguistic expressions, Reinach’stheory of states of affairs is not strictly connected with his theory of language.The opposite is rather the case. From a contemporary point of view it wouldbe very interesting to see how Reinach’s ontology decided about his accountof speech acts. Reinach’s theory of speech acts is in several respects similar totheories later proposed by Austin and Searle. Besides assertion, Reinach is alsoable to explain several other propositional attitudes such as promising, asking,requesting and so on. However, since judgment as a spontaneous act (as op-posed to non-spontaneous passive experiences) does not require the fulfillmentof any linguistic performances, Reinach’s speech-acts theory does not affectthe theory of true judgments. Yet this does hold for other spontaneous actswhich are by their nature social acts and therefore are dependent on linguisticusage.22

7. Summary of Chapter 5Descriptive psychology and theories of the linguistic counterparts of mentalacts exerted an ever greater influence on one another during the course of in-vestigations concerning the object of judgment. After the distinction betweenan act, its content and its object became clear, a new sort of correlate for judg-ing acts was established. Brentano’s immediate followers, such as Twardow-ski, saw these ontological correlates as still being in harmony with Brentano’sexistential theory of judgment. The correlate of the positive judgment ‘A ex-ists’ became the existence of A; the correlate of the corresponding negativejudgment, the non-existence of A. Other types of judgment-correlates werealso recognized, especially later by Meinong: the subsistence of A (as the ob-ject of judgment about fictions), the possibility of A, the necessity of A (as theobjects of modal judgments), the probability of A (as the object of probabilis-tic judgments), and so on. Later, however, together with the turn back to thecorrespondence theory of truth, the complexity of states of affairs no longercorresponded exclusively to the existential theory of judgment.


In the philosophy of Husserl, Marty and Reinach there took place a change,not only in the objects of judging activities but also in the concept of truth.Nevertheless, truth was still related to acts of judgment and to the concepts ofevidence. Even when all three philosophers added new conditions for speak-ing about truth, namely adequation or correspondence, they all assumed somekind of cognition of it. Thus, the theories of truth are still criteriological in thesense that, following Brentano, they are supposed to give a psychological cri-terion of truth which, in order to produce the objectivized criterion, rely uponnon-psychological conditions. Truth was also conceived as a species whichhas its instances in another species (as in the case of Husserl’s act-species) orin concrete acts of judging (as it was in Marty’s view.) What is important isthat in both cases truth was related in a new way to language. The instantia-tions of truth such as Husserl’s act-species and Marty’s judgment-contents aregrasped only with contemporaneously uttered sentences. This is not the casewith Reinach, however, who, defending his Platonistic view on states of affairs,relies on the ordinary experience of ordinary objects rather than on linguisticmediations in their cognition and in the cognition of truth.

On these accounts, there are truth bearers only in a certain secondary sensein which we predicate ‘true’ of the instantiations of truth in specie. Thus, truthis neither a property of an entity nor a syncategorematical term which might bepredicated of an entity instead of another term that directly refers to a propertypossessed by the entity. There are rather truths in specie, instantiations of truthand experiences of truth which, as we can guess, are co-experiences given inthe act of judging. This sort of co-experience includes the experiences of evi-dence and of adequation. The conditions under which they occur are, however,made independent of the knowing subject, and their formulations rely on theconcept of states of affairs.

Notes

1 Among others such theories were developed by Gustav Biedermann, Franz Biese, Eduard Erdmann,Kuno Fischer, Karl Prantl and Hermann Schwarz.

2 Bolzano 1837.3 Lotze 1880.4 Frege 1892, 1918.5 Stumpf 1907, pp. 29ff.6 As we shall see in chapter 7 below, this distinction was crucial for Twardowski’s theory of acts and

products.

7 On the theory of the Gestalt see Ehrenfels 1890.8 Stumpf 1907, p. 11, 32.9 Bergmann 1879, pp. 2–5, 19, 38. For this and more historical details see Smith 1992.10 For more details on Frege and Lotze see Sluga, H. 1980; on Stout see van der Schaar, M. 1991.11 See sections on Twardowski in chapters 3 and 4.12 Meinong 1965, pp. 143f.13 See Smith 1990.

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14 I use here the expression ‘the use of language’ in the sense in which it refers to every use of a linguisticentity by a knowing subject, such as uttering a name or a sentence, writing a name or a sentence. I donot think that it is right to assume that Husserl had any concept of language in the modern sense, i.e.as a recursively defined system of meaningful signs. Thus, I do not refer to the modern sense of theexpression ‘the use of language’ which suggests that there is no such thing as private language. Husserl,like all Brentanians, would claim that we speak in a language and not that a language speaks us. Wecreate language rather than use it.

15 How radical is the contrast to the standard propositional attitude theory and based on this a theory ofintentionality see Hintikka 1975 as example.

16 Not included in 2nd edition and in translation thereof.17 In regard to this statement I agree with the interpretations held, among others, by B. Smith in that

the natural and historically grounded interpretation conceives Husserl’s Sachverhalt as the creature ofa naturalistic ontology: the state of affairs is a truth-making segment of reality that is ‘thrown into relief’through an act of judgment. This issue turns on meaning as species. Therefore, the ideal species of thecontents of acts which use sentences can be interpreted in a non-Platonistic way. A reading of Husserl’stheory along these lines was later developed by Johannes Daubert, Anton Marty and Adolf Reinach. SeeSchuhmann and Smith 1987. See also: Smith 1989b.

18 See Willard 1984. At this point I shall talk only about truth as species and not about the reason fortaking truth as species. I shall address the latter point below in the Chapter 7, when speaking about therelation between knowledge and truth with respect to their objectivity. I shall then also develop in moredetail the reasons for Husserl’s interest in a priori truth.

19 See sections on Meinong in chapters 3 and 4.20 See Figure 1 above.21 See Marty 1908, p. 295.22 See, above all, Reinach’s monograph The A priori Foundations of the Civil Law (Reinach 1913 [1983]).

Chapter 6

REISM

In the present part of this study I shall sketch the choice of the truth bearer inthe framework of two theories which are included under the name of ‘reism’.Both theories express their authors’ metaphysical beliefs regarding what existsin the world; both, however, being ontologies, have different reasons for thosebeliefs: Brentano’s theory can be seen as a result of his mereological ontologyof mind,1 whereas Kotarbinski’s theory can be seen as a metaphysical interpre-´tation of Lesniewski’s ontology.´ 2 Brentano adopted reism around 1908 and Ko-tarbinski in the second half of the 1920’s. Yet both reisms arose independentlyóf one another. This is an interesting fact since both belong to the same philo-sophical tradition which comes from the so-called ‘early Brentano’. It is evenmore interesting that, considering the different concepts of truth (Brentano’scriteriological conception of truth and Kotarbinski’s correspondence theory of´truth), their results as far as truth bearers are concerned are similar in manyrespects. What is also worth mentioning in the light of the previous investi-gation is that both reisms can be seen as ontologies of judgment. From thispoint of view Brentano’s reism would be a theory of judgers which relies onthe ontology of mind. Kotarbinski’s reism would be, from this perspective,á theory of judgers which is based rather on a semantic analysis of the judger’sexpression.3

1. Franz Brentano (III): The Judger as the Truth Bearer1.1 What is Presentable?According to Brentano’s principle of the intentionality of the mental, everyjudgment, as well as every mental act in general, is a judgment about some-thing. Brentano’s object of judgment, as we have seen above, can be under-stood as the object of presentation in Twardowski’s terminology. The newanswer to the question of what can be an object of presentation is, according

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to Brentano’s reism, a thing.4 The argument for things as the only objects ofpresentation goes roughly as follows: A presentation is always a presentationof something. If the concept of presenting is unambiguous, then ‘something’cannot sometimes refer to something real (a thing), and at other times to some-thing which is not real (a non-thing). Therefore, taking realistic attitude, thingsare what can be presented.

1.2 The Reistic Theory of MeaningGiven the new, unambiguous term introduced for every object of thinking (andnot only of presenting), i.e. ‘thing’, we can also expect that it is an object aboutwhich we speak in language. Therefore, we should reformulate Brentano’s the-ory of linguistic expressions as discussed in Chapter 3 above, adapting it to thenew theory of reism. All linguistic expressions of presenting are, as was al-ready mentioned, names. Even if the names have different grammatical forms,for example, descriptions or subordinate clauses, they are still, according toBrentano, names. Names, as was the case with presentations, can be divided.They can, for example, be split into proper names (such as ‘Franz Brentano’)and general names (such as ‘philosopher’). There are also other divisions ofnames, such as the division into real and fictional.5 Among the former weshould include such names as ‘Franz Brentano’ or ‘The teacher of Alexanderthe Great’, whereas to the latter names like ‘Zeus’ and ‘truth’. Real propernames and real general names name (which in Brentano’s language means ‘re-fer to’) things. Thus, ‘Franz Brentano’ names Franz Brentano and ‘the rose’names this or that particular rose from the world and so on. Brentano claimsthat fictional names name an object, only insofar as this object is an object ofactual particular thinking. There are no Zeuses. But there are people thinkingabout them. This means, for example, that Zeus is an object of presenting onlyif there is someone who presents Zeus, i.e. if there is a presenter of Zeus. Thisis because:

The object need not exist. The person thinking may have something as the object of histhought even though that thing does not exist. (Brentano 1930, p. 88, [1971, p. 78])

Since thinking of an object does not necessarily mean that this object exists,then, strictly speaking, in the case of fictional names there is only the personthinking of an object.

Now, if we once again recall Brentano’s theory of expressions, what namesmean is the content of the presentation, i.e. the concept. The meanings of thenames (concepts) are always general, since we cannot present any object (i.e.any thing) with all of its individual properties.6 In Brentano’s reistic accountsince all concepts are universal, they are fictitious.

What contents have in common with objects is that they exist not in the proper sense ofthe term but only in the sense in which one says that something exists in the mind. Theyexist only insofar as an adequately thinking person exists; they begin to exist together

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with a thinker who thinks in this way and cease to exist when the person who thinks inthis way ends his existence. (Brentano 1956, p. 58—my translation)

Therefore, there are no concepts, but only the persons presenting concepts.Strictly speaking, then, names mean a person presenting a concept.

1.3 What is Presented from the Point of View of Reism?In Brentano’s descriptive psychology ‘that which is presented’ is, as it wasshown by Twardowski, at least ambiguous. ‘That which is presented’ remainsalso ambiguous on the ground of his reistic approach. On the one hand, ‘thatwhich is presented’ can be understood as referring to the object of presentation,i.e. to a thing from the world (including the presenting person himself). Onthe other hand, ‘that which is presented’ can be understood as the content ofpresentation. The latter, according to Brentano’s reistic standpoint, can beexclusively the presenting person, since actually there are no contents.7 Onthe grounds of the primacy of external perception in our cognition, as well ason the grounds of the possibility of a (blind) true judgment about the externalworld, we can assume that ‘that which is presented’ is to be understood as theobject of the presenting act (since both theses were held by Brentano). In thelanguage of reism, it means that what we can present to ourselves are thingsfrom the external world and ourselves as mental active subjects.

Remark. This does not, of course, change the problem of judgment aboutfictions. In Brentano’s reism a name names someone who presents himselfsomething fictional. If the object of such a judgment is the object of presenting,how are we, then, to accept or reject a fictional object? Assuming that we judgethat there are no Zeuses, what is the object of this judging act? Is it Zeus ormyself as a Zeus-presenting-person? Brentano says that I am the object of thisjudgment and Zeus is an object only in modo obliquo. But, again, what doesthe expression ‘Zeus’ presented in modo obliquo refer to?

1.4 The JudgerAccording to the descriptive-psychological investigations of the judging ac-tivity, as well as on the grounds of their linguistic counterparts, the entitywhich served as the bearer of truth for Brentano was the act of judging. GivenBrentano’s reistic ontology of mind, however, there are no judging acts, onlyjudging persons. In the reistic view, therefore, the bearer of truth is someonewho judges, i.e. the judger [der Urteilende], and the judger can judge trulyand falsely. Thus, in the proper sense, the word ‘true’ should be predicated ofa judger. Therefore, we have to deal with the truly and falsely judging personand not with true or false judgments. Since in Brentano’s view mental phe-nomena possess an active character, it is not surprising that truth-predicates

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are adverbs in this respect. The bearer of truth is, thus, a subject S who in theact of consciousness asserts or rejects an object of presenting.

2. Tadeusz Kotarbinski (I)´2.1 Ontological and Semantical ReismAs already mentioned, Tadeusz Kotarbinski came to his reistic view indepen-´dently of Brentano. In the period in which Kotarbinski developed his idea of´reism, the view developed earlier by Brentano was unknown to him. It wasonly Twardowski’s remarks regarding the similarities between the views ofBrentano in his later period of philosophical activity and Kotarbinski’s reism´that aroused the latter’s interest in the Brentano’s work. The first fundamentalideas of reism were included in Kotarbinski’s book, briefly entitled´ Elements.8

The two later kinds of reism espoused by Kotarbinski, ‘ontological’ reism and´‘semantical’ reism, were not clearly distinguished in that work. The distinc-tion between semantical and ontological reism arose only after Ajdukiewicz’scritique of Kotarbinski’s view in the year 1930.´ 9

Kotarbinski’s ontological reism asks which and only which objects exist.´This question differs from the question asked by Brentano, i.e. which objectscan be presented? Kotarbinski’s answer to the question about what exists wasánswered in 1929 as follows: first, every object is a thing, and, second, no ob-ject is a property, a relation or an event. This means that a thing is, accordingto Kotarbinski’s definition, either a body or a soul, where the latter is a body´which has sensual experiences. It is also worth noting that both theses of on-tological reism are interpretations of Lesniewski’s ontology rather than plain´metaphysical statements of folk metaphysics abstracted from ordinary life.10

Kotarbinski’s semantical reism states that names like ‘property’, ‘relation’,´‘event’ and many others are so-called ‘apparent names’, in opposition to ‘realnames’, which name things. Apparent names do not have an object to whichthey refer. Thus, every sentence in which such apparent names occur, should beseen as a kind of substitute sentence. Namely, they substitute sentences whichrefer directly to the things, i.e. in which all names occur as real names. It fol-lows that for every sentence with one or more apparent names, if the sentenceis meaningful, then it is reducible to a sentence in which only real names occur.For example, the sentence ‘The color of this rose is an instantiation of redness’,if it is meaningful, should be reduced to the sentence such as ‘This rose is red’.Similarly, the sentence ‘Redness is a property’ should fulfil the condition ofreducibility to a sentence, as put by Kotarbinski, with literal meaning. If it isńot the case, the sentence should be considered as meaningless.

2.2 The Sentence from the Reistic StandpointReism is thus, according to Kotarbinski, both the proper view about what kindsóf objects exist in the world and a view about what the literal way of speak-

Reism 107

ing about things is. He acknowledges that the actual way of speaking aboutthings uses abstract terms. But this takes place because abstract terms areshortcuts for our real thinking; shortcuts which we use in order to make ouracts of communication as convenient as possible. It is reasonable to expectthat such a view will also change the way in which Kotarbinski understandsóther linguistic entities, and especially the way of understanding the notion ofsentence.

The term ‘sentence’ is, for Kotarbinski, equivalent to ‘the utterance ofá thought.’ (wypowied´ mydd sli´ ). According to him, in reistic language it shouldsound as follows: ‘the utterance of a thinker who thinks that it is so and so’.11

There are two important remarks made by Kotarbinski regarding this defini-´tion of a sentence. First, the notion of a sentence is strongly connected withits truth-values: every sentence is either true or false. One of the reasons whyKotarbinski makes this connection is that he wants to distinguish a subclass of´sentences which are sentences in the sense of the grammar of a given language.Sentences which are true or false are, namely, indicative sentences (as opposedto interrogative sentences, for example). In order to distinguish this type ofsentence, Kotarbinski takes advantage of their semantic property of being trueór false instead of taking the results of the analysis of a theory of speech acts.It seems that the semantic property of being true and false are for him morebasic than assertive force or other illocutions. Secondly, in order to clarify thedistinction made among sentences, he recalls the Latin word ‘propositio’. Thisis because he wants to underscore that indicative sentences are statements, or,as Kotarbinski puts it, they are theses. In this respect, he also acknowledgesíllocutionary accounts for the definition of a sentence.

Now, Kotarbinski says that the terms ‘sentence’ or ‘´ propositio’ or ‘thesis’can be understood in three ways: first, they are used in an idealistic sense inwhich they are ideal objects. Under this kind of reading of ‘propositio’ he in-cludes Husserl’s ‘Satz’, the English word ‘proposition’, Frege’s ‘Sinn’ and, theterm ‘judgment in the logical sense’, widely used at this time in Poland. Sec-ondly, ‘propositio’ is used in a psychological sense in order to refer to a judg-ing act or to the content of a judging act. Thirdly, the term has its nominalisticreading in which ‘propositio’ stands for a linguistic sign, such as an utteranceor inscription.

From the point of view of reism, there is no judgment in the logical sense.Accordingly, there are also no sentences in the idealistic sense described above.Therefore, no judgment in the logical sense can be either true or false.

If psychological judgments were understood as events, then there wouldalso be no sentences in the psychological sense. Thus, no sentence in the psy-chological sense can be true or false either. However, according to semanticalreism, the sentence ‘His judgment is true’ can be interpreted as a meaningfulsubstitutive judgment, if it is reducible to a sentence with literal meaning. And

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it seems that the sentence ‘He judges truly’ can serve as such a translation.Thus, the truth-predicate occurs as an adverb predicated of a judger.

In the end, sentences in a nominalistic sense are non-problematic from thestandpoint of Kotarbinski’s reism, since inscriptions and utterances are things,ánd Kotarbinski accepts this use of the term ‘sentence’.´

2.3 Candidates for the Truth Bearer from the Pointof View of Reism

Now, there are two ways of correctly predicating truth of two different kinds ofthings, i.e. of a judger and of linguistic things such as utterances or inscriptions.A true sentence is the utterance of a truly judging person. Are these two waysof speaking about truth both valid and interchangeable?

First, from the point of view of ordinary language, it is quite natural to saythat a person judges truly or falsely. Instead of saying ‘He judges truly’, itis even more natural, remarks Kotarbinski, to use (meaningful) substitutive´sentences like ‘His judgment is true.’

Secondly, on the one hand, the predication of the truth of sentences un-derstood as utterances and inscriptions is, in a certain sense of this word,secondary.12 We say of sentences that they are true or false with regard totheir relation to the truth and falsity of the judgments of which they are expres-sions, i.e., actually, due to their relations to the judger. On the other hand, whenpredicated of sentences, the adjectives ‘true’ and ‘false’ function as determin-ing (in Twardowski’s sense) predicates, i.e. they occur in these cases in theirliteral senses. It is possible, Kotarbinski claims further, to say in an attributive´way and without any metaphorical sense (i.e. without the use of substitutivesentences) that sentences are true or false.

When referred to a sentence, ‘true’ means the same as ‘being a statement [an utterance—AR] of a true thought’, or, more strictly, ‘being a statement [an utterance—AR] (director indirect) of a person thinking truly’; ‘false’ means the same as ‘being a statement[an utterance—AR] (direct or indirect) of a person thinking falsely’. (Kotarbinski 1929´[1966, p. 105–106])

Thus, along the lines of Kotarbinski, the sentence ‘The sentence written´by him is true’ should be translated as ‘The sentence written by him is hisutterance of him thinking truly’.

With reference to acts of judging it is not the case that the predicates ‘true’and ‘false’ or, rather, the adverbs ‘truly’ and ‘falsely’ are to be interpretedas determining predicates. Kotarbinski suggests that instead of speaking about´judgments as true and false we should speak about judgments which are correctand incorrect. The conservative function of truth-predicates as predicated ofjudgments would then not be disguised by us and, therefore, we would havea non-ambiguous use of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’.

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2.4 The Sentence as the Bearer of TruthKotarbinski’s analysis of the notion of sentence and of the uses of truth-predi-ćates shows two groups of candidates for the bearers of truth: the sentence inthe nominalistic sense and the judger. From the point of view of ontologicalreism, both candidates seem to have an equal claim, since both groups consistof things. From the standpoint of semantical reism, however, sentences seemto better serve as truth bearers, since ‘true’ and ‘false’, when predicated ofsentences function as determining predicates; they are literal.

But Kotarbinski points out another reason for his choice of sentences as´truth bearers, and this is an easy application of such things as sentences for thepurposes of logic. The sentence- terminology as used in logic does not implyor even suggest that someone is believing in what he judges. It is better, statesKotarbinski, to investigate such notions as, for example, the notion of logicalćonsequence or logical truth as related to sentences, than to relate these notionsto someone’s mental activity, illocutions or meanings.13

3. Summary of Chapter 6The strong assumption of two different types of reism claimed by Brentanoand Kotarbinski led them to the choice of the judger and of the sentence as´bearers of truth.

Both Brentano and Kotarbinski were influenced by metaphysical beliefs.´Brentano’s theory of categories was rooted in the psychological description ofthe thinking subject. The choice of the judger as the bearer of truth made byBrentano was a result of approaching his theory of categories in the part ofdescriptive psychology which was devoted to the theory of knowledge. Kotar-binski gave an interpretation of Le´ sniewski’s system of ontology.´

Both philosophers, however, supported their choice by linguistic analysis.Brentano’s main point in this respect was his condition for the non-ambiguousnotion of presentation. Kotarbinski focused instead on a linguistic analysis ofńames. Kotarbinski’s semantic directives of reism, together with Twardowski’s´theory of the determining and modifying function of adjectives, led him to thechoice of sentences as utterances and inscriptions serving as truth bearers.

Notes1 See Smith 1994.2 See Wolenski 1990, Wole´ nski (ed.) 1990. For an interpretation which shows the similarities in the´

starting points of both ontologies see Simons 1992.3 Important information concerning Brentano’s and Kotarbinski’s reism can be found, among other places,´

in Brentano 1933, Chisholm 1978, Simons 1988, Smith 1987, Smith 1988 and Wolenski (ed.) 1990.´

4 Brentano 1956, pp. 38–46, Brentano 1930, pp. 88, 92, 106–113 (Brentano 1971, pp. 78, 82–83, 94–101).5 Real names are, in Brentano’s language, the self-meaning [selbstbedeutende] names, see Brentano 1956,

p. 47. For different types of divisions of linguistic categories and concepts see Brentano 1956, pp. 48–85.

6 Brentano 1956, pp. 43, 47, 49–50.

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7 Once again I use here Twardowski’s distinction between content and object presented from Twardowski1894, sketched above. Undoubtedly, Brentano was conscious of this distinction in his reistic phase.In a letter to Oskar Kraus, for example, Brentano writes: ‘I have never doubted that every thought oridea has a content and (with the exception of absurd ideas) a range of extension.’ (Brentano 1930, p. 103,[1971, p. 93]). See also the passage about the function of names in Brentano 1956, p. 47.

8 Kotarbinski 1929 [1966].´9 Ajdukiewicz 1930. For the presentations of Kotarbinski’s reism see Wole´ nski 1990, Wole´ nski (ed.)´

1990, Smith 1994.

10 See Kotarbinski 1929 [1966] (especially part 3 chapter 3), Kotarbi´ nski 1930 and Wole´ nski 1990.´11 Kotarbinski 1929 [1966], p. 103. In fact, the existing English translation uses the term ‘statement’´

instead of ‘utterance’. However, I think that the term ‘utterance’ is closer to Kotarbinski’s idea.´

12 Kotarbinski 1929 [1966], p. 105.´13 Kotarbinski 1951 [1993], p. 312.´

Chapter 7

THE OBJECTIVITY OF TRUTH

1. Bernard Bolzano (I): Sentences in Themselves

The influence of Bernard Bolzano upon the further history of philosophy, espe-cially in Brentano’s School, cannot be overestimated. Bolzano’s Wissenschaft-slehre [Theory of Science] of 1837 belongs to the most important and influ-ential works in the Brentanian tradition. The rediscovery of Bolzano’s workin this tradition is connected with Twardowski’s Habilitationschrift of 1894.I shall not go into the details of the multiplicity of Bolzano’s ideas and theirparticular influence on the history of semantics. I shall, as I have tried to dowith respect to every issue in this study, concentrate on his ideas within the the-ory of science as it is related to the problem of the truth bearer. In the context ofthe theory of truth, it is worth noting that Bolzano’s position during his times,i.e. in the first half of the nineteenth century, was quite unusual. Bolzano’sinfluence on this century was provided by his notion of the objectivity of truthin a way that also remained standard for the next century. Furthermore, thetheory which should guarantee the objectivity of truth was, for Bolzano, histheory of sentences in themselves. Only the semantics of the twentieth cen-tury sees Bolzano’s theory of sentences in themselves as an anticipation of thecontemporary notion of proposition. I shall, however, refer to his Fundamen-tallehre [Theory of Fundamentals], i.e. to the first sections of his Theory ofScience, which deals with the existence of objective truth and with the pos-sibility of its cognition. I shall omit some elements of this theory that areirrelevant to my purposes; for example, Bolzano’s proof of the existence oftruth, his proof of the existence of infinitely many truths or the argument forthe cognition of truths. In this part of Bolzano’s argumentation, he focuseson the problem of skepticism, making an attempt to prove the fundamentalistposition in epistemology.1 I shall take the liberty of presenting Bolzano’s ideasas far as truth bearers are concerned as contrasted with the views of Brentano

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and Twardowski on the objectivity of truth which I shall present in the nextsections.

1.1 What Are Sentences in Themselves?In the first part of his theory of fundamentals, which is supposed to be anintroduction to theories of science, Bolzano introduces a distinction betweenthe sentence in itself and the thought sentence or, as he also contrasts it, theverbally expressed sentence. A sentence as expressed in words is, accordingto Bolzano, a speech act in which something is expressed and can be valuableas true or false (or correct or incorrect).2 The thought sentence is a statement(assertion) which is not expressed in words, but rather is a pure thought in thesense of a mental act which, like the former, must also be either true or false.That which may be thought or expressed in words is the sentence in itself.

In other words, by proposition in itself [sentence in itself—AR] I mean any assertion[statement—AR] that something is or is not the case, regardless whether or not some-body has put it into words, and regardless even whether or not it has been thought.(Bolzano 1937, §19 [1972, p. 20–21])3

Thus, the thought sentence is in the proper sense called ‘the thought of a sen-tence’ or ‘a judgment’. The sentence in itself, in turn, forms the content (or, asit puts Bolzano, ‘the stuff’) of the thought or of the judgment.

According to these formulations of the three types of sentences (i.e. thought,uttered and in themselves) it seems that all of them have the semantic propertyof being true or false. It would seem that possessing of one of these propertiesbelongs, so to speak, to the ‘nature’ of sentences, and that these propertiesconstitute a part of the real definition of sentences, but this is not the case.As Bolzano puts it, the formulation of the notion of sentence as related to itsbeing true or false, a formulation which comes from Aristotle, should be takenonly as an instrument by means of which we can understand the notion of thesentence. There is no nominal definition of the sentence, argues Bolzano, andthe notion of the sentence can only be clarified more or less in a descriptiveway.

1.2 The Meanings of ‘Truth’:Ordinary Language Analysis

In his explanation of the notion of truth, Bolzano follows ordinary language,i.e. the usage of linguistic phrases in which the adjective ‘true’ occurs. He an-alyzes its different functions and shades of meanings.4 In this respect he takesthe position of a reductive attitude as to the different uses of these words in thathe distinguishes their proper and fundamental use. Bolzano sees the primaryuse of truth-predicates in the fact that truth is understood as an attribute of sen-tences in themselves, independently of whether they are thought or expressedin words by an epistemic subject. Being true is a property of sentences in them-

The Objectivity of Truth 113

selves, Bolzano argues––one of the two contradictory sentences in themselvesmust be true.5 It follows from this, argues Bolzano, that a true sentence saysthat something is the case. In other words, the attribute of being true of a sen-tence in itself makes it possible that something can be expressed in the way itis.

Besides the basic and primary meaning of ‘truth’, Bolzano distinguishesa secondary meaning of that word which is also related to sentences in them-selves. Sentences in themselves can also be understood as truths: true sen-tences in themselves, i.e. those possessing the property of being true are some-times called ‘truths’. This explains, according to Bolzano, the sense in whichwe speak about the cognition of truth: true sentences in themselves that arenamed ‘truths’ are intelligible, i.e. they are able to be thought of or expressedin words.

Only in analogy to sentences in themselves can ‘true’ be predicated of judg-ments. To be true is an attribute of judgments if these judgments have truesentences in themselves as their contents. Similarly, in analogy to sentences inthemselves, judgments which have true sentences in themselves as their con-tents can be named ‘truths’. But there is a difference between the attributiveunderstanding of ‘true’ as predicated of sentences in themselves and as predi-cated of judgments. A true sentence in itself which is contradictory to anothersentence in itself is, in fact, a false sentence in itself and can be also calleda ‘falsity’. A judgment which is contradictory to another judgment whose con-tent constitutes a true sentence in itself is, however, called a ‘wrong’ rather thana ‘false’ judgment. Thus, a wrong judgment is called a ‘mistake’ or an ‘error’instead of a ‘falsity’. This reason, which, in Bolzano’s view, relies on ordi-nary language, supposes a speech of ‘wrongness’ and ‘correctness’ of judg-ments rather than the predication of truth-predicates of them, thus assumingtheir properties of being true or of being false. Truth and falsity are ontolog-ical notions only with regard to sentences in themselves. They should remainepistemic when related to judgments.

The next meaning of ‘truth’ comes to light when we predicate it of the classof truths, i.e. in situations when in using ‘truth’ we speak about the set of alltrue sentences in themselves. In this sense we can speak about an extensionalconcept of truth in Bolzano’s philosophy. By analogy, this extensional conceptof truth also refers to a class of judgments: those of which, in taking one ofthe senses of ‘truth’ in analogy to the sentences in themselves, we can also saythat they are truths.

In the end, Bolzano sees the possibility of predicating truth of objects. Tospeak about objects as if they are true is, for Bolzano, tantamount to saying thatobjects are actual or genuine or real. This use of the word ‘truth’ is, however,improper. Moreover, the fact that we use this kind of predication is a result ofdemands connected with acts of communication by language. Speech about

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the truth of objects is related to the shortcuts which we use in our languages inorder to economize our speech.

Bolzano himself distinguishes five different concepts of truth. However,with regard to the above description of Bolzano’s view it is actually possibleto distinguish at least seven shades of truth: These are: 1) truth as an attributeof sentences in themselves (the abstract-objective concept of truth);6 2) truthas a true sentence in itself (the concrete-objective concept of truth); 3) truth asan attribute of judgments (the abstract-subjective concept of truth); 4) truth asa true judgment (the concrete-subjective concept of truth); 5) truth as the classof true sentences in themselves (the collective-objective concept of truth); 6)truth as the class of true judgments (the collective-subjective concept of truth);and, 7) truth as an attribute of objects (the improper concept of truth). Bolzanoconsiders the first concept of truth to be the genuine use of the adjective ‘true’,i.e. when truth is understood as an abstract-objective notion. The role of thebearer of truth-values is played here by the sentence in itself.

Interestingly, Bolzano’s whole analysis based on ordinary language doesnot imply that the sense in which we usually use the word ‘truth’ is its basicand proper use. So the second notion of truth, not the first, represents thatwhich we most commonly use and which Bolzano himself wants to apply inhis investigations to the theory of science:

Thus, to state it again, I shall mean by truth in itself any proposition [sentence] whichstates something as it is, where I leave it undetermined whether or not this propositionhas in fact been thought or spoken by anybody. In either case I shall give the nameof a truth in itself to the proposition [sentence in itself—AR], whenever that which itasserts is as it asserts it. In other words, I shall give it the name of a truth in itselfwhenever the object with which it deals really has the properties that it ascribes to it.(Bolzano 1837, §25 [1972, p. 32])

1.3 The Cognition of TruthAs we have seen, according to Bolzano the words ‘true’ and ‘false’, when pred-icated of judgments, can be replaced by the words ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (or‘wrong’) respectively. Now, in ordinary language (that of philosophers?) wespeak of judgments as knowledge [Erkenntnisse]. Bolzano, however, wants tomake a strong distinction between truth and knowledge. The reason for thisis simple: Truth in itself does not demand its own cognition or, as we alsosay, does not require its own knowledge.7 On the one hand, a true sentence initself remains a truth even if it is an unknown truth. On the other hand, in ordi-nary language the term ‘knowledge’ refers to a known truth. On one occasion,‘known truth’ can refer to a known sentence in itself, while on another occa-sion to a judgment whose content constitutes a true sentence in itself.8 Thus,‘known truth’ is, in Bolzano’s view, at least ambiguous: it means either a cor-rect judgment (i.e. the thought sentence) or it means a sentence in itself which


has been known through an act of cognition. This ambiguity, however, shouldnot misguide us as to the relation between truth and the knowledge of it.9

1.4 The Objective Truth Bearer as a Guaranteeof Objective Truth

Truths are, for Bolzano, not only independent of their cognition by knowingsubjects, but also independent in other ways. The objectivity of truth shouldbe understood, according to Bolzano, in three ways: First, truth is independentof the knowing subject, i.e. it is independent of whether it is known or notknown to be truth. The truth that a square has four sides is independent of theknowledge of geometry. Secondly, truth is independent of time, i.e. truth isabsolute. This means that truth has the property of being eternal. The truththat the sun was shining today does not change in the course of time. Thirdly,truth is independent of the circumstances in the world, i.e. it does not changeitself into a false sentence in itself (it does not change its truth-value, puttingit into modern language) when circumstances in the world change. Even if thesun stays behind the clouds tomorrow, the truth that the sun was shining todaystill remains a truth.

Because of this threefold independence, sentences in themselves are the bestcandidates for the bearer of truth. The independence of the knowing subject,of time and of circumstances, is guaranteed by the manner of existence of thesentences in themselves.

They do not have actual [real] existence, i.e. they are not something that exists in somelocation, or at a some time, or as some other kind of real thing. (Bolzano 1837, §25b[1972, p. 32])

If someone says that a sentence changes its truth-value in the course of time oraccording to the changes in circumstances in the world, then one says it aboutthe sentences which are expressed in the words and not about the sentence initself. In order to be correct, the sentence expressed in the words needs itsindices of time and space. A phrase like ‘It is raining’, for example, does notchange its truth-value depending on the points of time and circumstances inwhich it is raining or not. These kinds of phrases which include indexicals areincorrect expressions of sentences in themselves. To be a correct expressionof a sentence in itself, such a phrase needs indices that are related to time andspace, as for example, ‘On January the second, 1999, in Williamsville, StateNY, U.S.A. between Union Road and California Street, it is raining’. Eventhough the additional demand of indices may make the expression objective,objectivity in the proper sense is to be predicated of the underlying sentencein itself. But if we consider only sentences in themselves to be truths, theobjectivity of truth is guaranteed by its bearer, since the attribute of being trueor false is a necessary property of a sentence in itself in an objective way.10

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2. Franz Brentano (IV): Identity and Evidence

2.1 The Theory of Evident JudgementBrentano’s theory of judgment can be seen as subjective in two senses. First,according to some interpretations it is immanentistic as far as the objects ofjudging are concerned. Secondly, judgments are real events, they are mentalepisodes, a view which leaves no room for any view of truth and falsity as time-less properties of judgments as it was guaranteed by the realm of sentences inthemselves in Bolzano’s Theory of Science. Brentano takes this conclusion toimply that God, too, if he is omniscient, must exist in time, since the knowl-edge of which judgments are true and false must change from one moment toanother.11 As mentioned above, for Brentano ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ are not prop-erties of the act of judging because they are not real differentiations of it. Herethe notion of evidence plays the crucial role with regard to the notion of truth.This is because Brentano gave up the traditional concept of truth as correspon-dence which, according to him, does not yield a criterion of truth.12 Brentanofound such a criterion in the experience of evidence. Furthermore, since de-scriptive psychology helped Brentano to find such a criterion for at least a largedomain of judging acts, namely acts pertaining to the sphere of what he calledinner perception, Brentano moved to the so-called ‘epistemological conceptionof truth’.

2.2 Brentano’s Extensional, Evidentionaland Criteriological Definition of Truth

Let us assume that there are at least two different types of formulations ofthe definition of truth: an explicational definition of truth and an extensionaldefinition of truth. The former would be a definition of the concept of truth,such as, for example, that given by the scholastics in the formula ‘adequatiorei et intellectus‘ which answers the question ‘what is truth?’ or ‘What does“truth” mean?’. The latter would be a kind of definition which does not ex-plicate the notion of truth but rather determines the set of true entities whichserve as truth bearers. Thus, the extensional definition answers the questionof when something belongs to the set of truths. Tarski’s semantic definitionsof truth certainly belong to this kind of definition. The meaning of ‘truth’ isdetermined here by its extension and not by an explicational definition.

Brentano’s definition of truth should be treated as an extensional definitionof truth. For Brentano, there cannot be an explicational definition of truth since‘truth’ is not even a name. It is a syncategorematic word, whose meaning isnot an independent concept. The notion of truth is explicable only in terms ofevidence. Brentano in fact builds an extensional definition of truth in whichhe determines the set of true judgments. In his theory of truth, he answers thequestion of which judgments among all judging acts are true judgments.


As already mentioned, in Brentano’s explanation of when a given truthbearer (an act of judging) is entitled to be predicated as ‘true’, the conceptof evidence plays a crucial role. In this sense the definition of truth given byBrentano is evidence-theoretical. The main motive for introducing the notionof evidence was for Brentano the need of a criterion of truth in order to distin-guish true and false acts of judging. Evidence can play this role of the criterionof truth. Thus in this sense Brentano’s definition of truth is a criteriologicaldefinition of truth.

2.3 The Evidence as Mental PhenomenonAs mentioned above, for Brentano evident judgment differs from mere judg-ment. In other words, ‘evident’, as opposed to ‘true’, is a determining ad-jective when predicated of acts of judgment. Therefore, the evidence has tobe, in Brentano’s mind, a mental phenomenon, i.e. an experience which reallydistinguishes the psychological subject.13 In Brentano’s basic types of mentalphenomena, however, the phenomenon of evidence has no independent place.This is so because evidence is an experience which appears only in conjunctionwith other mental phenomena. In this sense, evidence is a co-experience. Inparticular, as applied to acts of cognition, evidence can appear together withan act of judging. In this sense it is judgment-evidence.

2.4 The Evidence of Factual JudgementsAlong the lines of Descartes and Leibniz, Brentano divides judgments intojudgments of facts and axioms (or judgments of necessity). The former are oftwo types: judgments of inner perception (for example when I judge that I amthinking, that my present thinking exists), and judgments of external perception(when I judge that there is something red, that a red thing exists). Brentanoalso calls acts of inner perception ‘secondary consciousness’ and, since theyare judgments, he also gives them the properties of being affirmative, assertiveand indirect judgments. Brentano often calls acts of external perception ‘false-reports’ [Falschnehmung], and these judgments are affirmative, assertive anddirect.

Given these basic classes of judgments and the fact that evidence can be at-tached to our judgments, one can wonder how these classes and the appearanceof evidence are related to one another? According to Brentano, the judgmentsof inner perception are always evident:

That what appears in our inner consciousness is actually such as it appears. (Brentano1956, p. 154—my translation)

How, then, is it possible that every act of inner perception be evident? Inother words, what makes the evidence of secondary consciousness possible?Brentano says:

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The certainty of judgments of inner perception relies on the fact that the judger’s rela-tion to his object is not merely causal but real. (Brentano 1956, p. 154—my translation)

The condition of the possibility of attaching the co-experience of evidenceto judgments relies, then, on the identity of the judging subject with what isjudged. This condition is, according to Brentano, always fulfilled in the caseof judgments of inner perception. In the case of judgments of external per-ception, however, such identity is ruled out. Brentano holds that evidence cannever occur as co-experience in external judgments. To generalize: judgment-evidence is a co-experience which can only attach those acts of judging inwhich an identity of judging subject and judged object takes place. It is hard,however, to treat this formulation as a kind of definition of evidence, sinceBrentano states:

Here it is a matter of such an elementary experience that it can be clarified only, so tospeak, ‘ostensively’, in one’s own experience. (Brentano, 1970, p. 150—my transla-tion)

2.5 The Evidence of AxiomsAxioms are described by Brentano as negative, apodictic and indirect judg-ments. Moreover, axioms, or judgments of necessity, have conceptual rela-tions as their objects. They are such that their validity flows a priori fromconcepts.14 They are ‘a priori’ in the sense that they do not rely on perception(they are not judgments of facts) and they are not dependent upon whether theirobjects exist.15 All axioms, Brentano now insists, are negative. His favorite ex-amples of objects of axioms are: a green red, a round square, a simultaneouslycorrectly accepting and rejecting judger, and so on. Each axiom is then of theform ‘An A which is B does not exist’, ‘An A which is B and C does notexist’, and so on.

As in the case of the factual judgment of inner perception, Brentano claimsthat axioms are always evident.16 The condition which makes this also possi-ble here is that the judging subject is identical with that which is judged. In anaxiom, the judger denies himself as someone who is a presenter of a contradic-tory concept. Or in other words: he apprehends himself as impossible insofaras he thinks a contradictory concept.17

2.6 Indirect Evident JudgementsIn addition to direct evident judgments, i.e. the judgments of inner perceptionand axioms, Brentano also uses the notion of indirect evident judgment. Thisis a distinction between evident judgments in the above sense and judgmentswhich are inferred from evident judgments. Every judgment which is logicallyderived from other evident judgments is an indirect evident judgment. Moreprecisely, if among the premises of an inferred judgment one can find onlyevident judgments, then the former is an indirect evident judgment. Thus, for


example, the general judgment expressed in the sentence ‘I present myself asalways presenting an object’ is an indirect evident complex judgment becauseit is based on evident judgments among which one can find such evident judg-ments as expressed in the sentences ‘Every presentation is a presentation ofsomething’ (the principle of intentionality applied to the act of presentation),‘I am presenting’ (a judgment of inner perception), ‘I present myself as pre-senting’ (the judgment of inner perception about me as presenting) and so on.

Brentano’s distinction between direct and indirect evident judgments goestogether with another distinction between direct and indirect knowledge. Anal-ogously, indirect knowledge is at bottom also inferred from direct evidentjudgments.18

2.7 Assertive and Apodictic EvidenceWith regard to judgments, Brentano makes another distinction as far as evi-dence is concerned. This distinction relies on the types of experience of evi-dence, and this is the distinction between assertive and apodictic evidence.

For the sake of clarification let me emphasize that it does not suffice for direct factualknowledge that that which is known is identical with the knower. We must also knowthat the knower and that which is known are identical. (Brentano 1928 §9, [1981, p. 6])

In the case of inner perception, we can experience the evidence because, inthat kind of perception, the object of judgment is identical with the judger. Theevidence, however, appears here in the way in which the required identity isgrasped. Therefore Brentano calls this kind of co-experience of evidence ‘as-sertive evidence’. Assertive judgment-evidence is, then, co-experience whichappears in inner perception and which is the grasping of the identity of thejudger with the judged object.

In analogy to this, we can formulate the following description of apodicticevidence: apodictic evidence is the co-experience which appears with axiomsand which is the grasping of the impossibility of the identity of the judger withthe judged object.

2.8 The Objectivity of Truth and of EvidenceAs we have seen, for Brentano the bearer of truth is the act of judging. A trueact of judging is, according to him, an evident act of judging. However, theextension of evident judging acts (i.e. that of inner perception and axioms)excludes the possibility of true judgments about the external world, i.e. ex-cludes, for example, almost all judgments which rely on sensory experienceand which refer to the objects beyond the judger’s mind. In addition to this,Brentano holds that we can judge truly about the external world. These judg-ments, however, will remain ‘blind’ in the sense that we have no experience ofevidence when judging about the external world. Therefore, these judgmentsdo not belong to our knowledge.

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Thus, in order to call some non-evident judgments ‘true’, such as judgmentsabout chairs and trees, Brentano’s extensional concept of true judgment mustbe extended. In fact, Brentano expands the extension of true judgments tojudgments which are not evident for us, but which would be evident if someonecould judge the same object, in the same way with the experience of evidence(like, for example, God). Therefore, assuming the extensional conception oftruth proposed by Brentano, truth is a sum of two classes of judgments: theevident judgments and the judgments which would be evident if someone couldmake them with the experience of evidence.

Now, what if we apply the Bolzanian concept of objectivity to truth in thephilosophy of Brentano? It seems that truth, in Brentano’s epistemologicaltheory, is fully subjective. It must be subjective at least in the sense in whichevidence depends upon subjective experience. The evidence, as related to theconcept of truth, is merely a mental co-experience which accomplishes judg-ments. At bottom, however, this co-experience has a condition of its appear-ance which is independent of any particular act of judging. The subjectiveexperience of evidence can arise only in regard to certain judgments, namelythose which involve an identity between judger and that which is judged. Inthis sense, truth in Brentano’s view can be treated as objective. For Brentano,the required condition of the identity by evidence is necessary. What can bechanged is the range of applicability of the experience of evidence, which isdifferent for different living species.

Similarly, at first glance, it seems that for Brentano truth is not absoluteeither. What is true at one point in time need not be true at another. Indeed,a true judger is so only for a certain time.19 However, truth does not therebychange from time to time or from subject to subject. It is rather that judgingsubjects sometimes judge with evidence and sometimes without it.

The problematic issue here, however, are truths such as logical truths. Howcan logical laws enjoy an atemporal validity in Brentano’s account? This iswhat has come to be called the issue of psychologism. Since the problem ofpsychologism has as long a history as the history of logic itself, in this studyI shall not consider this issue in detail. I will not focus on the philosophy oflogic and mathematics, which would require a great deal of space and addi-tional studies of the very rich literature on this topic. I cannot, however, denythe importance of the issue of psychologism to the problem of truth-bearers.I shall, therefore, mention some issues connected with psychologism in thecourse of this study concerning such points which seem to me to be necessary,like, for example, when speaking of Twardowski’s and Łukasiewicz’s solu-tions to this problem. Here we can mention that Brentano’s solution was thatthe objectivity of logic should be guaranteed by evidence exactly in the sameway in which the evidence is held to guarantee the objectivity of truth. But theconcept of truth can be reasonably held to be related to single cognitive actswhich, as cognitive, are still related to the judging subject. Logic, however, as


a normative system of rules according to which every process of thinking iscalled upon to satisfy, should not depend on a knowing subject.

3. Edmund Husserl (II): Evidence of SpeciesThe statement in Chapter 5 that Husserl’s ontology of judgment presents a linkbetween descriptive psychology, on the one hand, and the linguistic analysis ofmental phenomena as carried out by Brentanians, on the other hand can alsobe understood in a different way. By means of his theory of state of affairs andof his theory of meaning, Husserl also associated two contradictory views onthe warranty of the objectivity of truth as conceived earlier by Brentano andBolzano. In this respect, the ontology of Sachverhalt connects the experienceof evidence as related to particular cognitive acts with the conditions for ob-jective truth given by Bolzano in his Theory of Science. In order to see to whatextent this took place, we need some further remarks.20

3.1 Knowledge and EvidenceIn the sixth section of his Prolegomena, Husserl introduces two notions ofknowledge: objective knowledge and actual knowledge:

Science exists objectively only in its literature, only in written work has it a rich re-lational being limited to men and their intellectual activities: in this form it is propa-gated down the millennia, and survives individuals, generations and nations. (Husserl1900/1901 [1970, p. 60])

Now, objective knowledge can become an object of actual knowledge in that itcan be an object of correct judgment. We have to note, however, that the notionof correct judgment as used by Husserl is different from the notion as used byBrentano. The extension of the term ‘correct judgment’ includes, according toHusserl, all judgments that conform to truths, i.e. which conform to act-speciesas instantiations of the species truth. As we have seen, Brentano refers to theterm ‘correct judgment’ only as a subclass of the judgments which Husserlconsiders as correct, i.e. to (direct) evident judgments. Thus, Brentano countsas actual knowledge only evident judgments of inner perception and axioms.Husserl himself is conscious of the limited extension of evident judgments; hewrites:

Knowledge in the narrowest sense of the word is the being inwardly evident that a cer-tain state of affairs is or is not, e.g. that S is P or that it is not P . (Husserl 1900/1901[1970, p. 61])

Brentano extends the boundary of our knowledge only by means of the as-sumption that it is possible that there exists someone else who can judge withevidence to an extent which is inaccessible to us, human beings. Husserlchooses another method. In order to extend the realm of knowledge beyondwhat can be judged with evidence, Husserl seeks a unique and systematicmethod.

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That is the case, that we need grounded validations in order to pass beyond what,in knowledge, is immediately and therefore trivially evident, not only makes the sci-ences possible and necessary, but with these also a theory of science, a logic. (Husserl1900/1901 [1970, p. 63])

First and most importantly, it seems that for Husserl both types of evidentjudgments as described by Brentano, i.e. inner perception and axioms, mustbe considered to be judgments about facts. Yet, it is the judger himself whoconstitutes the object of both types of judgments. However, if one would liketo treat Brentano’s axioms as non-factual judgments, one has to explain theirnormative character. This leads to the problem known as the problem of psy-chologism. Thus, for Husserl, Brentano’s axioms are either factual judgmentsor they lead to a psychologistic account of logic.

Now, in order to overcome our ‘disabilities’ with regard to the domain ofobjects of evident judgments we should consider not only our particular actsof judging, but rather we should look at them as if they were species, i.e. weshould look at meanings. This would offer us several ways of looking at mean-ings and the relations between them. One of the ways in which we can investi-gate relations between meanings is the normative science of all sciences: logic.Therefore, in looking at how things are, we must not restrict ourselves to theevident judgments of facts.

3.2 The Extra-Temporality of RelationsBetween Meanings

It is clear that as far as Brentano’s notion of evidence is concerned Husserlrefers not only to the problem of the expansion of our knowledge, but also tothe problem of how our subjective cognitive acts become objective in Bolzano’ssense? In this respect, Husserl develops a theory of absoluteness of relationsbetween act-species. As we have seen, the act-species can be called ‘truths’.This enables Husserl to relate the problem of ‘how the objective knowledgeof an empirical knowing subject is possible’ to the problem of the objectiv-ity of truth. Thus, an answer to the question of the objective knowledge ofan empirically knowing subject is that there are knowable relations betweentruths. Husserl calls these relations ‘laws’ [Gesetze], and these are act-speciesof which objects are other (true) act-species. To these laws Husserl adds, forexample, the principles of logic (such as the principle of the excluded middleor the principle of contradiction), and the logical rules of inference (reasoning-relations in Husserl’s language). According to him laws cannot be empiricalin the same sense in which inner perception is empirical. Otherwise, the lawswould be obtained by means of induction and, therefore, they would be merelyprobable. Since they are universally valid, they must be extra-empirical. Thisis because their objects (truths) are extra-temporal. In this sense, pure log-ical laws assume an ideal content of knowledge (or ideal meanings or idealunities in Husserl’s language). However, according to the above ‘naturalistic’


interpretation of Husserl’s meanings, they are not ideal in the sense of beingin Plato’s heaven. They are ideal as species which we grasp through acts ofideation of speech (or writing).

If, now, one were to speak about Husserl’s philosophy as a fusion of theviews of Bolzano and Brentano, one would think that Husserl took overBolzano’s heaven of sentences in themselves, combining them with their ev-ident cognition (in Brentano’s sense).21 According to the interpretation givenhere, this is not the case. As a matter of fact we are dealing with the cogni-tion of species and, moreover, with the evident cognition of species, but boththe notion of species and the notion of evidence are different from species andevidence as described by Bolzano and Brentano. On the one hand, meanings(act-species, truths) are, for Husserl, absolute and in this sense ideal. On theother hand, they are absolute not because of their existence in a heaven as withBolzano, but rather because of their being as species. Similarly, the evidencewhich can be attached to special kinds of mental phenomena is co-experience.The identity of species, which we grasp with evidence in an act of ideation isnot the same as the identity of the knowing subject and his object as under-stood by Brentano. It is, however, difficult to find a unique condition for theoccurence of evidence in Husserl’s views. The much-mooted notion of insightas used in place of the notion of evidence by different types of phenomenolo-gists with reference to Husserl, remains unclear in this respect.

It seems that Husserl reduces the problem of objectivity as formulated byBolzano to the problem of the atemporality of truth-bearers. Changes of theknowing subject and of circumstances in the world are changes given in time(which, for Husserl, also means that they belong to the sphere of facts). Theextra-temporality of truth will guarantee its independence of minds and of thefactual changes in the world. This property of truth as being beyond timewill be assured if objects of truths are themselves extra-temporal. Thus, theextra-temporality of the relations between meanings is guaranteed by the extra-temporality of meanings. This kind of solution to the problem of the objectivityof truth was connected with the main issue in Husserl’s Prolegomena, i.e. withthe problem of psychologism.

Finally, the connections between the concept of objective truth and its ab-soluteness seem to confirm an earlier statement that Husserl was interested innon-empirical truth rather than other kinds of truths (which is quite clear inthe context of psychologism, which required special interest in logical truths).Truths of which we have just spoken are logical truths. For example, Husserlargues that truth cannot be a fact. This is because facts have the property ofbeing in time and, therefore, they are involved in causal relations. Logicaltruths, in opposition to this, cannot stand in causal relations. Moreover, theycannot be thought of as being in causal relations. When we speak about truthin a causal relation we mean that this is a true act of judging in which a cer-tain fact is judged. The truth of the act of judging depends, then, upon reality.

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According to Husserl, however, the true act of judging should not be confusedwith the truth of its meaning.22 In this sense, the objectivity of logical truth inHusserl’s view consists in its extra-empirical idealization; a solution which, asmentioned above, is different from the solution proposed by Bolzano.23

Remark. As regards later discussions on truth and its objectivity it is inter-esting to note how Husserl connects the bivalence principle with the classicalnotion of truth. As far as the principle of bivalence is concerned, Husserlclaims, somehow metaphorically, that the mere sense of the words ‘true’ and‘false’ is strongly connected with the principles of excluded middle and of con-tradiction. I think that this statement, together with the passage cited below,can be read as suggesting a strong connection between the notion of truth andthe principle of bivalence:

If the relativist says that there could be beings not bound by these principles (. . .) heeither means that there could be propositions or truths, in the judgments of such beings,which do not conform to these principles, or he thinks that the course of judgment ofsuch beings is not psychologically regulated by these principles. If he means the latter,his doctrine is not at all peculiar, since we ourselves are such beings. But if he meansthe former (. . .) We should never dream of calling anything true or false, that was atvariance with them. Alternatively, such beings use the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ in somedifferent sense, and the whole dispute is then one of words. (Husserl 1900/1901 [1970,p. 141])

3.3 Factual TruthsBut what about objectivity of factual truths? Here we encounter another streamin Husserl’s thinking connected with the ontology of judgment that I recalledas a link between descriptive psychology and its linguistic counterpart analy-sis. One of the problems of standard immanentistic analysis of intentionalityprinciple is that it does not recognize some objective standard for truth thatis somehow independent of, and thus transcendent to the judging subject. Inother words, it does not recognize that truth of judgment must also involvesomething objective against which truth is to be measured. Brentano’s solutionby means of the concept of evidence was adopted by Husserl to logical truths.But this solution does not account for the relation between the truth bearer andthe real world of which we empirically judge, and which is nowadays calledtruthmaker. Bolzano’s theory provides a similar problem since sentences inthemselves serve as both: truth bearers and truthmakers. Despite the problemof cognitive access of the sentences in themselves there must be, in Bolzano’stheory, sentences in themselves related to every situation in the world of whichwe can judge, whether it is actual or possible, in-time or extra-temporal, andso on. Hence the history of the world is, in Bolzano’s view, twofold: on theone hand it is in the form of the objective (in Bolzano’s sense) sentences inthemselves, while on the other it consists of actual events experienced to someextent by cognitive judging subjects such as human beings.


In this respect the investigations to the states of affairs as described in Chap-ter 5 can be seen exactly as an attempt to solve these problems. The ontologyof Sachverhalte draws upon the Aristotelian tradition of regarding the phe-nomenon of judgment also from the perspective of ontology, i.e. of what thejudgment is about. Theories of Husserl, Marty and Reinach recalled there arein this respect developements of theories of judgment assuming transcendentcorrelates of the act of judgment on the side of the object in the world, asa condition for objective truth. So, as regards the problem of the objectivetruth, Brentano’s and Bolzano’s succesors adressed this problem via investi-gations of objectual correlates to which judgment, in order to be true, mustconform. Thus, the investigations to the states of affairs as truthmakers are inthis respect an outcome of the non-Bolzanian condition of objective truth inAristotelian correspondence sense.

This explains inter alia the fact that Husserl’s notion of truth stands in op-position to any kind of relativism:

What is true is absolutely, intrinsically (an sich) true: truth is one and the same, whethermen or non-men, angels or gods apprehend and judge it. (Husserl 1900/1901 [1970,p. 140])

But, as has already been mentioned, Husserl rejects any treatment of truth asrelative, not only in a Bolzanian sense. He connects, for example, the objec-tivity of truth with metaphysical and epistemological realism. As regards thelatter, Husserl claims that the assumption of the relativity of truth would implythat there are no objects independent of knowing subjects.

One cannot subjectivize truth, and allow its object (which only exists as long as truthsubsists) to count as absolutely existent, or as existent ‘in itself’. There would thereforebe no world ‘in itself’, but only a world for us, or for any other chance species of being.(Husserl 1900/1901 [1970, p. 143])

4. Kazimierz Twardowski (IV): The Eternal Truthof Temporal Truth-Bearers

Having the concept of the objectivity of truth in both, Bolzanian and Aris-totelian (or Husserlian-Martian-Reinachian) sense it seems that further inves-tigations as regards the objective truth, especially in Poland, undertook theBolzanian notion of objectivity as more troublemaking. The classical, Aris-totelian sense of the objective truth as correspondence was granted the statusof an axiom. It was only semantic investigations that the problem of how lin-guistic entities reflect the complexity of objects in the world was undertakenanew. So the investigations to truthmakers remained for a period of time thedomain of Austrians rather than Poles. The latter concentrated on the problemof truth bearers and, as far as the objectivity of truth is concerned, on the inter-relations between the ways in which truth can be objectivized by means of thetruth bearer.

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4.1 So-called Relative TruthsIn 1900, Twardowski published one of his most important and influential pa-pers, ‘On the So-Called Relative Truths’.24 In this paper Twardowski, follow-ing Bolzano, argues in favor of a conception of truth as something objective,a conception which would rule out the possibility that the truth of a judgmentmight change from one occasion to another or from one subject to another. Un-like Bolzano, however, Twardowski shows how to preserve the objectivity oftruth without the assumption of any ideal or Platonistic entia rationis. Insteadhe tries to preserve the objectivity of true judgments, understood as mentalevents or processes occurring in a space and time and made by cognitive sub-jects.

Twardowski divides the general relativistic thesis of truth into two other the-ses. The first states that the bearer of truth can change its truth-value dependingon time, the knowing subject and circumstances in the world. The second rel-ativistic thesis states that the bearer of truth that changes its truth-value onlychanges the property of being true or false and does not change any of its otherproperties.

Under ‘truth’ we should, according to Twardowski, understand true judg-ment. The latter, as we have seen above, is a mere act of judging.25 ‘Judge-ment’ should not be taken in the sense of Bolzano’s sentence in itself, nor asany other kind of ‘ideal’ entity such as (in later terminology) judgment in thelogical sense or proposition. Judgement is a mere mental judging act. Truthsare, thereby, acts of judging which have the property of being true. The thesisof the relativity of truth states, thus, that an act of judging has the property ofbeing true on one occasion and does not have this property on another occa-sion depending upon time, the judging subject, and the circumstances in whichthe judgment is made. However, in the second thesis of the relativistic ac-count of truth in Twardowski’s formulation, the act of judging itself remainsunchanged.26

Twardowski argues that the acceptance of the thesis that the truth-value ofa judgment can change while the judgment remains the same follows, aboveall, from a confusion between judgments on the one hand and their statementsor expressions on the other. In such cases confusion occurs because relativistsdo not recognize the difference between the act of judging and its expressionwhen they speak about changing the property of being true. As a matter of fact,a sentence as an utterance or inscription is the expression of a judging act. Thesame grammatical form of a sentence can express different judging acts suchas, for example, in the case of the sentence ‘It is raining’. It can express the factthat it is raining in a particular way, in a particular place, at a particular pointin time, and so on. It seems that neither of the relativist theses is fulfilled. Thefact that a sentence can be true or false on two different occasions is, accordingto Twardowski, only a sign of the existence of two different judgments which


are expressed on these two different occasions. It is not that the same judgmenthas different attributes at different points of time; it is rather that we have todeal with two different judgments, one of which is true and the other false.Hence the first relativistic thesis is not valid. In order to fully understand theinvalidity of the second thesis, we should consider another fact which leadspeople to assume a relativistic thesis.

Confusion as to the relativity of truth arises in virtue of the contextual na-ture of language in its practical function. As Twardowski remarks, for speechto play its communicative role successfully we must restrict ourselves in ourutterances to the indispensable words which, together with the text in whichthey are spoken, lead to a sufficient understanding of a judgment. This ellip-tical manner of speech is a central feature of our everyday language. WhenI say ‘It is raining’, I express the judgment that, for example, ‘On September5, 1998, at seven o’clock p.m., in Williamsville, NY, USA, in the area betweenUnion Road and Cayuga Road close to Main Street, it is raining.’ Hence anargument for the relativity of truth fails if it claims that a sentence such as ‘Itis raining’ is both true and false because its truth-values change at differenttimes and places, and if we can make a strong distinction between a sentenceand a judgment, for the judgment that is expressed by the sentence on a givenoccasion includes all pertinent indices within it. Thus, the act of judgmentas expressed in the sentence ‘It is raining’ cannot change its truth-value with-out changing its ‘nature’ (or, in descriptive-psychological language, withoutchanging its content).

4.2 Acts of Judging as Bearers of Eternal TruthsTwardowski’s solution to the problem of the objectivity of truth is thus distinctfrom those solutions in which timeless truth requires a timeless bearer. Hethereby rejected the assumption of entities such as the proposition in itself ofBolzano and even Husserl’s act-specie as assumptions needed to ensure theobjectivity demanded. This is possible, since, in Twardowski’s mind, an act ofjudging includes indices which, for the above reasons, are not always apparenton the surface of language. Often it happens that the indices that belong, so tospeak, to the nature of judgment are invisible in the sentence or are expressedby means of indexicals. The only way to avoid confusion would be, some kindof artificial, permanent process of de-contextualization of the uttered or writtensentences.

After the clarification of the contexts in which judgments are expressed andbecause the bearers of truth are, for Twardowski, acts of judging with theirnature as described, there are, in consequence, no relative truths. Furthermore,every act of judging is either true or false. If there is any way to predicaterelativity of truths, then such predication refers to sentences. Such predicationmakes sense if we assume that the same sentence can express a true act of

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judging on one occasion and a false act of judging on another occasion. Thesentence is then true if it expresses a true judgment and false in the oppositecase. This is the only way, says Twardowski, in which the property of beingtrue can be a relative property of an entity depending upon who utters it, whenit is uttered and under which circumstances. However, since there are alsosentences which do not include any indexicals and which express every spec-ification which can be found in the act of judging we have to admit that thereare also sentences which can be true in the absolute sense, i.e. that they willnever change their truth-value without changing their contents.

Twardowski’s argument here is to be found in different forms in the laterworks of distinguished philosophers in the analytical movement such as Lud-wig Wittgenstein.27 However, the problem of how far the linguistic surfacedisguises thought was considered by Brentanians in a quite different way. Trueto the Brentano heritage, Twardowski’s efforts are directed to the things andprocesses that are involved in actual judgings, and not to the construction ofabstract models or surrogates thereof. Instead of being attracted by the am-bitious task of building an ideal or artificial language in which thought andits expression would coincide, Twardowski’s formulation of the problem as re-lated to the objectivity of truth is part of an attempt to come to an understandingof the mental acts involved in judging.

5. Kazimierz Twardowski (V) and Jan Łukasiewicz (I):On Psychologism, Acts and Their Products

If there is another place other than Husserl’s Prolegomena in which the prob-lem of psychologism remains a most important issue for the history of truthbearers from Bolzano to Tarski, it is one of the first papers of Jan Łukasie-wicz of 1907, as well as a text of Kazimierz Twardowski from 1912.28 I amnot denying that the models regarding how to free logic from psychology, atleast for the tradition I focus on here, were investigated by Husserl in Logi-cal Investigations and by Meinong when he discusses his notion of the anti-psychological. I shall, however, concentrate only on the anti-psychologisticturn in Poland. The main reason for this is that both the writings of Twardow-ski and those of Łukasiewicz belong to the set of works which present a key tothe understanding of the change of truth-bearing entities from the judging actto the sentence, a change which took place in Poland in the first three decadesof the twentieth century.

In 1907 Jan Łukasiewicz, inspired by Husserl’s work and the problem ofpsychologism, published his ‘Logika a psychologia’ [Logic and Psychology]where he presents himself as an anti-psychologist. The paper is the first inwhich a Polish thinker explicitly distances himself from the psychologistic de-piction of logic. Because of Łukasiewicz’s distinguished position in the philo-


sophical world in Poland, we can assume that his paper grounded for good theanti-psychologistic turn in this country.

While Twardowski established his answer to the relativity of true judgmentsin his paper from 1900, now, in his paper ‘O czynnosciach i wytworach’ [OnÁcts and Products] of 1912 he concentrates more on the processes of the objec-tivization of acts of cognition, as well as on the objectivization of knowledge.So, on the one hand, he focuses on the question of how it is possible to haveaccess to the then much mooted issue of the meanings of linguistic entities?On the other hand, Twardowski seeks for an explanation of why linguistic en-tities are intentional. In other words in his ‘On Acts and Products’ he proposesa causal theory of inheriting intentional relation by linguistic entities. The so-lution was one of the most important and influential theories concerning therelation between a judgment and its linguistic expression in the Lvov-WarsawSchool. Even though the theory of acts and products is devoted primarily tothis relation, it is also very important in the context of the anti-psychologisticturn in Poland, since it is an attempt to explain how meanings are objectivized.

5.1 Logic and PsychologyIn the 1907 paper, Łukasiewicz takes logic as a normative theory of correctthinking, following the Brentanians. For Łukasiewicz, however, this theory isnot only not part and parcel of the science of psychology, but is not even anobject of psychological investigation. In the first two arguments for this view,Łukasiewicz clearly follows Husserl. Above all, psychological laws cannotconstitute the ground of logical laws, otherwise the latter would be only prob-able, and probabilistic laws cannot become the basis for the certainty whichcharacterizes logical laws. Secondly, the content of psychological laws aredifferent from those of the laws of logic. The content of psychological lawspresent mental phenomena, whereas the content of logic present relations be-tween truths. Thus, for example, the principle of contradiction from a psy-chological point of view is different from the same principle from the pointof view of logic: The statement about a mental phenomenon that there cannotexist two contradictory beliefs in one person at the same time is thoroughlydifferent from the statement that of two contradictory judgments one has to befalse. Thus, in the same sense in which mental phenomena do not belong tothe sphere of logic, concepts of truth and falsity do not belong to the sphere ofpsychology.

Łukasiewicz generalizes Husserl’s arguments in the way in which he de-scribes the functions and objects of logic and psychology. Psychology, andespecially the psychology of cognition, concerns mental events and processes,including those which obtain during logical thinking. The task of logic is dif-ferent: it points to objective laws which rule the relations between the truth andfalsity of judgments. The lack of a clear distinction between the functions and

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objects of these two disciplines is caused, according to Łukasiewicz, by theambiguity of the expressions used as basic terms in both logic and psychology,which include, above all, such terms as ‘judgment’, ‘reasoning’ and ‘conclud-ing’. Thus, in order to keep both disciplines separate, we should clear up themeanings of these words as they are used in logic and in psychology.

‘Judgement’ in the province of psychology means the same as ‘belief’, i.e.it is a mental act, state or attitude of a psychological subject. While Łukasie-wicz includes mental processes involved in logical inference under psychol-ogy, it is the task of logic to point out the objective laws governing the con-nections between truth and falsehood. This refers to what Łukasiewicz calls‘judgment in the logical sense’. Judgement in the logical sense is rather thecorrelation of mental acts of judging. More precisely—and here we encounteranother Brentanian theme in Łukasiewicz’s thinking—he takes the correlatesof judging acts as facts that something exists or does not exist in such and sucha way. In a sense, Łukasiewicz’s judgment in the logical sense is comparableto Meinong’s objective. However, Łukasiewicz indicates in a footnote to hispaper that his concept of the correlate of belief came into being independentlyof Meinong’s notion of objective. It is important that Łukasiewicz understandslogical judgments as states of affairs which are expressed in words. He insiststhat there are no judgments in the logical sense without language in which theyare expressed. Thus, Łukasiewicz connects the correlates of mental acts ofjudging with the linguistic expressions of the latter in a way similar to the wayin which Husserl forms the meaning of psycho-linguistic phenomena. More-over, since these belong to the sphere of logic, they serve as bearers of truthtruth-value of which depends on the relations between what constitutes theirobjects.29

5.2 Acts and Products

The distinction between acts and products introduced by Twardowski in his‘On Acts and Products’ of 1912 goes back to Stumpf’s distinction betweenfunctions and formations. Twardowski himself, however, also mentionsBolzano, Bergmann and Witasek as his predecessors in this respect.30 Twar-dowski defines the mental fact as a whole made up of a function (from an actor an action—we can use these interchangeably) and a product.

Functions can be further divided into mental processes (such as passive sen-sations) and mental activities (such as judging acts). What is produced bya mental function is a mental product. Such mental facts as judgment, for ex-ample, consist, according to this theory, of a function of judging and its prod-uct, i.e. a judgment. The latter is a product of the mental action of judging.

How can one, then, know what is the product and what is the action? ForTwardowski, the easiest way to differentiate between an act and its product


is by looking at language: The simple criterion provided to us by ordinarylanguage is the so-called etymological figure, i.e.

constructions in which a noun, formed from the same stem as a given verb, functionsas its complement, or object. . . (Twardowski 1912 [1979, p. 14])

Such pairs in our language are: ‘to judge—the judgment’, ‘to present—thepresentation’, ‘to sing—(the) song’, ‘to lie—the lie’, and so on.

Mental life, for Twardowski, includes not only mental facts but also dispo-sitions. Dispositions, as defined by him, are conditions upon which propertiesof mental facts are dependent as well as the conditions upon which the ap-pearance of those facts depends. What is important here is that dispositionsconstitute the objects of sciences such as anatomy, biology or neurophysiologyrather than of psychology. Thus, the brain and its processes, as well as, forinstance, innate universal structures understood as conditions of mental facts,are considered in Twardowski’s account to be dispositions which should be theobjects of investigations of the aforementioned sciences.

5.3 Types of Acts and ProductsTwo classifications of functions and their products are described by Twardow-ski. First of all, acts and their products can be divided into three basic types:mental (for example, thinking and thought), physical (jumping and jump) andpsycho-physical (an assertive utterance). This kind of classification refers toboth functions and products. Mental functions and products are parts of puremental facts. A product which arose in conjunction with a mental function ispsycho-physical. A physical action is psycho-physical if and only if it is ac-companied by a mental function which has an influence on its product. A goodexample of this is the term ‘statement’. On the one hand, a statement is a men-tal function of a judging activity. On the other hand, a statement can be thepsycho-physical function of the uttering (expressing) of a judgment in words.Furthermore, the waves which produce sounds in speech are psycho-physicalsince they are the result of the mental action of judging by the person whois making the sounds. Nevertheless, sounds also can be considered as purephysical waves, i.e. as physical products.

The second classification of importance for our purposes is Twardowski’sdistinction between the durability and non-durability of the product. Sincefunctions always occur at some point in time, they are not durable. The actof presenting is non-durable. The mental product of this act, i.e. a presenta-tion, also is not durable. The non-durable products are always accompanied bya function and they are events, phenomena and processes. Unlike acts, how-ever, products can become durable. It can happen that a non-durable productcan be fixed in a durable product. My presentation, as caused by an act ofpresenting, can be fixed, for example, in a picture. The durable products thenbecome independent of functions and are physical or psycho-physical things.

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My presentation of a sight can become durable if I paint a picture. The pos-sibility of fixing mental facts in durable products enables us, in Twardowski’sview, to go out of our mental lives as people.

5.4 Language as a ProductNow, we can include such objects as linguistic expressions into Twardowski’snetwork of the theory of acts and products.

First, according to Twardowski’s theory of acts and products, the word‘judgment’ has at least three meanings: Judgement can be seen as an act ofjudging (or a function or action of judging). Judgement can also be understoodas the product of a judging activity. Judgement as a product of a judging actwas also often called a judgment in the logical sense by Polish philosophers(for example, by Łukasiewicz). Finally, judgment can be seen as a disposi-tion to judge, as it is understood for instance, in a sentence of the form ‘Healways judges correctly’. Judgment in the logical sense exists only when thereis someone who is judging. Thus, judgment in the logical sense is non-durable.This non-durable mental product of judging can, however, be fixed in a non-durable psycho-physical product like an utterance, i.e. in the waves which arereceived as sounds. Further, this non-durable psycho-physical product of an actof judging (utterance) can be fixed in a durable psycho-physical product suchas writing, i.e. in an inscription which consists of the marks made by a ball-point pen or another tool. Thus, the process of fixing non-durable thoughts asproducts of thinking is as follows: thinking-thought-speech-writing.

Twardowski, by means of the distinction between act and product, is tryingnot only to explain how it is possible to go out of the mental life of a givensubject, but also to give us a linguistic interpretation of the psycho-physicalprocesses of fixing our mental lives. First, the psycho-physical product can bea symptom or manifestation of a mental action. For a psycho-physical productto be a manifestation of an act the following two conditions must be fulfilled:the mental fact must cause the product, and the psycho-physical product mustbe accessible in a sensual experience. Now, if this psycho-physical productwhich manifests the underlying mental product to us causes similar mentalfacts in different subjects, then it expresses this mental fact. When a psycho-physical product expresses a mental fact, we call the first a sign of the second,and we call the expressed fact its meaning.

Now, a sentence (written or uttered) can be a symptom of a fact such asa judgment which consists of an act and its product. This is the case, accordingto Twardowski, when the sentence is caused by the mental fact of judging inthe way in which the process of fixing it as described above takes place. If thesentence (written or uttered) causes mental facts in different subjects which aresimilar to the mental fact of which the sentence is a symptom, then the sentenceis an expression of this underlying mental fact of judging. When a sentence


expresses a judgment, the sentence is a sign of the judgment. If the sentenceinvokes the same judgment in the receivers of the speech or in the readersof the inscription, then the judgment is the meaning of the sentence. One ofthe consequences of such a view is Twardowski’s strong position regarding theclarity of thought: clarity in judging has its counterpart in clear sentences; thus,clarity in philosophical writing reflects clarity in thinking.31

Twardowski’s theory of the meaning of sentences includes as a proper partthe notion of the objectivization of judgments. It would seem that people havethe same judgments as products of judging acts. Yet this is not the case, since,according to Twardowski, there are as many different judgments as judgingpeople. In speaking of the meaning of a sentence, we abstract from these dif-ferences. Judgements, however, can become objective in the sense in whichthey are fixed in durable writings. Judgements fixed in sentences then appearto us not only as enduring, but also as independent of functions. For Twardow-ski, a higher level of independence of writings with regard to actual mentalfunctions is present in the case of logic. Here, artificial logical products ex-press, not judgments, but only presentations of judgments, which are entirelyindependent of the psychological moments of belief or conviction. Accord-ing to Twardowski, this is the sense in which they deserve Bolzano’s name of‘sentences in themselves’.

Written or printed sentences, such as those on this page, can be read in twoways: First, as a sequence of linguistic signs which are psycho-physical prod-ucts in which a mental fact of judgment is fixed. Secondly, a printed sentenceon this sheet of paper can remain uninterpreted, i.e. we can see it as a purephysical product. Thus, Twardowski’s theory of acts and products as appliedto sentences, like Łukasiewicz’s definition of utterance, constitutes a transitionfrom a pure psychological theory of mental acts of judging to concern withlanguage and with judgments expressed in language. It constitutes a directionwhich, some years earlier, was made possible by Husserl’s psycho-linguistictheory of meaning.

However, even if Twardowski was now able to translate every speech aboutmental activities into a speech about language, he never rejected the viewaccording to which the judgment was the proper truth-bearer. Moreover, hethought that the theory of truth must include a good theory of judgment.32 Theimportance of Twardowski’s theory of acts and products can also be seen inthat it presents an early attempt at an epistemology without an empirical sub-ject, as it was called sixty years later by K.R. Popper, in the clear frameworkof Brentanian tradition.33 Twardowski’s theory of acts and their products be-came, in fact, a foundation for the methodology of the humanities in Polandfor a long period of time. For the purposes of this study one of the main pointsis that the theory of acts and products serves as a causal explanation of howlinguistic entities inherit intentional relations, which, together with the realis-

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tic attitude towards the object of intentional acts, guarantee the objective truthin Aristotelian sense.

6. Tadeusz Kotarbinski (II) and Stanisław Le´ sniewski (I):´The Absoluteness of Truth

The problem of the objectivity of truth was under discussion more than oncein the history the Lvov-Warsaw School. One of those discussions took placearound 1912. Tadeusz Kotarbinski and Stanisław Le´ sniewski refer to the thesis´stated by Twardowski in 1900 about the objectivity of true judgment. In fact,this discussion concerns only one aspect of what, after Bolzano, was calledthe objectivity of truth, i.e. the problem of the absoluteness of truth. First,Kotarbinski was stimulated by Łukasiewicz’s book on Aristotle.´ 34 Kotarbinski´discovered an inconsistency between objective, true judgment and free cre-ativity. Then Lesniewski responded to Kotarbi´ nski, defending the Bolzano-´Twardowski view on objective truth. How important and widespread the thesisof the absoluteness of truth was among Polish philosophers is shown by thefollowing line from Lesniewski’s paper:´

Slowly, truth begins to become ‘created’ even by the representatives of that camp whichhas gathered at the Lvov University around Professor Kazimierz Twardowski, that isthe camp whose members have for such a long time believed that a judgment is always,‘absolutely’ true, i.e. that it is true independently of whether it is useful or damaging;whether it helps to forecast the future or not; whether a scholar felt like ‘creating’ thegiven truth and he did, or refrained from such ‘creation’, etc. (Lesniewski 1913 [1992,´p. 104])

On the one hand, both Kotarbinski and Le´ sniewski discussed the problem in´the framework outlined earlier by Brentanians. They discussed, as we shall see,the problem of the actual existence of judging objects in the correspondencetheory of truth, the same problem which arose in Marty’s theory of truth. Onthe other hand, they used a kind of argumentation that, as Lesniewski pointedóut, remains valid without any changes for different theories of judgment. Thearguments presented by them focus on principles of classical logic rather thanon a description of our mental life.

6.1 Free Creation and the Sempiternity of TruthIn 1913 Kotarbinski, recognizing a tension between the free creativity of hu-´man beings and the absoluteness of truth challenged the thesis of the objectivityof truth. From everyday experience, Kotarbinski argues, we know that there is´free creation.35 Consider the variety of possibilities as far as my activity tomor-row goes. Hence, if we assume free creation, then we have to exclude any kindof strong determinism of the future, says Kotarbinski. If I am able to decide´that tomorrow I will send a software registration letter to Microsoft’s CustomerService, it cannot be determined already today, since I can change my mind,change the software in my computer and give the trouble-making Windows


back to the retailer. (I assume that nobody will take this example as one givenby Kotarbinski.) To clarify the problem of pre-determinism and indetermin-ísm regarding the future, Kotarbinski relates them to the problem of absolute´truth, asking about the truth-value of judgments about the future. Thus, theproblem of freedom in creativity is considered in the light of the truth or false-hood of judgments about the future rather than in the classical framework ofthe cause-effect relation.

Therefore it follows that creativity and hence freedom do not end precisely where causeand effect begins, but they already end where truth begins. (Kotarbinski 1913, p. 82—´my translation)

Now, the problem of the relation between truth and creation seems to be asfollows: If truth is independent of time, then this implies a kind of determin-ism. But the thesis of the absoluteness of truth can be split, as it was later byLesniewski, into two different theses, i.e. into the thesis of the eternity of truthánd the thesis of its sempiternity. The thesis of the eternity of truth (or of true‘for ever’) can be formulated in the following manner:

TET (Thesis of the eternity of truth:) If a judgment J is true at a point oftime t1, then it is also true at every point of time t2 which is later thant1 (‘t2 > t1’).

The thesis of the sempiternity of truth (or of true without a beginning or oftruth ‘since ever’) can be formulated, analogously, as follows:

TST (Thesis of the sempiternity of truth:) If a judgment J is true at a pointof time t1, then it is also true at every point of time t2 which is earlierthan t1 (‘t2 < t1’).

Now, the conjunction of both theses is what was called by Bolzano the ab-soluteness of truth.

Now, consider the example of my judgment that tomorrow I will send theregistration card for my software. If truth is without a beginning, then thisjudgment was true already, not only today, but also one hundred years ago.But how is it possible that judgments about non-existent objects can be true?(For my action of sending the registration card did not exist today; likewise,I was non-existent one hundred years ago, not to mention the software.) But,the given judgment cannot be false, either. For otherwise, because of the eter-nity of truth, it would be false forever. Then what happens if I do send theregistration card tomorrow? On the other hand, it seems that I can decideabout the sending of the registration card, so that I have a role in determiningwhether the judgment about my action will be true or false.

Thus, Kotarbinski holds only one of these theses. He held, namely, that TETís valid whereas TST is not, i.e. that truth is eternal but not sempiternal. Every

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truth has its beginning, but then stays truth forever. The assumption of the the-sis of the sempiternity of truth leads, according to him, to the pre-determinismof our free creation. If the sentence about my action which takes place tomor-row is true today, I cannot behave in another way than the way which is statedin this sentence, otherwise the sentence would be false tomorrow. Thus, thesentence about my actions tomorrow cannot be true today.

Kotarbinski’s general argument for this is as follows: There exists an ob-´ject O if and only if there is a true judgment J about the existence of thisobject O. Now, if I am able to create an object O, this means that the judg-ment J about the existence of the object O is not true. Otherwise, I could notcreate something which already exists.

However, perhaps the judgment J about my action tomorrow can be falsetoday and will be true tomorrow if I will do it in the way stated in this judg-ment? Here, Kotarbinski also denies that judgments about the future can be´false. Let us assume that today’s judgment J about my behavior tomorrow asto the Microsoft software is false, i.e. I will not send the registration card to Mi-crosoft. But how can the judgment J be false today when it is about an objectwhich will exist only tomorrow? In other words, Kotarbinski sees a problem in´the fact that something can exist in some way, even when I judge falsely aboutits existence. Moreover, tomorrow I may decide keep Windows in the hopethat my friend, a computer scientist, can do something with it. According toKotarbinski, my action tomorrow will make the judgment´ J true.

Thus, since a judgment about the future cannot be true or false, there mustbe at least some judgments which are neither true nor false at a given point intime. According to Kotarbinski, a sufficient argument for the assumption of´judgments which are neither true nor false is that we could not create an objectabout which a judgment is already false or true.

Therefore, if neither that about which the assertive judgment is true nor that about whichthe assertive judgment is false can be created, then there is a condition of the possibilityof the free creation of something, in the sense that the assertive judgment about thissomething is neither true nor false. (Kotarbinski 1913, pp. 80–81—my translation)´

It seems that both arguments of Kotarbinski, i.e. about the impossibility of truthánd falsehood without a beginning, use the thesis of the eternity of truth which,in fact, he holds as valid without argumentation. Thus, whereas all truths areeternal, not every truth is sempiternal. There are judgments which begin to betrue. If they begin to be true, however, they will stay true forever.

6.2 The Notion of ExistenceAs one can suppose in examining the argument given by Kotarbinski, the cru-ćial point in this argument is his notion of existence. Kotarbinski in fact con-´siders the term ‘existence’ to be ambiguous and makes a distinction between


the everyday understanding of this notion and the way in which he uses thisnotion in his argument for truths with a beginning.

The everyday usage of the term ‘existence’ refers to the presence of a thing,Kotarbinski claims. In order to avoid a confusion of the everyday notion with´the notion he uses, he defines the notion of existence in a way already men-tioned above:

DE An object O exists iff a judgment J about this object is true.

Kotarbinski chooses the second meaning of ‘existence’ for it is, as he claims,´the sense in which people speak about existence when speaking about the past,the present and the future.36

As regards the ordinary usage of ‘existence’, Kotarbinski gives us the wayín which the presence of an object can be understood so as to remain consistentwith his notion of existence as given in DE. He proposes to interpret the pres-ence as a property of things. Instead of saying ‘The rose which I saw in July isred’ it would be more proper, according to Kotarbinski, to say ‘The July-roseís red’. He thereby suggests treating predications of space and of time as prop-erties of things in the same way in which we predicate of them shape or color.All predications are, in this respect, expressions of properties, and a generalscheme for such sentences in which we predicate about things would be as fol-lows: ‘An object O with a time-property t and with a space-property x is P ’. Itis very clear that Kotarbinski locates space-time properties, properties whoseéxpressions appear on the surface of language as indexicals, as properties ofthings and not as properties of judgments, as was the case with Twardowski.Thus, for Kotarbinski ‘to exist’ means the same as ‘to have a property´ P whenhaving the property of being at the point of time t and in the space x’ (i.e.‘P (t, x)’). Moreover, according to Kotarbinski, this having a property´ P (t, x)is predominantly the object of assertive judgments. If one says that somethingis such and such, one thinks that it has such and such a property; we judgeabout having a property by an object.

This is an interesting point in Kotarbinski’s analysis, not only because he´transfers the time-space properties from being properties of judgments to be-ing properties of objects, but also because he interprets Brentano’s existentialtheory of judgment. It seems that Kotarbinski adopts Brentano’s view accord-íng to which all assertive judgments are existential judgments, i.e. they arejudgments about the existence of an object. However, given the interpreta-tion of the notion of existence, i.e. since the existence of an object is havinga property P together with the properties of being in a given time and space,judgments have a much more complicated logical form than that considered byBrentano. This represents, I think, a first attempt in the tradition of analyticalphilosophy to resign from the notion of existence as a primitive notion. Froma historical point of view it was significant for two reasons. On the one hand, ithas not changed the view of the validity of the idiogenetic, existential theory of

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judgment as formulated first by Brentano on the level of descriptive psychol-ogy. On the other hand, it shows that the notion of existence must not be takenas primitive and can be interpreted in a manner that is more accurate for thepurposes of modern mathematical logic. Thus, when one speaks of changingthe logical form of judgment in opposition to the existential form defended byorthodox Brentanians, this does not automatically mean that we do not have anexistential theory of judgment. The existential theory of judgment only tookon a different meaning, as in the case of Kotarbinski.´

6.3 Note on Truth with a Beginning and on the Principleof the Excluded Middle

Kotarbinski’s paper is very rich in other respects, among which I shall mention´his reformulation of the principle of the excluded middle. On the one hand,according to Kotarbinski’s theory of eternal but not sempiternal truth, we have´judgments which are neither true nor false. Thus, we have two classes of judg-ments which he calls definite and indefinite with regard to their having or nothaving truth-values. Indefinite judgments are those whose truth or falsehoodis undetermined until they will become true or false. On the other hand, how-ever, Kotarbinski claims that the principle of the excluded middle is universally´valid, but only when we apply this principle so as to obtain the following sen-tences: ‘For every judgment J , J is either true or false’ or ‘For every judgmentJ , either J or non-J is true’. It seems, however, that in contradiction withthe above statement there exists a class of indefinite judgments. Therefore, inorder to retain the principle of classical logic, Kotarbinski restricts the rangeóf applicability of these principles to definite judgments only. Moreover, as faras the universal validity of the principle of the excluded middle is concerned,Kotarbinski reformulates it in the following manner: ‘For every judgment´ J , ifthe judgment is true, then the judgment non-J is false’. From a historical pointof view it is worth noting that, at this point, strong differentiation between theprinciple of the excluded middle and the principle of bivalence would not haveled to this difficulty. In fact, it is another reason why the distinction should beconsidered meaningful.

6.4 Lesniewski’s ResponseÍn the same year in which Kotarbinski paper appeared, Le´ sniewski publishedán article in ‘Nowe Tory’ with the significant title ‘Is all Truth only True Eter-nally or Is it also True Without a Beginning?’.37 In his response to Kotarbin-ski’s argument, Lesniewski defends the absolute view on truth defended by´Bolzano and Twardowski, i.e. the view in which truth is not only eternal butalso sempiternal. One of the main bones of contention between both philoso-phers in this paper was the notion of existence and its relation to time andspace.


Above all, Lesniewski does not accept the notion of existence as defined by´Kotarbinski. Existence is, according to Kotarbi´ nski, the possession of a prop-érty. However, argues Lesniewski, if this possession of a property is the objectóf an assertive judgment, then according to the definition of existence givenby Kotarbinski, the only object which exists is the possession of a property.´Hence, the property itself, as well as the object which possesses it, do notexist. In consequence, if one accepts Kotarbinski’s account of the notion oféxistence, one must admit that if the judgment that the paper written by Kotar-binski is short is true (if it is true that the paper possesses the property of being´short), then the paper, as well as its author, do not exist.

Moreover, Lesniewski and Kotarbi´ nski do not agree as to what can exist.´Whereas Kotarbinski’s objects of judgment are seen as past, present and futureóbjects, Lesniewski refers to the past, present and future existence of an object.´Lesniewski can therefore defend the view that an affirmative judgment which´refers to an object can be true even if the underlying object does not existsimultaneously with the judgment. I can judge about my future action, justas I am able to judge tomorrow about my writing of these lines. Thus, forLesniewski, existence is not a property and it is atemporal:´

. . . an affirmative judgment referring to an object is sometimes true not only when intime that object exists. (Lesniewski 1913 [1992, pp. 95–96])´

In an assertive judgment about the past or the future, I make a statement aboutsome object as existent in the past or in the future, and not about the past orfuture object. Otherwise, in Lesniewski’s mind, we have to accept the conse-´quences of Kotarbinski’s view on existence which leads to difficulties similar´to those with which Marty had to deal earlier in his actualistic theory of judg-ment, i.e. that objects would exist if and only if we judge truly about them,which is not the case. Thus, in order to avoid such consequences, Lesniewskiádopts a solution which in this respect is similar to Marty’s distinction between‘to be real’ and ‘to exist’. Objects are real at specific points of time, but theyexist at all times and not only when they are truly judged. Both realia andnon-realia can exist.

. . . an object exists not only then in time when an affirmative judgment referring to it istrue. (Lesniewski 1913 [1992, p. 95])´

Thus, if my computer, for instance, deletes these lines of the text, tomorrowstill I am able to judge truly that the lines were written by me today, even ifthey are no longer real.

6.5 The Eternity of Truth and the Principleof the Excluded Middle

As we have seen, Kotarbinski, accepting the TET (thesis about the eternity of´truth), had to change the formulation of the principle of the excluded middle

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into a conditional in order to guarantee its universal validity. Now, acceptingthe same thesis about truth ‘for ever’, Lesniewski uses the principle of theéxcluded middle to prove that there are absolute true judgments in both aneternal sense and without a beginning, i.e. if one accepts TET, then one mustalso accept TST.

The argument goes roughly as follows: Lesniewski reformulates the thesisóf the sempiternity of truth into the question of whether there was ever a pointin time t1 at which a judgment J was not true, whereas the same judgmentJ is true at the point in time t2 which is later than t1. Let us first assumeindirectly, proposes Lesniewski, that there was some point in time´ t1 at whichthe judgment J was not true, i.e.

(1) (Jη(V er)t1 ,and, secondly, that there is some point in time t2 (later than t1) at which thejudgment J is true:

(2) (non-Jτ(V er)t2 .Using the principle of the excluded middle (and, in fact, both the principle ofthe excluded middle and the principle of bivalence) from (1) we obtain:

(3) (non-Jτ(V er)t1

and, similarly, from (2):

(4) (non-Jη(V er)t2 .Now we can apply the thesis of the eternity of truth TET to which both Kotar-binski and Le´ sniewski agree. From TET and (3) we have:´

(5) If (non-Jτ(V er)t1 , then non-J is true at every point in time which is laterthan t1.Given assumptions (1) and (2), where t2 is a later point in time with regard tot1, and (5) we have:

(6) If (non-Jτ(V er)t1 , then (non-Jτ(V er)t2

which, after the reduction of (6) using (3), is in contradiction with (4). Simi-larly, applying the thesis of the eternity of truth TET to (1) we obtain:

(7) If (non-Jη(V er)t1 , then non-J is not true at every point in time which islater than t1.In particular:

(8) If (non-Jη(V er)t1 , then (non-Jη(V er)t2 .which is in contradiction with (2).

Lesniewski’s original proof goes somewhat differently, but the crucial idea ofúsing the thesis of the eternity of truth, combined with the principles of theexcluded middle and of bivalence in order to prove sempiternity of truth, issimilar.38 I shall not evaluate this proof nor shall I evaluate Lesniewski’s proofóf the eternity of truth that is given in the same paper. Both attempts are


clearly ballasted with several philosophical assumptions. What is importantand, I hope also clear, is that these philosophical assumptions are deeply rootedin the Brentanian tradition and they can be found in different forms in the writ-ings of Twardowski, Husserl and Marty. What is also interesting from a histor-ical point of view is that both debaters agreed unanimously on the fact that truthmust be at least eternal. The common conviction among Polish philosophersthat truth should preserve objectivity, valid to this day, undoubtedly finds itsconfirmation in their great predecessors, Lesniewski and Kotarbi´ nski, as wellás in other members of the Lvov-Warsaw School who accepted the axiom ofobjective truth.

6.6 What Does ‘Absolute Truth’ Mean?Lesniewski’s discussion with Kotarbi´ nski is not only a debate about the ob-´jectivity of truth that is somehow indirectly related to the problem of the truthbearer, but it is also indirectly important with regard to this problem. Namely,on this occasion Lesniewski made some remarks about judgments as absolutely´bearing truth-values.

The discussion itself between both philosophers takes place either on thelevel of the mental acts of judging (when arguing about true or false judgments)or it takes place on the level of their linguistic expressions (i.e. when speakingabout true and false sentences). Lesniewski himself, however, prefers to speakábout sentences. But even for him, the choice of the level of discussion doesnot change the main points of argumentation:

I say ‘I utter a judgment’; but should someone prefer that ‘judgments’ were ‘writtendown’ or ‘experienced’, ‘felt’ or ‘lived through’—it would in no way affect the resultof my discussion. (Lesniewski 1913 [1992, p. 95])´

In spite of this statement, Lesniewski makes some remarks regarding the na-´ture of judgment. For him, the basic notion in this respect is that of the utteredjudgment. Expressions of judgments, however, are infected with an ambiguityalong the lines pointed out by Twardowski. Uttered judgments, like the men-tal acts of which they are the expressions, are episodic only. Yet we speakabout the same judgment when we in fact have numerically different judg-ments. When different people at different points in time utter (in the samesense) the judgment ‘The rose is red’ we tend to take these utterances as if theywere expressing one and the same judgment. In such situations, however, wespeak about the same judgment only in some metaphorical sense, Lesniewskićlaims.

Furthermore, Lesniewski continues, we also attribute duration to a judgmentín a metaphorical sense. An act of judging is episodic and its utterance isalso a non-durable process; at those points in time when nobody utters sucha judgment, we should deny any duration to this judgment. Thus, if one saysthat something is eternal in the sense that it never ceases, this certainly cannot

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be said about judgments. A judgment begins to have duration when it is utteredfor the first time and, with pauses, it ends when it is uttered for the last time.One can speak about eternal judgments only in the sense in which can onespeak about the eternity of truth:

No true judgment, in other words no truth, is eternal in this sense if the human race thatutters judgments is eternal. (Lesniewski 1913 [1992, p. 96])´

In fact, no truth can ever be claimed to be eternal. Therefore, according toLesniewski, the thesis about the absoluteness of truth states only that there willńot occur a point in time at which a judgment that was true at some point intime could change its truth-value when uttered at another point in time. It isalong these lines that one should read the thesis about truth ‘since ever’: therewas never in the past a point in time at which a given true act of judgmentwas not true when uttered. This is one of the earliest expressions of Lesniew-´ski’s nominalism and it seems to be rooted in Marty’s actualism in the theoryof judgment and truth. It is, however, a remarkable fact that the very sameproblem of the object of judgment led to two completely different solutions:to rich ontologies like those of Meinong in Austria and Reinach in Germany,on the one hand, and to the nominalistic positions accepted by philosophers inPoland, on the other.39

7. Maria Kokoszynska (I): The Relativity of the SemanticŃotion of Truth

Issues dealing with the objectivity of truth were discussed in Poland not onlybefore Tarski’s formulation of the definition of truth in 1933, but later as well.Moreover, the discussion grew in strength in the light of this new definitionand its new opponents. One of the distinguished attempts to formulate theproblem of the objectivity of truth with regard to Tarski’s semantic definitionof truth was made by Maria Kokoszynska. As a matter of fact, her descrip-´tion of the problem goes beyond the time which I consider in this study, i.e.until 1933. However, it is worth referring to Kokoszynska’s papers publishedáfter this date for at least two reasons: For one thing, they present the firstclarification of the problem of objectivity of the semantic conception of truth.Secondly, they show how the problem of objective truth was important in theLvov-Warsaw School. Thirdly, they show that for the investigations of theobjectivity of semantic truth both Bolzanian and Aristotelian notions of ob-jective truth still played an important role. Furthermore, we can assume thatthe papers mentioned below were an outcome of discussions which took placeimmediately around the time when Tarski’s results appeared, i.e. around 1929.


7.1 The Absoluteness of the ClassicalConception of Truth

In a speech given on the occasion of the Third Polish Philosophical Conferencein Krakow in 1936.40 Kokoszynska distinguishes two types of questions which´should be asked in the context of the semantic definition of truth. The firstquestion is: ‘Is the term «true» in this definition relative or absolute?’ Thesecond question is: ‘Is it possible in a system in which theses of the form «pis true» appear that these theses are not relative with regard to the assumptionsof this system?’ (where p stands for the sentences.)

The answer to the first question depends, according to Kokoszynska, en-´tirely on what ‘true’ means. If one takes, for example, concepts of truth otherthan the semantic definition, concepts in which ‘true’ would be equivalent to‘consistent’ or ‘commonly accepted’, the notion of truth would be relative. Asfar as the semantic notion of truth is concerned, if this formulation preservesthe intuitions connected with the classical concept of truth the term ‘truth’should be understood as non-relative. ‘Truth’ is a non-relative term in the se-mantic conception of truth under the following condition: the meanings of thesentences of the language for which the definition is formulated are fixed. Thesentences cannot change their contents depending on the time, circumstancesand epistemic subjects who read these sentences.

7.2 Relativization to LanguageKokoszynska notes, of course, that utterances of the same sound or inscriptionsóf the same shape can have different meanings. It depends upon which rules ofinference are assumed in the language to which these utterances or inscriptionsbelong. The assumption which must be made in order to retain the absolute-ness of the classical conception of truth is that the meanings of utterances andinscriptions are fixed. When we treat sentences and utterances with regard totheir truth without fixing their meanings, we make the notion of truth relative.This assumption also decides the answer to the second question asked above,i.e. about the relativeness of the metalinguistic thesis ‘p is true’. It is clearthat whether the notion of truth is given an absolutistic or a non-absolutisticinterpretation is related here to the notion of meaning. More specifically, truthas defined for a given language, is relative to the meaning of the sentencesof that language. Kokoszynska in turn describes the sense or meaning of theútterances and sentences in a certain language using Ajdukiewicz’s notion ofdirectives of the language. Roughly speaking, the sense or the meaning ofa sentence S in a language L is the relation in which the sentence S stands toevery other sentence in the language L.41

It is remarkable how the speech given by Kokoszynska was discussed by´Tarski himself. He presupposes that the notion of sense or meaning is muchmore complicated than the notion of language. Thus, the notion of truth, since

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it is relative, should be relative to the concept of (formalized) language.42 Thisis because the latter does not produce any technical troubles; it is more clearand less complicated than the notion of its sense or meaning. Hence, in orderto become absolute the classical notion of truth should be relative to a given(formalized) language. The absoluteness of truth therefore presents anothermotive for the theory of truth in which ‘true’ is predicated of sentences orutterances.

Remark. I have not paid much attention to a modern aspect of objectivity(dating from the 1930’s), having to do with the problem of intersubjectivity.This problem has several levels, such as the problem of intersubjective mean-ing, or, something which is important from the point of view of the choice ofthe truth bearer, the problem of psychologism. I have almost exclusively reliedon the concept of objectivity as described by Bolzano, as well as by Husserland others, following Aristotelians. I think that other notions of objectivityhave not had a direct impact on the understanding of the objectivity of truthand these can be put in other contexts. These contexts are, respectively to theproblems mentioned, the problem of the cognition of the meanings of utteredsentences, the problem of the cognition of someone’s thought, or the problemof their individuation.

8. Summary of Chapter 7: Objective Truthand Objective Knowledge

8.1 Objective KnowledgeThe notion of objectivity used in the course of this chapter is consistent withBolzano in his Theory of Science. However, the same notion of objectivitycan be used not only regarding truth, but also when predicated of knowledge.Objective knowledge bears a resemblance to objective truth in both respects,as regards the ways in which they are objective and as regards the methodof making them objective. This should not be surprising if we consider thefact that according to the epistemic definition of the truth bearer as given inChapter 2 above, it is very often the case that these are the epistemic toolswhich serve as the bearers of truth. Since the notion of the objectivity of truthand knowledge remains Bolzanian here, it is therefore worth seeing how truthand knowledge can be objectivized.

Since the notion of objective truth was explained at the beginning of thischapter, it is now appropriate to make some remarks regarding the notion ofobjective knowledge. Above all, when speaking about objectivity in Bolzano’ssense, objective knowledge is to be understood in a narrow sense as knowledgeindependent of a subject (i.e. consciousness). Thus, first, if one speaks aboutthe objectivity of knowledge, one thinks about the objectivity of the products(results) of certain knowing acts whereby the knowing act is to be understood


as a mental event or process which depends on the subject (i.e. the act is an actof some subject and it stands in a real causal relation to this psychological sub-ject). A product of knowledge is objective if the product is independent of eachand every subject (and, respectively, from each and every consciousness). Thismeans either (a) that different subjects with cognitive dispositions have accessto the objective products of cognition (this is what is supposed by K.R. Popperin his concept of the 3rd world and by B. Bolzano in his account of the world ofsentences in themselves).43 The above could also mean (b) that the products ofcognitive acts become independent, i.e. they begin to live independently withreference to consciousness (as in Popper’s third world).

Secondly, and this is the view of Brentano and others, in order to guaranteethe objectivity of an act of knowledge (as contrasted with the product of theact) one needs some objective condition of knowledge. In Brentano’s view therole of such an objective condition is played by the identity of the knowingsubject with the object of knowledge (at least, to avoid some objections, in thecase of the empirical knowledge).

Thirdly, objectivity in the sense of subject independence may also be calledintersubjectivity. With reference to the act of cognition, this means that differ-ent subjects can repeat in exactly the same fashion similar acts of cognition andin such a way as to yield the same or similar results. Moreover, they should bein a position to give a recipe for the given kind of act and to give informationabout the results. An example in this regard is provided by Brentano’s expe-rience of evidence or by Husserl’s notion of insight [Einsicht]. In reference tothe results of knowledge, we can understand objectivity as equal-accessibilityof the products for all relevantly situated knowing subjects.

In the broadest sense, then, we can understand the concept of objectivityas meaning absoluteness (as independence from time). In regard to the prod-ucts of acts of cognition, absolute knowledge is either timeless (like Bolzano’ssentences in themselves) or unchangeable in the course of the time. Althoughabsolute acts of knowledge are usually considered to be the attributes of a godor of some other ‘objective’ or ‘transcendental’ consciousness, the demand thatthe products of cognitive acts be absolute seems more plausible to us.44

These kinds of understanding of objectivity refer, as mentioned above, toboth knowledge and truth. It needs to be mentioned, however, that the notionobjective knowledge in the above senses is not always or perhaps even neverthe same as the notion of true knowledge in the works of the authors men-tioned. On the one hand, not every case of objective knowledge is a case oftrue knowledge. In Bolzano’s philosophy, for example, there are also absolutefalse sentences [Falschheiten an sich]. They are objective in the same sense inwhich true sentences in themselves are objective. Moreover, we have cogni-tive access to both objectively false and objectively true sentences. Objectivefalsehoods are not to be found in Popper’s 3rd world, but some objective hy-potheses and theories in this world are false. On the other hand, not every case

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of true knowledge is a case of objective knowledge. Brentano assumes thatthere can be judgments about the external world which are true, but which aresuch that they will never be correct, i.e. capable of being proven by deductionor by experience of evidence. The condition for the appearance of the latter isthe identity of subject with object and this cannot take place in the context ofour cognition of the external world. Thus, judgments about the world outsideof the mind will never be a part of our knowledge.

In the aforementioned senses the notion of objectivity is opposed to thatof relativity, i.e. relativity with respect either to the knowing subject or tothe time. With regard to this opposition and to the philosophical tradition,we might also mention the issue of independence regarding space or circum-stances. It is difficult to define such a metaphor, but one can demand that ourknowledge and the corresponding truths remain unchangeable not only withrespect to a subject of cognition and a point in time, but also under ‘different(spatial) circumstances’. Thus, the following metaphorical expression: ‘in-dependently of circumstances’ will at the moment give us an explanation ofspace-independence. It could be, on the one hand, that space-independenceis less relevant to our concerns than are the other kinds of independence. Forexample, if we take mental acts to be truth bearers, then these acts are alwaysdescribed as non-spatial. On the other hand, however, some philosophers likeTwardowski, insisted upon the spatial indexicality of judgments. (‘I think itsraining in Kraków today.’)45

Remark. A short note on the objective knowledge in the Aristotelian senseis required. What does it mean that knowledge can be measured accordingto the things in the world of which it is the knowledge? There seem to be twogeneral answers to this question. Firstly, knowledge, if it should be objective inthis sense, must be empirical. Secondly, there must be an object of knowledgeindependent of cognitive subject. The latter answer claims epistemologicalrealism. The former answer claims strong empiricism. It is worth noting thatboth claims were propounded by Brentanians. Even if an object of knowledgewere not empirical, it would demand an empirical explanation of its access andcognition.

8.2 How Knowledge Becomes Objectivized

How, then, does knowledge become objectivized? By the ‘objectivization ofknowledge’ in a given case, I understand the fulfillment of one or more of theconditions specified above. Similarly, by the objectivization of truth I will un-derstand the assumption of any condition which refers to the knowing subject,the truth bearer, truth-maker and other conditions which give us the reasons todescribe the truth of a given theory of truth as objective in one of the abovegiven senses.


Now, the objectivization of knowledge can be accomplished assuming oneor more of the following conditions (see Table 1):

1. Objectivization as making knowledge independent of time (i.e. absolutiza-tion):

1.1. With regard to the subject of knowledge:

(i) The assumption of a timeless subject such as (one which does notexist in time), for instance, god or some transcendental conscious-ness (later Husserl), whose knowledge (in the form of acts or theresults of such acts) is beyond time. This is a less interesting pos-sibility of the objectivization of knowledge for someone who is in-terested especially in empirical subjects and their empirical knowl-edge.

(ii) The assumption that we do not need any knowing subject at allto perform an act at a particular point in time, because knowledgeexists without any empirical subject (Popper, Bolzano).

1.2. Absolutization of knowledge with regard to the act of knowledge:

(i) The assumption of timeless media of knowledge (tools). Thesemay be the ideal contents of judgment, meanings, senses or logi-cal laws: tools which, from the beginning of the act of cognition,guarantee its independence with regard to time. Thus, the media ofknowledge which, by nature, are in time here express somethingwhich exists beyond time. (For example, Husserl’s written or spo-ken sentences can be interpreted as uses of ideal meanings whichare tools of knowledge and communication.)

(ii) Another assumption made by such a conception of the media ofknowledge is that of being temporarily instantiated counterparts oftimeless media. Despite the fact that we use judgments and lan-guage which exist in time, they exemplify something outside oftime (their ideal contents or meanings, for example).

(iii) One can also assume that we have at our disposal permanent oreternal products of the act of knowledge such as sentence-types,propositions or other ideal meanings, theories and so on. Theseexist in time, but we can recognize them and use them at each pointof time.46

1.3. Assumptions for the absolutization of knowledge made with regard tothe object of knowledge:

(i) The assumption of timeless objects of knowledge such as numbers,objects of logic, sentences in themselves and others. If we ‘really’know such objects, then it is impossible that at another point in time

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they could be cognized in a different way. Even if they were neverto be known, their cognition is guaranteed to be time-independent.

(ii) The assumption that our knowledge has validity at any point intime (a kind of a priori knowledge, such as Brentano’s axiomaticjudging).

1.4. Assumptions for the absolutization of knowledge made with regard tospecial conditions for knowledge:

(i) The assumption of the timeless condition of knowledge, such asBrentano’s identity of the cognitive subject and the object of cog-nition.

(ii) The assumption of a condition or a special kind of cognitive actwhich is valid at any point in time, such as a Cartesian or Husserlianinsight, insofar as this is seen as being involved in our knowledgeof mathematical inferences.

(iii) The assumption of intersubjectivity, understood in such a way thatat any point in time there exists the possibility of repeating the actof knowledge in such a way that the result is the same product.

1.5. The objectivization of knowledge regarding time is also made by a com-bination of assumptions 1.1. through 1.4.47

2. As in the case of the possibilities mentioned above for making knowledgeobjective with regard to time, one can also order the assumptions for mak-ing knowledge objective with regard to space:

2.1. One can make assumptions with regard to the subject of knowledge.This possibility can be seen, however, as less interesting because thesubject of knowledge is always described as non-spatial. (Especiallyby descriptive psychologists.)

2.2. One can make assumptions about the objectivity of knowledge as to cir-cumstances with regard to the act of knowledge in the following ways:

(i) By assuming the timelessness of the media of knowledge. It shouldbe mentioned that we can include here among the tools of knowl-edge such entities as mental acts which are always described asnon-spatial by their very nature, as well as entities like Bolzano’ssentences in themselves, logical laws and so on.

(ii) The assumption of instances of timeless entities (as in the case ofabsolutization—see 1.2.(ii) above), and

(iii) The assumption of permanent products as media of knowledge,such as theories and type-sentences.

2.3. The assumptions for the objectivity of knowledge as to circumstancesregarding objects of knowledge are the following:


(i) The assumption of objects which are beyond space, such as num-bers, sentences in themselves and––what seems to be important––the mind or psyche.

(ii) The assumption of some kind of a priori knowledge, which is validfor any object under any circumstances.

2.4. Another group, assumptions with regard to the conditions of knowledgeconsists of the following:

(i) The assumption of timeless conditions of knowledge, such as psy-chological conditions characterized in terms of evidence (e.g. thestatement that the presence of evidence makes an act of knowledgeobjective), insight and so on.

(ii) The assumption of the condition of intersubjectivity in the sensegiven above.

2.5. It is also, of course, possible to make combinations of assumptions 2.1.through 2.4.

3. Finally, objectivization in the narrow sense, i.e. making knowledge inde-pendent of a subject (or of a consciousness), takes place by means of thefollowing assumptions:

3.1. With regard to the subject of knowledge:

(i) The assumption that there is no empirical subject (but only a tran-scendental one, or something similar).

(ii) An assumption which is more interesting than the former becauseit refers to an empirical subject: the monistic assumption that thereis only one consciousness.

(iii) The assumption of solipsism. Then the problem of the indepen-dence of knowledge from a subject does not exist at all.

3.2. Objectivization of knowledge as independent of a subject (or of con-sciousness) with regard to the object of knowledge consists of the fol-lowing:

(i) The introduction of entities which can be used as epistemic toolsand which do not depend on any sort of consciousness for theirexistence. Examples are Bolzano’s sentences in themselves, logicallaws and so on.

(ii) The assumption of epistemic tools which are products of acts ofknowledge and which continue to exist without any subject, suchas sentence-types or theories.

3.3. Objectivization (of knowledge regarding the subject) with respect tothe objects of knowledge is made by the help of the following:

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(i) The assumption of objects which are independent of consciousnessor which are entirely outside the realm of consciousness. It shouldbe mentioned here that in making such an assumption we shoulddecide the problem of mental objects, since images, representationsand so on are mind-dependent.

(ii) The assumption of the intelligibility of the object of knowledge.Here these objects are cognizable for any subject. It may be worthmentioning that this is one of the most commonly held assumptionsin theories of knowledge.

3.4. Objectivization (of knowledge regarding the subject) with regard toother conditions of knowledge can be made by introducing:

(i) A condition which is independent of any consciousness, such asBrentano’s identity of the subject and the object of knowledge(hence, for Brentano, for any species which has the ability to makea judgment, there exists a class of judgments which fulfil this con-dition) or such as Husserl’s epoche. This kind of condition is veryoften accompanied by the assumption of ‘privileged cognition’, asformulated in what follows:

(ii) The assumption that every individual of a species with the abil-ity to gain knowledge has the same abilities, such as, for instance,Husserl’s assumption that each of us might, after appropriate train-ing, be capable of achieving phenomenological insight.48

3.5. Combinations of assumptions 3.1. through 3.4.

8.3 The Objectivization of TruthThe objectivization of truth, which in many ways is similar to the objectiviza-tion of knowledge, can be achieved with the help of the following assumptions(see Table 2):

1. The absolutization of truth:

1.1. With respect to the subject, this takes place by:

(i) The assumption of a timeless subject which cognizes a given truth(Again, this is uninteresting if we are interested in cases where anempirical subject is involved).

(ii) The assumption that truth can exist even without any epistemologi-cal subject or the assumption of truths which can be grasped by anysubject (sentences themselves or true products of cognitive acts,such as those which belong to Popper’s 3rd world, for example).

1.2. The absolutization of truth with regard to the truth bearer takes placeby means of:


(i) The timelessness of the truth bearer (e.g. sentences in themselvesin Bolzano’s theory);

(ii) The assumption that at any point in time we can exemplify timelesstruth bearers by means of an act of knowledge.

(iii) The assumption of the existence of permanent products such as, forexample, sentence-types, which can be exemplified at any point intime.

(iv) The de-contextualization of the truth bearer with respect to time(by its indexicalization: ‘The sentence written by me on Januarythe 20th, 1999 according to the Gregorian calendar and so on’).

1.3. The absolutization of truth with respect to truth-makers can be achievedby:

(i) The assumption of the timelessness of that in the world which de-cides the truth-value of the truth bearer (e.g. numbers, objects oflogic in Husserl and Frege or sentences in themselves in Bolzano,when conceived as truth-makers).

(ii) The thesis to the effect that that which decides the truth-value ofthe truth bearer is unchangeable, although it is in time (such as, forexample, physical laws-—the view held by Brentano and Marty).49

(iii) The assumption that there are no truth-makers of whatever truth-bearers one likes. This includes assumptions such as that the truth-value of analytical sentences is independent of the world, or, takinganother example, that if something is true at some point in time,then regardless of what might happen, it will remain true.

(iv) Time-indexicality (time de-contextualization) of the truth-maker(‘Today, January the 5th 1999 according to the Gregorian calen-dar something is the case’).

1.4. Other conditions undertaken in order to retain the time-independenceof truth are, for example:

(i) The assumption of time-independence of the criteria of truth (suchas the principle of non-contradiction), or

(ii) criteria which are valid at any point in time (such as the aforemen-tioned identity of subject and object in Brentano’s view.)

1.5. Finally, of course, combinations of assumptions formulated in 1.1.through 1.4.

2. The possibilities of making truth independent of space or circumstancesrely on the following assumptions:

2.1. The assumption in which the subject is considered as a non-spatial sub-ject (e.g. the Brentanian psyche).

152 CHAPTER SEVEN

2.2. Assumptions with respect to the truth-bearer:

(i) The assumption that the truth-bearer is beyond space (because itbelongs to the domain of what is mental in a Cartesian sense, orbecause the truth bearer is something ideal like a sentence in itselfin Bolzano’s sense).

(ii) The assumption of the possibility of exemplifying a timeless truthbearer. For example, an act of judging which exemplifies a sen-tence in itself as its content.

(iii) The assumption of products which are independent of space, suchas, for example, sentence-types.

(iv) Space indexicality (space de-contextualization) of the truth bearer.

2.3. With respect to the truth-maker:

(i) The assumption of truth-makers which are beyond space (numbers,sentences in themselves, objects of logic, mental acts, states of af-fairs).

(ii) The assumption of any truth-maker for a given truth bearer. (Exam-ples here can be Husserl’s idea of variation or the idea of fulfillmentwith any sequence of objects from the universe);

(iii) The space indexicality of the truth-maker (e.g. by means of quan-tification).

(iv) The assumption of a truth-maker which fills all space (such as, forexample, maximal situations).

2.4. Other conditions of making truth independent of space or circumstances:

(i) A criterion of truth which is independent of space, or(ii) a criterion which is valid under any circumstances (identity, con-

sistency, coherence and so on).

2.5. As with the other cases, it is possible to combine the assumptions givenabove in 2.1.–2.4.50

3. Objectivization of truth as independence of the knowing subject takes placeby means of the following assumptions:

3.1. Assumptions with respect to the subject:

(i) The assumption of a transcendental subject (uninteresting for thoseinterested in empirical cognitive subjects).

(ii) The assumption that we do not need any subject of knowledge atall (that truth exists in and of itself).

(iii) The assumption of monism (there exists only one subject and there-fore there cannot be any problem of his knowing or even of theexistence of a difference between subject and object).


(iv) Solipsism.

3.2. Objectivization of truth by making truth independent of the knowingsubject also takes place by means of assumptions with regard to thetruth bearer. These are:

(i) The assumption that the truth bearer is independent of conscious-ness (that it is a matter of ideal contents, sentences in themselvesand so on).

(ii) The assumption of the exemplification of truth bearers which areindependent of the subject (act of judging—ideal content, utterance-token—its meaning and so on).

(iii) The assumption of permanent product-like sentence-types.(iv) The process of ascribing of an epistemic subject to a given truth

bearer, i.e. an indexicalization of the relation of the truth bearer tothe epistemic subject (‘John Smith’s mother’s utterance is true’).

3.3. Objectivization (as independence of a subject) with regard to the truth-maker is accomplished by means of:

(i) The assumption that the truth-maker is independent of conscious-ness (here we have not only objects like sentences in themselves ornumbers, but above all objects from the so-to-speak external world,which is one of the most commonly held assumptions in classicaltheories of truth).

(ii) The assumption of the intelligibility of the truth maker (this is quitea strong assumption in which what decides the truth-value of thetruth bearer is capable of being known by everyone).

(iii) The indexicality of the truth-maker with regard to the subject (‘theutterance of John Smith’s mother about what she sees is true’).

3.4. Objectivization (as independence of a subject) with regard to the truth-maker is also made by means of other objectifying conditions such as,for example:

(i) A criterion for truth which is subject independent, or(ii) a criterion of truth which would remain valid for any subject (co-

herence, correspondence and so on).

3.5. Combinations of the assumptions described above in 3.1.-–3.4. are alsovery often the case.

8.4 Concluding RemarksFrom what we have seen above, one can conclude that the epistemologicalproblem of the objectivization of knowledge and of truth has (or has had in theBrentanian tradition) more metaphysical answers than epistemological ones.Most of the ways described for objectivizing truth are metaphysical solutions.

154 CHAPTER SEVEN

Only by assuming indexicality, intelligibility, a priori knowledge and differentkinds of criteria, do we come close to proposing an epistemological answerto the problem of the objectivization of truth. Our answers are either directlymetaphysical (where they deal, for instance, with sentences in themselves), orrefer to metaphysical problems in an indirect way, i.e. where they deal withideal meanings, type-sentences, propositions and the like.

Since the ways of objectivizing knowledge and truth are very analogous toone another, one might expect that the attempts to objectivize knowledge willhave their expressions in the area of truth theory. We now have another reasonfor making an epistemological definition of the truth bearer as described abovein Chapter 2. Therefore, it is also easier to see why the epistemological notionof the truth bearer dictates the choice of entities such as the following as thetruth bearer: a judging thing (Brentano, Kotarbinski), an act of judging (early´Brentano), a judgment as the product of an act of judging (a statement), anutterance as the psycho-physical product of an act of judging (Łukasiewicz),a sentence as psycho-physical product which expresses a judgment (Twardow-ski), a sentence as psycho-physical product which expresses the content ofa judgment (Ajdukiewicz), a proposition or other ideal meanings as psycho-physical products which are fixed or as something which is exemplified in suchproducts.

In selecting a truth bearer in the sense of the epistemic definition of the truthbearer, one chooses, on the one hand, the tools of knowledge (those, which canserve best for acquiring knowledge by empirical subjects) and, on the otherhand, the way to objectivize it (i.e. which tool of knowledge serving as the truthbearer guarantees the greatest independence from time, circumstances and sub-ject). It seems that the choices are seen or, at least, were seen in the past, ascontradictory: At the turn of 19th century, what was seen as the proper tool ofknowledge (e.g. judgings or their contents) does not offer many possibilitiesfor the objectivization of truth. With respect to this contradictory choice, itseems that there is a ‘golden mean’. This regards expressions of language astruth bearers: On the one hand, one chooses language because it can be a goodand sufficient tool for acquiring knowledge or for expressing knowledge ac-quired by other means, such as acts. On the other hand, one chooses languagebecause language makes it possible to objectivize truth in many ways.


TABLE 1

objecti-vization/

assumptions

with regard to

the subject S

with regard to

mediaof knowledge

MK

with regard tothe objects

of knowledgeOK

with regard to

the conditionsof knowledge

CK

combinations

of knowledge

time absolutization space absolutizationobjectivization in

the narrow sense

timelessness for any toutsideof space

for anyx1, x2, x3

withouta subject

of knowledge

for any

subject

timeless S

knowledge

without Sof knowledge

S outsideof space

each Stranscendental

S

knowledgewithouta subject

of knowledge

monism

solipsism

timeless MK

presentation

of

timeless MK

permanent

products

as MK

MK outsideof space

presentation

of MK outsideof space

permanent

products

as MK

independent

of subject MK

presentationof MK

independentof subject

permanent

products

as MK

timeless OK each OKOK outside

of spaceeach OK

independent

of subject OK

intelligible

OK

timeless CK

valid CKfor any t

intersub-jectivity

CK outsideof space

valid CKfor any

circumstances

intersub-jectivity

independent

of subject CK

cognitive

abilities

intersub-jectivity

combinations → · · · → · · · → · · · → · · · → · · ·→ · · · → · · · → · · ·

156 CHAPTER SEVEN

TABLE 2

objecti-vization/

assumptions

with regard to

the subject S

with regard

to the truth

bearer TB

with regard

to the truth-

maker TM

other

conditions

combinations

of truth

time absolutization space absolutizationobjectivization in

the narrow sense

timelessness for any toutsideof space

for anyx1, x2, x3

withoutan empirical

subject

for any

subject

timeless S

truth

without Sof knowledge

S outside space any SS outside spacetranscendental

S

truthwithout S

of knowledge

monism

solipsism

timeless TB

presentation

of

timeless TB

permanent

products

as TB

indexicality

of TB

TB outsidespace

presentationof TB outside

of spacepermanentproducts

as TB

indexicality

of TB

psyche as TB

TBindependent

of subject

presentation

of ideal TB

permanent

products

indexicality

timeless TM

TMunchangeable

in time

any TM

indexicality

of TM

TM outsideof space

TM which‘fills all

of space’

any TM

indexicality

of TM

TMindependent

of subject

intelligibility

of TM

indexicality

of TM

timeless

criteria

criteria validfor any t

identity of

TB with TM

criteria

outsideof space

criteria validfor any

circumstances

identity of

TB with TM

criteriaindependent

of S

identity of

TB with TM

criteria validfor any S

identity of

TB with TM

combinations → · · · → · · · → · · · → · · · → · · ·→ · · · → · · · → · · ·


Notes1 Bolzano 1837, par. 40–43. For general presentations of Bolzano’s theories see Bergmann 1909, Berg

1962, Morscher 1973.

2 Bolzano 1837, §19.3 I prefer to use the term ‘sentence’ instead of ‘proposition’ since the former does not suggest directly the

use of terms of modern semantics in an interpretation of Bolzano. Therefore, I put literal translationsinto brackets. In the quoted passage a similar problem concerning the established translation refers tothe term ‘assertion’, which is supposed to be the translation of the German term ‘Aussage’ and whichshould be translated as ‘statement’ or ‘sentence’. ‘Mit anderen Worten also: unter einem Satze an sichverstehe ich nur irgendeine Aussage, daß etwas ist oder nicht ist; gleichviel, ob diese Aussage wahr oderfalsch ist; ob sie von irgend jemand in Worte gefaßt oder nicht gefaßt, ja auch im Geiste nur gedachtoder nicht gedacht worden ist.’ (Bolzano 1837, §19)

4 Bolzano 1837, §23, 125.5 He thus clearly assumes the ontological law of the excluded middle. For the distinction between the

psychological, the ontological and the logical law of the excluded middle see Łukasiewicz 1910/1987.

6 The names given in parentheses are Bolzano’s. See Bolzano 1837, par. 24.7 Bolzano 1837, §25c, §26.1.8 Bolzano 1837, par. 36.9 Bolzano 1837, par. 129.10 Compare: Bolzano 1837, sect. 25, 125; Morscher and Simons 1982; Morscher 1986.11 See Brentano 1987, pp. 87f.

12 See Brentano 1889 ‘Über Begriff der Wahrheit’ in: Brentano 1930, pp. 3–29.13 Brentano 1933, p. 148.14 Brentano 1956, pp. 162–165, 173; 1933, p. 88.15 Brentano 1970, p. 151.16 Brentano 1956, p. 141 ff.17 This is debatable with regard to the arguments of Brentano to which I refer in order to develop my

interpretation of the identity of the axiomatic judger and the objects of axioms. Since the Theory ofCategories (Brentano 1933) is rather an ontology of mind, I refer to the Theory of Correct Judgement(Brentano 1956), a work which was edited by Franziska Meyer-Hillebrand. The content of this bookrelies, for the most part, on manuscripts of her husband from the time he was Brentano’s student. One ofthe students of Meyer-Hillebrand in Insbruck, Paul Weingartner, drew my attention to the fact that sheoften emphasized that the Theory of Correct Judgement should not be taken in a literal sense as a viewpresented by Brentano himself. However, in order to present a unique theory of identity as required bythe experience of evidence, I risk giving the above interpretation which relies on the views described inthe book edited by Meyer-Hillebrand.

18 Brentano 1956, pp. 199–202ff.19 Brentano 1956, p. 195.20 In what follows most references are to the first volume of the Logical Investigations, i.e. to the Prole-

gomena to Pure Logic. The reasons for this choice are the following. First, in order to present Husserl’stheory of truth in its entirety I would have to explain most of his other concepts, which are not directlyrelated to his theory of truth. Ironically, in order to take into account all of what Husserl wrote to explainthose concepts, several monographs would be necessary, and not a brief sketch. Moreover, since mostof these concepts are quite vague (for this see, above all, Blaustein 1928), the task is even more difficult.Secondly, and more seriously, in this study I place Husserl in two contexts: in the context of the ontologyof judgment and in that of the objectivity of truth. For those purposes I do not need a hermeneutics ofthe whole work of Husserl. Thirdly, since in my choice of sources I refer to those writings which havehad or may have had an influence on Polish philosophers, the significance of particular works of Husserlshould be taken into account. It can be argued, as far as Polish philosophers are concerned, that not thesecond part of the Logical Investigations, but its first volume, i.e. the Prolegomena, played the mostimportant role. It is the part of Husserl’s Logical Investigations which was most influential and highlyvalued, especially that part of the work where, as it was put by Łukasiewicz, Husserl speaks ‘in thename of Frege’. (This is how Jan Łukasiewicz referred to Husserl’s ‘Prolegomena’ in his diary.) In whatfollows, maintaining what I wrote about Husserl earlier in this study, I would like to give a non-Platonicinterpretation of what Husserl says in the name of Frege.

158 CHAPTER SEVEN

21 See Morscher and Simons 1982.22 ‘Man vermenge auch nicht das wahre Urtheil als den richtigen, wahrheitsgemäßen Urtheilsact, mit der

W a h r h e i t dieses Urtheils oder mit dem wahren Urtheilsinhalt.’ (Husserl 1900/1901, p. 119).

23 See also Twardowski 1900 [1965, p. 327].24 Twardowski 1900.25 See also Twardowski 1900 [1965, p. 327].26 With the interpretation of the judgment as a particular act of judging comes the problem of whether the

act of judging, when fulfilled at different points of time, can remain unchanged at all. As a matter offact, it is numerically another mental event when given at different points of time. The problem of theindividualization of acts of judging leads to solutions in which one speaks about a type of act of judgingor about species of acts, as was in case when Husserl tried to solve the problem of the individualizationof the contents of judging acts.

27 See Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 4.002.28 Łukasiewicz 1907 and Twardowski 1912.29 It is worth noting that the paper which was originally presented as a lecture by Łukasiewicz on July 23,

1907 at the philosophical section of the 10th session of Polish Physicians and Scientists was discussed,among others, by Twardowski. According to the records from this session, Łukasiewicz’s presentationdid not encounter any opposition on the part of the participants. Even on the point of logic as a the-oretical discipline, as seen by Łukasiewicz, met no opposition. From a historical point of view, sinceTwardowski did not turn to the anti-psychologistic camp until 1912, it is interesting to ask how closeTwardowski was to the anti-psychologistic view on logic in 1907. I think that a reasonable answer isthat even though Twardowski held logic to be a theoretical discipline independent of psychology, he stillsaw the theory of knowledge, or at least some of its parts, as belonging to psychology. Thus, his theoryof acts and products represents the final step of his move in the direction where the theory of knowledgefrees itself from the theory of cognition, i.e. in the direction which was the mainstream of epistemologyalmost exclusively until the 1980’s.

30 Bolzano 1837, Bergmann 1879, Witasek 1908.31 See Twardowski 1919/1920 ‘On Clear and Obscure styles of Philosophical Writings’.32 See Twardowski 1975.33 Popper 1972.34 Łukasiewicz 1910. It is clear that Kotarbinski was influenced especially by the problem of determinism´

in its relation to the principle of the excluded middle. This is, no doubt, the motive for both texts.

35 Among other things, Kotarbinski calls inner perception as a witness here!´36 Kotarbinski 1913, p. 75. In fact the Polish word which Kotarbi´ nski uses for what I translate here by´

‘existence’, namely the word ‘istnieje’, is more elastic as regards the distinction between ‘to exist’ inthe ordinary sense and the way of existence which is often expressed in such terms as ‘there is’, ‘thereare’ or ‘to be’ are concerned. Yet this does not change the heart of the matter and the exact terminologyin this case could lead only to grammatically more complicated expressions.

37 Original in Polish as Lesniewski 1913.´38 Lesniewski 1913, p. 514.´39 More to this topic below in chapter 8.40 Kokoszynska 1936, 1936a.´41 See for this Ajdukiewicz 1934.42 It is important that Tarski’s notion of formalized language refers not only to languages commonly ac-

cepted as ‘formal’, i.e. to the languages of logic and mathematics. For Tarski, a language L is formalwhen it fulfills the following conditions: (1) it has a complete vocabulary, (2) there are explicitly given(purely) syntactical rules to built expressions, functions and sentences in L, (3) the function of themeanings of expressions in L depend on their form (L should be extensional), (4) L does not includeindexicals, (5) L is not closed (does not include its metalanguage). Thus, some parts of natural lan-guages, when fulfilling these conditions, can be formalized languages as well. In particular, to makeit more ‘Brentanian’, it is possible to improve a fragment of a natural language in such a way that itbecomes a formalized language.


43 The appearance of the name of K.R. Popper seems to be in violation of my earlier statement that thisstudy refers to the period from 1837 (first edition of Wissenschaftslehre of Bernard Bolzano) to 1933(the year of the first edition of Alfred Tarski‘s work). Yet in spite of this I decided, for the sake ofgreater clarity, to mention Popper’s ideas (Popper 1972) here due to the large number of convergencesin interpretations of the so-called 3rd world of Popper with Bolzano’s world of the sentences themselvesand due to the fact that Popper’s theory is more well-known in English speaking world than Bolzano’stheory.

44 It is possible, of course, to reject the thesis that Bolzano’s sentences in themselves can be interpreted asproducts of cognitive acts. However, this possibility, and the possibility of rejecting other theses as welldoes not change the kernel of our problem. Usually, in a discussion about the theory of truth, one askswhether the truths are absolute or changeable in the course of time according to the theory. Yet whenwe are considering the cognition of truth or true knowledge, we ask for absolute products of cognitiveacts.

45 Twardowski 1900.46 See Smith 1989.47 It should be mentioned here that I do not claim that the list given above is complete. It does not mention

which of the assumptions can refer only to acts of knowledge and which refers only to the products ofthese acts. Moreover, not all of the various combinations are possible. Some solutions of the problemof objectivity may be seen nowadays as archaic. However, this does not change the fact that suchtreatments were arrived at in the past. In any case, one can at least see that they were accepted.

48 If I do not see what a phenomenologist sees, it means that I have not received sufficient training. Sinceit seems that not only most people but also most philosophers have not had, according to this phenom-enological criterion, sufficient training, I call this view ‘privileged cognition’.

49 See Smith 1994, especially chapter 4.50 Some of the expressions used are very clearly metaphorical such as, for instance, ‘a truth-maker which

fills all of space’; however, I think that if they were reformulated into expressions of a theory in whichthey would be more understandable, expressions such as ‘maximal situation’ or ‘each infinite sequenceof objects from a given domain’, then they could be defended.

Chapter 8

ONTOLOGISM, ABSTRACT OBJECTS ANDNOMINALISM

1. The Choice of Truth Bearers andOntological Preferences

Edgar Morscher sees the distinctive property of continental philosophy af-ter Bolzano in that this philosophy continuously considered the problem ofSachverhalte and propositions.1 From the topics which again and again be-came the objects of philosophical investigation Morscher points out what isthe special unifying feature of the Austrian philosophical tradition:

What unifies and distinguishes Austrian philosophy is not a set of common answers toquestions and solutions to problems offered by most Austrian philosophers, but rathera central core of topics and the methods and attitudes brought to them. One such topicis that of propositions and states of affairs. (Morscher 1986, p. 75)

This is what in rough formulation I call here the thesis of ontologism. Thus,by ‘ontologism’ I understand the view according to which the introduction ofan entity into the framework of logical, linguistic, or philosophical investiga-tion, providing a solution to some problem, also demands ontological argu-mentation. Morscher’s thesis is that ontologism is fundamental in AustrianPhilosophy, with underlying of states of affairs and propositions as the entitiesaround which argumentation takes place. Since the Brentanian Tradition onwhich I focus on in this study presents a proper part of the tradition of Aus-trian Philosophy, Morscher’s thesis, if it is true, should also be valid as far asthis study is concerned.2 This is also confirmed in monographs devoted to thistradition which focus almost exclusively on its ontological side.3 This studydiffers in that the ontology of judgment and other ontological topics presentonly part of the written history. In order to be historically correct, despite thefact of whether and how much I would like it, I cannot, however, to avoid thecontext of ontology as far as the choice of truth bearer is concerned. The mo-tives for and against the claim that certain kinds of entities, such as states of

161

162 CHAPTER EIGHT

affairs or propositions, may serve, for instance, as truthmakers, must be con-sidered when we are considering the bearers of truth. One such motive was anattempt to combine the linguistic and psychological sides of the theory of judg-ment within the framework of what I earlier called the ‘ontology of judgment.’Another motive has already been mentioned by me in the previous chapter,devoted to the problem of the objectivity of truth. Here I can quote Morscheronce again:

As far as I can see, in most cases the dominant aim in introducing propositions and/orstates of affairs is to guarantee the independence from time, space, change, mind andlanguage, of truth and falsity and of logical properties and relations like (in)validity,logical consequence, (in)compatibility and so on. The independence (or aspects of it)are sometimes referred to by the word ‘objectivity’. . . (Morscher 1986, p. 80)

The topic of this chapter are remarks regarding the ontological preferences andmotives of the members of the Lvov-Warsaw School as regards the acceptanceor rejection of entities which can serve as bearers of truth.4

2. Ontologism and Nominalism in Poland2.1 Ontologism as the Brentanian Heritage?Morscher’s thesis states that ontologism is the distinguished feature of theBrentanian tradition. In the sense in which ontologism presents a requirementof ontological argumentation for the introduction of an entity into the concep-tual framework of philosophical consideration, it also represents the charac-teristic feature of the Lvov-Warsaw School. This is especially the case sincein the school choice of the bearer of truth was also an outcome of ontologicalor metaphysical views. For example, Kotarbinski’s reism as described above´led to the choice of inscriptions as bearers of truth.5 Taking another example,the ontology of acts as presented by Twardowski was of great importance forhim in epistemological considerations.6 It is also interesting that in the Lvov-Warsaw School ontological decisions go hand in hand with linguistic and log-ical investigations.

2.2 Nominalism as a Special Case of OntologismThe commonly known fact about the ontological preferences of Poles is thatmost Polish philosophers of the Lvov-Warsaw School were nominalists. AsPeter Simons pointed out, Kotarbinski, Le´ sniewski, and Tarski defended nom-ínalistic positions in a particular sense of the term ‘nominalism.’7 In the frame-work of Simons’ concepts Kotarbinski’s nominalism can be called ’concretism’,´whereas Lesniewski’s nominalism ‘particularism.’ As far as Tarski is con-ćerned his nominalistic position is not subject to discussion. However, theprecise description of his position presents problems. Especially problematicseems to be Tarski’s view on abstract objects such as classes or types. On theone hand, as Simons reports, Henryk Hiz believes that Tarski was a reist.˙ 8 On

Ontologism, Abstract Objects and Nominalism 163

the other hand, Wolenski urged for the existence of a difference in this respect´between Tarski and his teacher Kotarbinski.´ 9 I shall return to the problem ofclasses or types in Tarski’s account in chapter 10 below. Here I shall focusrather on the early discussion between Lesniewski and Kotarbi´ nski on univer-´sals, a discussion which, I believe, represents the key to understanding thenominalistic positions taken later by both of them, as well as by their succes-sors, including Tarski. This discussion, like their discussion on truth, clearlyshows its Brentanian roots and confirms the attribution of the thesis of ontol-ogism to that part of the continental philosophical tradition represented by theLvov-Warsaw School.

In this context there is an interesting anecdote about Mostowski who after his return(already after the Second World War) from a conference devoted to set theory said:‘There, in America, I missed reism.’ At the conference, among other things, the theoryof sets of (great) power was considered. (Wolenski 1987a, p. 104—my translation)´

2.3 Tadeusz Kotarbinski (III) and´Stanisław Lesniewski (II) on General Objects´

The fact that the reistic attitude assumed by the Lvov-Warsaw School is also anoutcome of discussions about the existence of general objects is often passedover in silence. The discussion took place between Lesniewski and Kotarbi´ n-ski, as well as among others. Indeed, the discussion about general objects inthe Lvov-Warsaw School was evoked by Twardowski’s habilitation and it alsotook place, for example, among students of Twardowski with clear psychologi-cal inclinations, such as Adam Stögbauer or Salomon Igel. Roughly speaking,the descriptive-psychological argumentation of these latter refers to the pos-sibility of presenting of general objects and to the problem of abstraction.10

The arguments against the existence of general objects presented by Lesniew-´ski and Kotarbinski in their discussion on general objects represent, however,á completely new standard of argumentation on this topic. Because of theirimportant consequences (to mention only Lesniewski’s mereology and Kotar-´binski’s reism), it is worth sketching them here briefly.´

Lesniewski’s critique of the existence of general objects is included, amongóther things, in his 1913 paper about the logical principle of the excludedmiddle.11 In this paper he states that every general object had to be incon-sistent. Using an analogy to Russell’s paradox Lesniewski’s argument goesás follows: A general object is, by definition, an object which has only thoseproperties which belong to every particular object which is its instantiation (orbelongs to its extension). Thus, according to Lesniewski, the assumption of´the existence of general objects goes together with the assumption that it ispossible to have an object that contains only properties shared by the particu-lar objects which are instantiations of this general object. As opposed to thisgeneral object, each of its instantiation, i.e. every particular object, has at leastone property, say P , which is not shared by every other particular object. This

164 CHAPTER EIGHT

property P of a particular cannot be a property of the general object, for thelatter has only properties which are shared by all particulars. If a particularhas a property P not shared by all other particulars, then it also does not havethe property of not-having the property P . But this property of not-having theproperty P is, Lesniewski argues further, also not shared by every particularóbject. Thus, the general object also cannot have the property of not-havingthe property P . Therefore, since the general object does not have the propertyP and does not have the property of not-having of the property P , then, in fact,the general object violates the ontological law of contradiction. The generalobject must, therefore be an inconsistent object. The general object neither hasnor does not have the property P which is not shared by all particular objects.And by applying the ontological principle of the excluded middle and the on-tological principle of contradiction, when the general object has P then it doesnot have P , and when the general object does not have P then it has P .12

As a matter of fact, fourteen years later Lesniewski wrote about his earlyáttempt to show the inconsistency of the idea of general objects in the followingway:

At the time I wrote that passage I believed that there are in existence in this world socalled features and so called relations, as two special kinds of objects, and I felt noscruples about using the expressions ‘feature’ and ‘relations.’ It is a long time sinceI believed in the existence of objects which are features, or in the existence of objectswhich are relations and now nothing induces me to believe in the existence of suchobjects . . . (Lesniewski 1913a [1992, p. 198])´

Yet even after Lesniewski changed his views on the notions and terms used in´1913 (especially that of the ‘property of an object’), he still maintains as validthe informal proof that in the realm of two existent particular objects, the objectwhich is general with regard to these two does not exist.13 It is worth addingthat in 1927 Lesniewski modified his scheme of the argument against abstractóbjects in the mode of Kotarbinski, who joined the discussion and who addedńew arguments to Lesniewski’s.´ 14

Above all, Kotarbinski modifies the arguments of his colleague. Let us as-´sume that we have an object G which is general with respect to the objects A,B and C. According to the definition of general objects, the object G has thoseand only those properties which are shared by particular objects A, B and C.Thus, according to Kotarbinski, especially every particular object´ A, B and Cis general with respect to itself, since it has only those properties which arecommon to it, i.e. those and only those properties which it has. Furthermore,every object A, B and C, being general with respect to itself, has the propertyof being general with respect to itself. As objects having the property of beinggeneral with respect to themselves, particulars are objects which are identicalto each other; they are general objects. Moreover, the general object G, whichis general with regard to the objects A, B and C, also has the property of beinggeneral. But if the object G has the property of being general, then the partic-


ular objects A, B and C also have to have this property of being general, forthe general object has only those properties which are shared by all particulars.Thus, Kotarbinski argues, it is not only the case that these particulars´ A, B andC are general objects with respect to themselves and thereby identical to eachother, they are also, through the property of being general, identical with thegeneral object G.15

Despite their logical structure I believe that the differences between Les-niewski’s and Kotarbinski’s argumentations are more understandable when oneúses notion of abstraction as a tool by means of which one creates generalobjects on the cognitive psychological level. Namely they use quite differ-ent notions of abstraction, by means of which we ‘produce’ abstract objects.Whereas Lesniewski clearly refers to the general object as produced in an ab-´straction by skipping individual differences of objects (i.e. abstraction as un-derstood by Twardowski in his descriptive psychology where, for example, weskip individual properties such as the color, shape, and size of a triangle pre-sented in our imagination when creating a general triangle), Kotarbinski refers´to abstraction in a sense which is closer to Husserl’s notion of abstraction byspecifying (we focus either on color, or on size, or on shape in our imaginationrather than skipping them all). The latter is, therefore, closest to the class of ab-straction as known from logic. With regard to this I believe that Kotarbinski’sánd Lesniewski’s arguments against general objects mirror the same problemás investigated earlier on the level of descriptive psychology.

The reference to the possible descriptive-psychological interpretation of gen-eral objects by means of abstraction in the views of Lesniewski and Kotarbi´ n-ski seems reasonable, especially when one looks at the latter’s paper. Thispaper is very rich in arguments against the assumption of every kind of idealobjects which appeared in the Brentanian Tradition and was later brought tothe Polish philosophical world by Twardowski. Kotarbinski treats here against´the following form of ideal objects: 1. He argues against the idealization ofmathematical objects and treats them instead in a materialistic manner. 2. Herejects the notions of class and numbers as objects which are atemporal andout-of-space. He urged that if they arose in a mental act by means of a processof abstraction, then they would have a beginning and an end. 3. Kotarbinski re-´jects the existence of any kind of relations. The assumption of their existence isbased on a mistake, according to Kotarbinski, based on the fact that languages´have nouns and noun-clauses which seem to be names of such objects; nounand noun-phrases which can be eliminated from these languages. 4. Kotarbin-ski argues against purely intentional (in the sense of purely imaginary) generalobjects. The assumption of the existence of such kinds of general objects isbased, he argues, especially on the following two mistakes: The first one con-sists in the belief that such objects are thinkable. This kind of mistake arises,again, because of the misleading character of some of the linguistic expres-

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sions just described. Moreover, even aside from this linguistic misdirection,it is possible to think of only a finite number of particular objects with regardto which we can abstract a general object, whereas there are infinitely manyobjects which instantiate the general object, as in the case of infinitely manyred objects. The second basic mistake in presupposing pure intentional objectsconsists, holds Kotarbinski, in that it is assumed that when something has been´thought, then it exists. Similarly to the first kind of mistake, this assumptionis also deeply rooted in the misunderstanding of the linguistic expressions ofintentional mental acts such as ‘I think of an object O’, where O stands some-times for apparent names.

This is not a complete list of what Kotarbinski took into account in his cri-´tique of general objects. However, two things included in his paper and in whatwe have said about his argumentations stand out. First, it is sufficiently clearthat Kotarbinski refers to arguments, notions and principles used and discussedéarlier in the Brentanian Tradition, including Twardowski and his psychologystudents, especially when he considers inconsistent and thought objects, thepresentation and imagination of general objects, intentionality, the principle ofthe independence of being from being-so, and so on. Secondly, the analysisprovided by Kotarbinski links those arguments with linguistic analysis, suchás the analysis of apparent names, a conception used later in his semanticalreism. In this respect, having in mind the subsequent sections of this study,it is very interesting to see how, for example, the principle of the primacy ofintentionality (with regard to language) is replaced in Kotarbinski’s view by´the primacy of language in its function of communication:

‘I present myself an object’ means as much as ‘I understand a name’ and vice versa—nothing more. I can then also say that ‘I have a thought in mind’ (if I only do notput too much into this statement). However, I do not have to stand in any intentionalrelation to the object. (Kotarbinski 1921 [1993, p. 111]—my translation)´

2.4 Stanisław Lesniewski (III): Constructive Nominalism´Lesniewski remained a consequent nominalist not only in the ontology of the ‘world’´but also in the ontology of ‘language.’ (Wolenski 1985, p. 141—my translation)´

Since languages constitute a proper part of the world they too should be in-terpreted in a nominalistic manner. Thus, for Lesniewski, a linguistic expres-´sion, as well as its all parts, consist of concrete entities such as inscriptions orsounds. A finite sequence of inscriptions (and, respectively, sounds) constitutean expression. Two different sequences of inscriptions (sounds) are two differ-ent expressions. This is true not only of expressions which consist of differentsounds or inscriptions, but also to expressions of different shapes such as ‘Therose is red’, ‘The Rose Is Red’, and ‘THE ROSE IS RED’, which sometimescannot be distinguished on the level of sounds, and which are usually takenas ‘the same’ expression. Moreover, according to Lesniewski, the expression´‘The rose is red’ printed on this line is different from the expression of the same


shape printed above. Similarly, two sequences of sounds spoken by the sameperson and in the same manner on two different occasions (two utterances) aretwo different linguistic expressions. Along the lines of his theory, sequencesof linguistic sounds made by a tape player or by some sources would also bedifferent expressions. (The arrangement of bipolar particles on the magnetictape, which Lesniewski could not even consider would in his theory be partic-úlar durable expressions, just as arrangements of ink-dots printed on paper areexpressions.)

Language, thus, consists of concrete inscriptions or utterances (or even othernoises) which have to be written or uttered (or recorded in some way). Thenumber of linguistic expressions in a language depends upon how many in-scriptions can be written down or utterances can be made. There are no, so-to-speak, potential expressions in languages in the sense that they have not beenwritten down or uttered. A new inscription or utterance can be constructed byusing the directives or rules of a given language. The latter are rules whichare used for deriving new inscriptions from existent inscriptions. Hence, ifLesniewski speaks about a sentence, the term ‘sentence’ means an inscriptionín the sense given above and is neither something which exists potentially nor(even worse) something which exists somewhere other (like in the domain ofBolzano’s sentences in themselves) than in that part of our real world whichalso consists of utterances and inscriptions. This is why Lesniewski’s view on´language is often called ‘constructive nominalism’ or ‘inscriptional syntax.’16

In his early papers Lesniewski assumed also types of expressions, in addi-´tion to tokens. An expression-type is formed by all sequences of inscriptionsof the same shape (or, respectively, all utterances of the same sounds.) Both ofthem, sequences of inscriptions and sequences of sounds, are physical objects.As regards judgments in the psychological sense, Lesniewski never changed´his view that they are concrete and different from each other, a view held byhim even before he had taken a clear nominalistic position in ontology andwhich is in conformity with the views of the Brentanians. If bearers of truthare entities such as judgments or inscriptions-sentences or utterances, then theyall should be considered clearly as concrete and particular mental or physicalentities.

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3. Summary of Chapter 8One of the distinguishing features of the Brentanian Tradition was interest inontological investigations. Its representatives especially liked to consider prob-lems concerning such things as states of affairs and other objects of higherorder, among which abstract and general objects may also be found. Ontolog-ical arguments were required to introduce a kind of entity into the frameworkof concepts used in any of the philosophical disciplines of this tradition, in-cluding logical and linguistic investigations. The ontological commitment wasnot an outcome of a choice of a given formalized, meaningful language, but,rather, it was a result of ontological discussion and argumentation. In the Lvov-Warsaw School, on the other hand, nominalistic preferences were widespreadand explicit. In this movement, Lesniewski and Kotarbi´ nski were the first toáct as strong nominalists, arguing against any kind of ideal, abstract, or gen-eral objects. The nominalistic attitude of the latter culminates in reism andconcretism. Therefore, Polish philosophers inspired by the same Brentanianproblems, chose a solution completely different from the rich ‘pure Austrian’ontologies, such as those formulated by Meinong and Reinach. The objectsserving as truth bearers, as well as every other kind of objects, were thus givena nominalistic account. Lesniewski’s nominalism, for example, led him to theáccount of language as a constructive and expanding system of physical ob-jects. This must also imply that linguistic bearers of truth are concrete physicalobjects. Generally speaking, the ontologism represented by the Lvov-WarsawSchool restricted the domain over which the entities that could serve as truthbearers range to objects which could satisfy the nominalistic preferences of itsmembers.

Notes1 Morscher 1986. It ought to be mentioned that ‘continental philosophy’ refers here not only that part of

philosophy on the continent which is usually associated with this term in the English speaking world,i.e. with French and German philosophy and philosophers, but also, for example, to Austrian, Polish,and other streams of philosophying which are attributed to European countries.

2 Philosophers such as Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, Marty, and Twardowski who are underconsideration in this study undoubtedly belong to the tradition which is called ‘Austrian Philosophy.’However, as has already mentioned in one of the previous notes, since the concept ‘Austrian Philosophy’is encumbered with a certain vagueness (see Haller 1979, Nyiri (ed.) 1981, Nyiri (ed.) 1986, and Smith1994) I prefer the term ‘Brentanian Tradition’, which points directly to the elements of Franz Brentano’sphilosophy and covers almost all the investigations of the above authors. I prefer this other term becausea part of Austrian Philosophy includes, for example, the Vienna Circle which, as I pointed out at thebeginning, in my opinion had much less influence on Polish philosophers before the twenties or thirtiesof twentieth century than is commonly believed.

3 See Smith 1994, Albertazzi et all (ed.) 1996.4 Concerning the Austrians see Morscher 1986, Simons 1982, Smith 1987a, and Smith 1988a.5 See chapter 6 above.6 See chapter 5 above.7 Simons 1993.8 Simons 1993, p. 225.9 Wolenski 1987a, 1990a.´


10 See Rojszczak 1994, 1998/1999.11 Lesniewski 1913a.´12 Lesniewski 1913a, pp. 318–319.´13 Lesniewski 1927.´14 Kotarbinski 1921.´15 Kotarbinski clearly does not acknowledge in his argument the Leibnizian definition of identity in which´

two objects are identical when they have the same properties.16 See to this: Wolenski 1985, 1987a, 1988 and Simons 1993. It should be mentioned that the Le´ sniewski’s´

nominalistic preferences were of special importance for his logical systems, especially in his formulationof classes. As regards nominalism in relation to Lesniewski’s logical systems see Le´ sniewski 1927,´1928, 1929, Küng 1963, Simons 1992a, 1993, and Wolenski 1985, 1988.´

Chapter 9

BRENTANISM AND THE BACKGROUNDOF THE SEMANTICSOF THE LVOV-WARSAW SCHOOL

In this part of my study I am going to track the ideas of the Lvov-WarsawSchool which are unanimously considered to be purely semantic, but whoseroots, I think, may clearly be found in the tradition of Brentano’s philosophy.It does not directly present investigations on truth bearers, which are the topicof the next chapter; instead, it presents steps in the philosophical developmentof the Lvov-Warsaw School that are of greatest importance for Tarski’s laterchoice of the truth bearers.

1. Stanisław Lesniewski (IV): On the Sense of Inscription´1.1 Ontologism as the Primacy of Semantics

Steeped in the influence of John Stuart Mill in which I mainly grew up, and ‘condi-tioned’ by the problems of ‘universal-grammar’ and of logico-semantics in the style ofEdmund Husserl and by the exponents of the so-called Austrian School, I ineffectu-ally attacked the foundations of ‘logistic’ from this point of view. (. . .) The decidedlyskeptical dominant note of the position I occupied for a number of years in relation to‘symbolic logic’, stemmed from the fact that I was not able to become conscious ofthe real ‘sense’ of the axioms and theorems of that theory,—‘of what’ and ‘what’, re-spectively, it was desired to ‘assert’ by means of the axioms and theorems. (Lesniewski´1927 [1992, pp. 181–182])

This passage from Lesniewski’s 1927 paper ‘O podstawach matematyki’´[On the Foundations of Mathematics], most important for its contribution tothe history of philosophy, the author presents a forceful example of how deepsemantic ideas were of interests in the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School.Above all, in this paper Lesniewski gives us several pieces of informationábout his philosophical development, and especially about the motives of thedevelopment of his systems of mereology, ontology, and protothetic. It isa commonly known fact that one of the motives were difficulties in readingthe Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead. The whole first chap-

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ter of Lesniewski’s paper focuses on his doubts about the semantics of this´milestone work. The ambiguities of the terms and the vagueness of the no-tions contained in this work, which overturned a great part of philosophy inthe twentieth century, lead Lesniewski to a years-long study of mathematical´logic. His difficulties led him to concentrate on the meanings of the symbolof assertion, logical connectives, and the well-formed formulas of the systemof Principia Mathematica. As Lesniewski himself states, the symbol of asser-´tion itself as used in Principia took four years of study, which can be taken assomewhat caustic remark and is commonly interpreted as an expression of Les-niewski’s perfectionism.1 In any case, difficulties and suspicions concerningthe semantic interpretation of the logical system of Russell and Whitehead in-duced him to state explicitly that semantics should present the most importantpart of contemporary logic at the time. These suspicions were, as Lesniewski´himself acknowledges, due to his Brentanian heritage.

Thus, taking into account the notion of ontologism as described in the pre-vious chapter, one can also speak about another type of ontologism with regardto language. It is not only that language, depicted as a set of physical objects(inscriptions and utterances) which changes in the course of time, was an out-come of ontological discussions and nominalistic preferences announced in theBrentanian framework. From the ontological point of view it is not only impor-tant what language consists of, but also what language is about. The ‘ontologyof language’ does not even sound very strong when compared to the ontologyof judgment. Language, however, consists inter alia of expressions of judg-ments. Thus, we can formulate a thesis of ontologism with regard to language:every language, including formalized languages such as the languages of logicor mathematics, are languages about something, about objects. In other words,there are no objectless languages. This thesis is one of the most importantpresuppositions of the Lvov-Warsaw School.

It follows from several statements of Tarski, the founder of modern logical semantics,that the very first semantic ideas were clear formulated by Lesniewski. And there isńothing surprising here. Everyone who believes that language of formal system is a de-scription of the world must consider the matter of semantic problems; and this is thecase of Lesniewski. (Wole´ nski 1985, pp. 139–140—my translation)´

I just called the thesis of the non-existence of objectless languages the the-sis of the ontologism with respect to language. This is because it could bealso formulated as the thesis that every interest in language should be con-nected (or even cannot be considered as not connected) with a clear ontologyof this language, an ontology which is given in a semantic interpretation. Ifit is true that this thesis was commonly taken for granted in the Lvov-WarsawSchool, there is no other way of explaining it, I believe, that through a tra-dition which goes back to Brentano, a tradition suggested by me throughoutthis study. The ontology of language is indispensable in the same sense inwhich the ontology of judgment was indispensable for Husserl or Marty. Once

Brentanism and the Background of the Lvov-Warsaw School 173

thoughts were connected with language in the work of Twardowski and Łu-kasiewicz, language—as it was in the case of mental acts—cannot loose itsconnection to the world. In a very rough formulation, the thesis that languageis always about something seems to be obvious when one considers languageas an expression of thinking or as a medium for the communication of thinking,i.e. an expression or medium of something of which the thesis of intentionalityis valid. It is true even in the case of formal languages, since any formal lan-guage is only an improvement of the natural way of speaking, a thesis-refrainamong Brentanians. In another formulation, the problem of the ontology oflanguage has its counterpart in the problem of the inheritance of intentionalityby linguistic entities. The view that linguistic entities which are expressionsof intentional acts must preserve the relations in which the latter stand wascausally explained inter alia by Twardowski in his theory of acts and products.In order to make a move from a theory of the intentionality of linguistic entitiesto semantics, or even to free semantics from intentional idioms, an explanationof how language functions and what it is about is needed.

It is worth noting that the thesis of ontologism with regard to language inthe Lvov-Warsaw School is not as different from the first thesis of ontologismstated in the previous chapter as might appear at first glance. Ontologism,which relies on the ontological argumentation for the introduction of an entityinto the philosophical framework (the latter thesis), is transformed into seman-tics (the former thesis) when one recognizes that language is the tool of anydiscussion. This is because language can picture or represent both thoughtsand the world. The only task left is to formalize ordinary language in a waywhich would enable both functions.

1.2 Language and Metalanguage

One of the most famous semantic ideas originally invented by the Lvov-WarsawSchool, whose fame is due to Tarski’s semantic conception of truth, is the dis-tinction between language and metalanguage. Almost to the same extent asthe idea itself, it is known that this distinction was first introduced by Les-niewski. Wolenski sees the distinction between language and metalanguageás an outcome of Lesniewski’s reading of the Russell-Whitehead´ PrincipiaMathematica.2 I think, however, that the idea of metalanguage is already presentin the 1913 paper ‘Krytyka logicznej zasady wyłaczonego srodka’ [A Critiqueóf the Logical Principle of the Excluded Middle].3 Since the paper was pub-lished before Lesniewski’s study of Russell’s and Whitehead’s work, which´took place around 1914, one may assume that this distinction was not inspiredby their work. I shall give some reasons for believing that it is rather theBrentanian context for some logical problems that induced Lesniewski to con-´sider such a distinction.4

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In the aforementioned paper Lesniewski focuses on the definition of logicás a part of science. The task of the latter in Lesniewski’s view is to sepa-´rate true and false sentences.5 It seems that he refers thereby to the view onlogic depicted as a part of the general theory of knowledge as known from theBrentanians and Bolzano. Yet the main problem which can arise here for Les-niewski is not whether logic is or is not a part of a theory of knowledge. Theproblem consists in some misinterpretation of the formulation of the task oflogic as stated in the definition, i.e. in what exactly is meant in such a defin-ition by the separation of true and false sentences? For one can consider thataccording to this definition almost every scientific problem is nothing otherthan a problem of logic. If one asks ‘Is it true that all bodies are heavy?’ oneseems to ask a clearly logical question, since one is asking about the truth ofthis statement. In analogy to this example, every kind of question asked byscientists would be a logical question.

For Lesniewski that kind of argumentation is wrong. The question about the´truth of a thesis is indeed a logical question. The problem of truth and falsityof a thesis is, according to him, a logical problem. The sentence ‘The thesisthat all bodies are heavy is true’ or the sentence ‘The thesis that all bodiesare heavy is false’ are logical sentences. Both are possible answers as to thequestion asked above. However, they should be distinguished from sentenceslike ‘All bodies are heavy’ and ‘All bodies are not heavy.’ These sentences arenot sentences of logic: they belong to science, in this case to physics. They areboth possible answers as to the physical problem ‘Are all bodies heavy?’ Thedifference between these sentences and the logical sentences above is that thetwo groups of sentences refer to different objects. The physical sentences referto bodies, whereas the logical sentences refer to theses. Moreover, the thesesto which the logical sentences refer to are, in this case, the physical sentencesabout bodies.

A logical sentence, therefore, is not every sentence in which the term ‘true’appears—as one might think looking at the definition of logic as a part ofscience—but only those sentences which are about another sentence or sen-tences. In fact, a logical sentence is one which states about another sentence(or sentences) whether it is (or they are) true or false. For every true sentenceA, continues Lesniewski, there is a logical sentence ‘The sentence´ A is true.’And, respectively, for every false sentence B there is a logical sentence ‘Thesentence B is false.’ As regards the latter, if it is true, there is another logicalsentence ‘The sentence «The sentence A is false» is true.’ Now, it is quite clear,I believe, that already in the year 1913 Lesniewski treated the words ‘true’ and´‘false’ as metalinguistic predicates predicated of sentences; this idea clearlycomes to light in Tarski’s 1933 paper.

Lesniewski’s study includes a remark that could be seen as a generalizationóf the difference between object-linguistic and meta-linguistic signs. In the


fourth remark to the third section of his paper Lesniewski defines the symbolic´function of an expression in the following way:

DSA The connoting expression ‘W ’ represents [symbolizes] any object pos-sessing the properties connoted by the expression ‘W ’—with the ex-ception of the expression ‘W ’ itself together with those expressionswhich have at least one element in common with the expression ‘W .’(Lesniewski 1913a [1992, p. 64])´

Thus, the expression ‘English expression’ printed on this line represents allEnglish expressions with the exception of the one written above and with theexception of every English expression which contains the above expression asits part. An example of the latter is the former sentence printed on this page(i.e. ‘Thus, the expression ‘English expression’ printed on this line representsall English expressions with the exception of the one written above and withthe exception of every English expression which contains the above expressionas its part.’), as well as the expression ‘the above English expression «Englishexpression».’ As we would say nowadays, the expression ‘English expression’refers to all English expressions except expressions in metalanguage (and lan-guages of higher order) in which this expression occurs. It cannot be selfre-ferring. The definition DSA can serve as an early version of the distinctionbetween inscriptions in language and metalanguage. For Lesniewski the defi-ńition DSA served to solve paradoxes. The paradoxes solved with the help ofDSA include, among other things, Meinong’s paradox of contradictory objectsand the paradox of Epimenides, known better as the liar paradox, the samewith which Tarski began his study on the definition of truth.6

Remark. Lesniewski expresses also an important aspect of the idea of im-´proving ordinary languages by introducing such distinctions as language andmetalanguage. The decision to make a definition in such and such a wayhas, according to Lesniewski, a conventional character. The goal of con-´ventional definitions is to eliminate inconsistencies included in everyday lan-guages. Thus, the task of the improving natural languages with the help ofconventional definitions is not a goal in itself but helps us in the eliminationof paradoxes to which ordinary language can or will otherwise lead us in ouranalysis.

In this case the ‘scientific’ language can eliminate various contradictions by the wayin which it departs from some schemes of ‘everyday’ language; its value depends ex-actly upon its ability to achieve such eliminations. (Lesniewski 1913a, p. 349—my´translation)7

The idea of improving natural languages rather than the ambitious task ofcreating new artificial languages clearly goes back to Twardowski and othersBrentanians.

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1.3 Existential Sentences

I have tried to show (1) that the reformulated thesis of ontologism is valid as faras Lesniewski’s philosophical views are concerned, and (2) that Le´ sniewski’s´distinction between language and metalanguage, commonly seen as importantfor Tarski’s semantic definition of truth, arose very early and independently ofthe Principia Mathematica. The Brentanian contexts in which Lesniewski’sínvestigations took place, including that of the definition of logic, shows thatthe influences came from a direction other than that of Russell-Frege.8 Les-niewski’s paper on the principle of the excluded middle also deals with otherproblems which undoubtedly are rooted in the tradition which goes back toBrentano: the problem of general objects already discussed above, the problemof inconsistent objects,9 the problem of sentences about non-existent objects,10

the problem of negative sentences,11 and existential sentences. All of this to-gether provides sufficient evidence that at least some of Lesniewski’s ideas´which are of importance for the future history of the Lvov-Warsaw Schooland, especially, for the future history of semantics reside in Brentanian tradi-tion rather than in another.

The issue of existential sentences was also considered by Lesniewski in hiséarliest paper from 1911. This article too shows a very clearly Brentanian in-clination and contexts in which Lesniewski’s philosophical investigations took´place. Above all, it shows distinctively the influences of Anton Marty and Ed-mund Husserl on Lesniewski’s thought. Moreover, the 1911 paper refers toánd discusses directly Brentano’s thesis of the primacy of existential sentencesas a representation of existential theory of judgment.

For the purposes of his analysis of existential sentences in 1911, Lesniewskiássumes a theory of the symbolic (presentational) function of language. Thesymbolic (presentational) function of language consists in the fact that linguis-tic expressions symbolize objects. It is to be noted that at this time, whenLesniewski also believed in the existence of objects that are not concrete, lin-´guistic expressions could also symbolize contents. The symbolic (presenta-tional) function of a simple expression is, in Lesniewski’s view, the function of´reference (Bedeutung in Frege’s sense). The symbolic function of complex ex-pressions such as sentences depends upon the presentational function of theircomponents, i.e. upon the functions of the words that occur in the sentence(the principle of compositionality). By ‘sentence’ Lesniewski understands ei-´ther utterance or inscription. The symbolizing (presenting) expressions can,however, be inadequate. According to Lesniewski, existential sentences be-´long to such a class of inadequately symbolizing expressions. They symbolize(present) contents. Yet the contents to which they refer, in order to be adequate,should not be understand as existential. Lesniewski proposes a translation´which goes exactly opposite to Brentano’s way of translation all of the formsof sentences into an existential form. Hence, for Lesniewski, also a sentence´


of the form ‘The object A exists’ should rather be read in a non-existential waysuch as ‘Some beings are objects A.’12 This is because for Lesniewski, who in´this respect follows J.S. Mill, a sentence in every case symbolizes (presents)the possession of a property by an object rather than its existence; the objectis symbolized by the subject of the underlying sentence and the property is theconnotation of the predicate appearing in this sentence. When this possessionof a property by an object is not the intention of the speaker the symbolizing(presentation) is not adequate.13

The semiotic analysis of the adequacy or inadequacy of certain propositions[sentences—AR] in relation to the contents which they represent is then ultimatelybased on a phenomenological analysis of speaker’s representational intentions.(Lesniewski 1913a [1992, p. 17])´ 14

According to Lesniewski, in the case of negative existential sentences we are´faced with a certain important inconsistency. The predicates in such sentencesconnote (once again Mill’s terminology) the property of non-existence and,hence, they are synonymous with ‘non-being’ and ‘non-beings’ (the latter isa plural noun). Now, let us assume that the definition of the object symbol-ized by the subject of a negative existential sentence is as follows: ‘the beingthat has properties A, B, C etc.’ Since the predicate which appears in a nega-tive existential sentence connotes the property of ‘non-being’, it is inconsistentwith the object as symbolized by the subject of this sentence. Therefore, thesentences ‘The round square does not exist’ and ‘Paris-which-is-in-China doesnot exist’ are, in Lesniewski’s view, inconsistent, and as such they cannot be´true. This is the case even though the categorical form of the latter sentence,i.e. ‘Paris is not in China’, is true. In the light of this, claims Lesniewski,´Brentano’s thesis about the reducibility of every categorial sentence to an ex-istential one must be false.15

Using the notion of the presentational function of language Lesniewski for-´mulates general semantic conditions for truth of sentences. First, a true sen-tence has to have a subject which presents something. This statement is equiv-alent to the statement that every sentence whose subject does not refer to(‘presents’ or ‘symbolizes’ in Lesniewski’s language) an object is false. Sec-óndly, a true sentence always has a connotative predicate. This is equivalent tothe statement that every sentence whose predicate is not connotative is false.16

2. Maria Ossowska (I): Expressing and SemanticsThe second part of twenties of twentieth century introduces into Polish philo-sophical literature a number of papers which belong to semantics in the currentsense of the term. Wolenski, for example, would prefer to speak about the pe-´riod prior to Tarski’s works on semantics as a period of the philosophy of lan-guage or of the theory of meaning rather than about a period of pre-semanticinvestigations.17 However, as he also underlines, the term ‘semantics’ was un-

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derstood in the Lvov-Warsaw School in a rather broad sense. In fact, the term‘semantics’ replaced ‘semasiology’, the term introduced by Marty and alsofrequently used by Poles. As Maria Ossowska’s 1926 paper shows, the investi-gations treated at this time as semantic, would today rather be called semiotic:

Even if the word ‘semantics’ acquired its citizenship not long ago and even if it is notused in a great number of circles, it was able to be encumbered by so many ambiguitiesthat if one uses it, one is obliged to use it with care. Despite the way in which oneapprehends this word, everyone who becomes acquainted with this word will agreethat by semantic problems we mean such problems as: what is the meaning of words?;what is naming?; what is the expressing of thought in the words? (Ossowska 1928a,p. 392—my translation)

The last of the aforementioned fields, that of semantics, seems especially to beof importance when considered together with the problem of how sentences,instead of judgments, took the role of the bearers of truth. The features of a signin relation to language represent the object of Maria Ossowska’s investigations.

2.1 The Notion of ExpressionFirst of all, Ossowska tries to categorize the ways in which the words ‘expres-sion’ and ’expressing’ are used. The starting point of her investigation includesthe following formulation:(1) A sentence S expresses a thought T in the language L.Thus, the first point which distinguishes Ossowska from most Brentanians isthat not every linguistic expression but only the sentence is the primary mean-ingful linguistic entity. The reason for this is simple: what is expressed ina sentence (which is an expression) is a thought. The latter, according toOssowska, is an experience that is either a belief, a supposition, or the pre-sentation of a judgment.18 Yet thoughts are the primary complex experiencesof which true or false are predicated.

It is also the case, continues Ossowska, that the function of expressingshould be, above all, distinguished from the descriptive or presentational func-tion of a linguistic sign.

. . . such a property of presenting is the same property which Russell and others call thetransparency of a linguistic sign, and which should consist in the fact that an uttered ora written (. . .) linguistic phrase redirects our thought to something else: with its helpof mediation one thinks about something different. . . (Ossowska 1931, p. 204—mytranslation)

Now, the ambiguity of the sentence (A) is effected by four different concep-tions of expressing a thought by a linguistic sign.

The first version of the meaning of ‘expressing of a thought’ is that the sen-tence pictures a thought. ‘Picturing’, however, can be also understood in dif-ferent ways. First it can mean the structural similarity of the parts of a sentence(i.e. of the parts of an utterance or an inscription) with the parts of presentedsentences (of the presented parts of an utterance or of an inscription). This


conception of the picture theory of expressing thought, however, supposes verystrong assumptions. One of them is the (literal) assumption of thinking in thewords in which ‘thinking in the words’ means as much as ‘presenting wordsor sounds.’ Despite this assumption Ossowska draws attention to homonymsand indexicals which create difficulties in this conception. Secondly, however,the picturing of thought in the sentence can have another sense. It can be un-derstood as the identity between the content of the expressing sentence and theexpressed thought. The main problem here, as pointed out by Ossowska, isthat the picturing takes place in different kinds of ethnic languages. Sentenceson language L1 could then picture thoughts which would consist of the pre-sentation of words in another language L2. Thirdly, one might like to combinethe above two senses of picturing into one type of picture theory of sentencesin which a sentence and a thought are characterized by structural similarity andidentity of content.19 According to Ossowska the picture-theoretical interpre-tation of a sentence A poses an impersonal (non-subjectivistic) and atemporalversion of this sentence. This is because, according to this theory, the sentence‘A is B’ expresses not only the thought of a subject who has uttered or writtenthe sentence, but it also expresses every experienced thought that A is B atevery point of time and experienced by anybody. Since the picture theory ofexpression refers to the relation between the content of the sentence and thecontent of the judgment, it is proper to say that it is a theory of meaning.20

She thus differentiates between the theory of meaning and the theory of speechacts. The main difference is that the latter is always related to a given mo-ment and to a given person under given circumstances. Both, however, can beunderstood as a theory of expressing.

The second interpretation of the sentence (A) advocates that the sentence Sor, more precisely, the perception of the sentence S, suggests a thought tosomeone who is a competent user of the language of which the sentence A isa part. ‘To express a thought’ means here ‘to have the property of suggesting(of evoking) a thought.’ Therefore, the function of expressing is the propertyof an utterance or an inscription. According to Ossowska, a sentence suchas ‘The sentence expresses the thought that A is B’ can be replaced by thefollowing sentence: ‘The sentence means that A is B.’ This is because thefunction of expressing can be replaced here by the function of presentation,where the evoked thought is the psychological meaning of this sentence. Thisreplacement presents a trick in which this interpretation of the sentence (A)can become impersonal and atemporal.21

The third conception of the notion of expression takes the function of ex-pressing as the property of the manifestation or betrayal of a thought. Thesentence (A) is in need of a restriction. The thought which is manifested bya sentence is the thought of a speaker or of a writer. This version of the notionof expression has the following quite complicated formulation:

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DA The sentence S expresses the thought T in the language L if:

(1) S is uttered or written by the person X , and

(2) the utterance or writing of the sentence S by X is made not earlierthan the thought T , and

(3) S is of the same form as the sentences which under normal situa-tions are uttered or written in L when one wants to inform someoneelse about T .22

From this we can conclude that, in opposition to both of the interpretations de-scribed above, the third interpretation of (A) relates the function of expressingto the subject, i.e. it is ‘personal.’ Moreover, it is related to a given temporalrelation between the thought and the uttered or written sentence. The temporalrelation replaces the requirement of causal connection between the thought andits expression as known from Twardowski’s theory of acts and products appliedto sentences. The third condition of (DA) gives us an interesting piece of infor-mation. According to this condition the sentence S and the experience T areempirically related to each other. As we would say today, it requires a com-petent user of the language L. In order to be a competent user of a language,empirically observed situations in which other competent users utter and writesentences are required.23

Finally, according to Ossowska, the fourth interpretation of the sentence Asupposes looking at a thought expressed not only as the thought of somespeaker, but also as if the thought was such that, in accordance with linguis-tic usage, a linguistic expression is equivalent to it. This is a theory of sen-tences and thoughts as counterparts. The counterpart-relation consists in anempirical relation between an experience of a thought T and the utterance ofa sentence S. It can also be understood in the sense of picturing, i.e. in thesense in which the relation is understood in the first interpretation of sentenceA described above. It is, however, obvious that not every counterpart-relationcould be picturing in the given sense. It should be added that most Brentaniansembraced more or less this conception of expression, explaining thereby theproblem of how linguistic entities inherit the intentional relation to an objectin which thought is expressed.24

2.2 The Presentational Function of the Sentence andthe Expressing Function of the Sentence

Ossowska, however, chooses the third of the above interpretations of the sen-tence (A) as the proper understanding of the word ‘expression’ and of thephrase ‘the expression of thought.’ It is in the sense in which, according toDA, the expression is a manifestation (betrayal) of thought. And in this sense,she claims, the notion of expression should be used in semantics. Therefore,Ossowska’s proposal to narrow the sense in which we speak about express-


ing and expressions is very close to the notion of Anzeichen as described byHusserl in its function of communication. However, as Ossowska also claims,we should make an additional assumption: that the sentence S which manifestsa thought should not refer directly to the thought of which it is the expression.‘I think that this rose is red’ is here an expression of my thought that the rose isred but not of the fact that the rose is red. It means that on Ossowska’s account,if the sentence S expresses a thought T , then it should not present us the samethought T . In other words, sentences that are nowadays called intentional orpsychological should be distinguished from sentences which are transparent.25

This should prevent us from confusing the two functions of sentences: that ofexpressing and that of presenting. Thus, the notion of expression of a sentenceas interpreted by DA should be formulated as follows:

DA’ A sentence S manifests a thought T in the sense of DA and the sentenceS does not present the thought T .

Hence, Ossowska distinguishes strongly between expressing and presenting.‘The function of presenting’ is a psychological term. It stands for both the psy-chological function of designation or naming as well as for the psychologicalmeaning (like the content of thought). By means of this condition Ossowskawants to exclude from DA’ cases in which what is expressed would be the sameas what is named or is referred to in a sentence.

Only in this somehow most ordinary sense does the phrase ‘The sentence S expressesthe thought T ’ speak about a new function of sentences which would complete thosealready distinguished and whose consideration would be necessary in order to explainthe mechanism of language. (Ossowska 1931, p. 239—my translation)

2.3 Expressing and the Meaning-IntentionHowever, what is precisely that which is expressed by a sentence in the sensegiven by DA’? This is, above all, the mental acts which Husserl called ‘actsof meaning-bestowal intention’ [verleihende Intention]. In other words, usingOssowska’s language, a sentence expresses, above all, presented judgments, asit was understood by Twardowski. This is because the experience of presentingof a judgment constitutes a necessary condition for understanding a sentence.The last statement relies on several further assumptions made by Ossowska;some of them are the following: The first assumption is that there are, at least,three ways of seeing an uttered or written sentence. First, one can take a sen-tence as a purely physical object. Second, one can see a sentence as a man-ifestation of something else. The second assumption consists in the fact thatone can see a meaningful sentence, i.e. a sentence which expresses an act ofmeaning-giving intention, in either of its two functions: in its function of ex-pressing or in its function of presenting. Thirdly and lastly, one can see a sen-tence as a meaningful utterance or inscription behind which there is hidden an

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intention of meaning. This third assumption claims that one can see a linguis-tic sign in its function of presenting only if one assumes that this linguisticsign is intentional, i.e. one assumes that the linguistic sign is an expression ofa meaning-intention.

The assumption of a meaning-intention hidden in meaningful sentencesseems to be another of widely spread axioms in the Lvov-Warsaw School.Kotarbinski, for example, on some occasions defended the view that the func-´tion of expressing (which he understood in a way similar to that presented byOssowska and DA’ above) is the primary function of the sentence with regardto its presentational function:

To put it briefly, reference to the intention to communicate something, reference to thefact that a given phrase is adequately used to communicate something—for example, topredicate something by means of a given term—belongs to the essence of meaning. Thefact that a given content of an image associates with a given word does not in the leastprove that we want to communicate that content by means of that word. . . (Kotarbinski´1929 [1966, p. 93])

Kotarbinski also defines a statement or utterance (´ wypowied´dd ) as an expression´whose intention is to communicate something, where ‘something’ refers toa mental experience. A sentence is thus defined by him as a statement ofthought.26

Yet it is important to note that Ossowska argues against the primacy of thefunction of expressing in its relations to the other functions of language. Thisdoes not contradict what was already said above, since she proposes a solutionto the problem of ‘Is something meaningful because it expresses or it expressessomething because it is meaningful?’ as follows: She suggests that we shoulddistinguish two domains, one in which ‘true’ is the statement of the primacyof the meaning, the other in which ‘true’ is the statement of the primacy ofexpressing.

In the process of learning a language, says Ossowska, expressing is undoubt-edly primary. However, starting from the point where we master a languageto some extent, it seems that the opposite thesis is valid, i.e. the thesis of theprimacy of meaning.27 There are various arguments for this. I shall brieflymention three of them—the speech act argument, the argument from the inter-subjectivity and an empirical argument.

Let us take the case of hearing the utterance ‘It is raining.’ Firstly, uponhearing such an utterance, we understand that what is intended it is not thejudgment of the speaker that it is raining, but rather the fact that it is raining.What is presented by the utterance is primary with respect to what it expresses.Secondly, argues Ossowska, only the speaker in inner perception can decidewhether the sentence expresses his intention or not. Expressing is not intersub-jective. Thirdly, the argument claims that there are contexts in which speechtakes place without any intentional moments at all. Examples here are therecital of a rhyme or the locutions of two persons which take place one after


the other, but in which no true exchange of thought takes place between the per-sons, and no discussion in the normal sense of this word is expected.28 Thus,since the presentational function and the function of expressing can be sep-arated, Ossowska argues against every theory of meaning or reference basedon the notion of expression. Even if both of these functions appear togetherin the linguistic praxis, they should in fact be distinguished, especially for thepurposes of semantics.

Ossowska’s views, briefly sketched here, are clearly inspired not only byBrentanians but also, or perhaps even above all, by such philosophers as Rus-sell and Wittgenstein. Ossowska’s interests in the philosophy of logical pos-itivism and logical atomism are quite clear and remarkable, judging by herpapers. This, however, does not affect my claim that her investigations arerooted in the Brentanian contexts. In fact, as I urged at the beginning of thisstudy when speaking about the interconnections between Tarski and the Vi-enna Circle, Ossowska visited Vienna three years after the last paper of hersthat I consider here. By this time her philosophical work in Lvov, as well asthe framework she used for philosophical investigations, was under the stronginfluence of Twardowski (due to whom she later traveled to Vienna). Thus,even if the inspiration and vocabulary of Ossowska’s investigations until 1934come from Cambridge, the polemics in which she engaged took place withina framework determined by Brentanians.

In order to be historically correct, it is very important to emphasize that,unlike most of the papers referred to in this study, Ossowska’s were not veryinfluential. They represent a description of the consequences of the views heldin the Lvov-Warsaw School at the time but did not inspire further discussions.The same can be said about Maria Ossowska’s husband’s papers which aretopic of the next sections. However, the sketch of the situation in the firstdecades of twentieth century in Poland as regards semantic explanation of theinheritance of some of the properties of intentional relations by linguistic enti-ties seems to be very important from the point of view of the contexts investi-gated in this study. Ossowski’s papers are the best examples of it.

3. Stanisław Ossowski (I): On Semantic Products3.1 Semantic Products and the Function of ExpressingIn 1926 Stanisław Ossowski came back to the act/product distinction as madeby Twardowski fourteen years earlier. Ossowski defines semantic products asphysical objects correlated with one of the semantic functions. Semantic func-tions include, according to Ossowski, the function of designating (of namingor of referring), the function of picturing, and the function of meaning. It isimportant to note that the correlation between a physical object and its seman-tic function depends upon the intention of the ‘user’ of this object: ‘If an objectis a semantic product, it is one only for some person.’29 In other words, there

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must be a person P who has an attitude toward an object as a semantic prod-uct. Ossowski calls this attitude toward an object as a semantic product the‘semantic attitude’ and defines it as follows:

SA In order to say that a person P has a semantic attitude, the followingconditions must be fulfilled :

(1) if person P predicates something of an object x, then P does nothave a semantic attitude toward the object x,

(2) if P predicates something of an object x, then P has a semanticattitude toward another object O, and

(3) if P has a semantic attitude toward an object O, then P has this at-titude with regard to another relation which P establishes betweenthe object O and the other object.30

Thus, for example, in the case where John predicates of a rose that it is red, hecannot have a semantic attitude toward the rose. If he predicates redness of therose, then he can have a semantic attitude toward an entity, for instance to thesequence of sounds which he utters when predicating of the rose. Yet John’ssemantic attitude toward this sequence of sounds is semantic only when Johnmakes a connection between the sequence of sounds and the rose about whichhe predicates that it is red. Furthermore, in order to be in the semantic attitudetoward the sequence of sounds, John must not make the connection betweenthe sequence of sounds and the rose, though he can make a connection betweenthe rose and his mental act (or another object) which articulates the sequencesof sounds. (This is because of the third condition above, which refers to a con-nection between the object O and another object which can be any object beingin a relation to the object to which P has the semantic attitude.) From the pointof view of psychology, Ossowski continues, the semantic product redirects thethought of a person who understands this product to another object.31

Now, Ossowski claims that every system of semantic concepts is

a relative system, as everything in this domain, where the eventual criterion is alwayssomebody’s intention, is relative. (Ossowski 1926, p. 54—my translation)

This, I believe, justifies the translation of the Polish word ‘utwór’ by theEnglish word ‘product’ when speaking about semantic products in Ossowski’sview. In everyday language the Polish term means a work, a result, a composi-tion, a creation, etc. I think that Ossowski’s notion of a product is very similarto Twardowski’s notion of a durable (material in Ossowski’s case) psycho-physical product. However, a very important difference between these twonotions of product must be mentioned. Twardowski’s psycho-physical productdemands that the product be made with a meaning-giving intention (in fact,even be caused by the intentional act). Ossowski’s semantic product, on theother hand, will remain psycho-physical (in Twardowski’s sense) even if there


should be someone who has only a semantic attitude toward the product, in-dependently of the fact whether the product was made with a meaning-givingintention or not. One of the consequences of Ossowski’s view is that every-thing material can be a semantic product.32

Semantic products as described by Ossowski can still be seen, however, ina double way. Firstly, they can be treated with regard to the objects to whichthey refer in their semantic functions. Secondly, they can be treated as relatedto the mental acts of subjects who have a semantic attitude toward them. Whenseen according to the second possibility semantic products are treated in theirfunction of expressing. The function itself belongs, in Ossowski’s view, to theobjects of the psychology of speech acts. Here the function of expressing se-mantic products consists in the fact that semantic products direct the thoughtsof a subject to the objects to which the semantic products refer in their othersemantic functions. More precisely, the function of expressing consists in thefact that the material object to which we take the semantic attitude directs ourthought to the objects to which this semantic product refers (or means or pic-tures). Thus, if John, traveling on a train from Berlin to Kraków sees the sign‘stacja Rzepin’, if John understands Polish, and if he takes the semantic atti-tude toward this sign, then the function of expressing this sign leads John tothink about the rail station building on which the sign is located. This is be-cause the referent of this sign in Polish is a building in the town named Rzepin(according to the rules of Polish language and according to the habit that signspainted in this way are usually placed on rail stations buildings).33

3.2 Linguistic ProductsThe semantic attitude toward the above written text leads our thoughts to thenotion of language in Ossowski’s theory. For him language is a system ofconventional semantic products which by means of conventional rules createsa new complex of semantic products with a new independent function of theirown.34 The functions of complex products are new in the sense in which theirfunction is not included in the basic conventional rules which are possessed bysimple semantic products. The complex product ‘The rose is red’ has a seman-tic function that is different from those of ‘rose’ and ‘red.’ Its function is newwith respect to these single words. The conventional rule which enables us tocreate such complex semantic products is the rule according to which we cancreate sentences by the means of the copula ‘is’ in English. Yet not only rulesare conventional. The semantic product itself is also conventional in the sensethat its semantic function does not depend on its outer physical shape.

The class of conventional semantic products can generally be split into twocategories. The first category of semantic products includes symbols. Thelatter are understood by Ossowski as semantic products whose semantic func-tion consists in assigning these semantic products to objects. The assigning,

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however, is possible only with respect to someone’s intention. Ossowski callsthe objects to which semantic products are assigned ‘that which is assigned’or ‘designation.’ The semantic function of these conventional products is hereone of designating or naming. The second category of conventional seman-tic products consists of all products which mean something. Their semanticfunction is not that of designation but of meaning (in Frege’s sense).

The relation between the two categories of conventional semantic productsis quite interesting. On the one hand, when he says that ‘[the object] dependenton someone’s attitude can change one of its semantic function into another’,35

Ossowski claims that the function of a semantic product depends on a psy-chological attitude taken toward it. On the other hand, semantic productsof the second category, i.e. those with meanings, are always signs of speechacts. (In fact, Ossowski divided signs which are meaningful into those knownfrom Brentanian classes of sentences, nominal phrases and syncategorematicphrases.) Symbols, however, are not necessarily signs of speech. Thus, linguis-tic signs, i.e. the signs of speech acts, do not always have their designations.Moreover, a similar linguistic semantic product can have a designation on oneoccasion, and not have it on another, depending on how it functions, which,again, depends upon the semantic attitude of the subject. Thus, in intentionallymaking a meaningful sign from a symbol, we can lose, for example, its des-ignation. A simple example of this, I think, would be that of making a namefrom a sentence. Let us assume that we have the following symbol ‘The presentking of France is bald.’ This is a name which designates the sentence writtenin Bertrand Russell’s 1905 paper.36 We are able, however, to make this namea sentence which would be a meaningful sign of a speech act. The normal wayto do this is by omitting the quotation marks. But then the sentence designatesnothing, since at present there is no king of France. The quotation marks hereare clearly marks of a semantic function.

Now, linguistic products can occur as single signs or as complexes. Ossow-ski, as most of his colleagues in the Lvov-Warsaw School, accepts Frege’sprinciple of compositionality in that he accepts that the semantic function ofa complex depends on the semantic function of its parts. Ossowski calls sucha complex a semantic product of the second order. Semantic products of thefirst order consist of parts of semantic products of the second order. Thus, lan-guage is a system of semantic products in which it is possible to built semanticproducts of the second order. Sentences are, in Ossowski’s account, semanticproducts of the second order. This means that for him the basic semantic unitsare simple signs. However, only the ability to form sentences decides abouta system of semantic products as a language.


3.3 Truth and the Property of SentencesThe distinction between designating and meaning grows in importance whenOssowski considers the notion of truth. An expression is meaningful, claimsOssowski, under the following conditions: (1) an expression can be part of trueor false expressions, and (2) all parts of an expression have their normal seman-tic function in a given language.37 Logical sentences constitute a special classof meaningful expressions. They are special in that they do not need to oc-cur in another expression, for logical sentences are true or false in themselves.Logical sentences are semantic products which are independent with regard tomeaning. (An expression is independent iff it does not need any product ofa higher order in order to explain its semantic function.) This means that logi-cal sentences are basic units of meaning. What we have already said about thebasic semantic units implies that basic semantic units are different from basicmeaningful units. This fact does not need further explanation, for the functionof meaning is only one of the functions of semantic products. Yet not onlysentences, but also nominal expressions, are independent products. The latter,however, are independent not only with respect to the meaning but also withregard to the function of designating. This is because their semantic functioncan be explained by showing what they designate.

The two classes of independent semantic products distinguished by Ossow-ski cannot be reduced to one unique class. The attempt to unify those productsby putting them into one group is a mistake which was common to both Fregeand Meinong. Both held the view that sentences must be taken in their functionof designating.

For Meinong nominal expressions designate objects. Sentences, accordingto Meinong, designate objectives. According to Meinong, if a nominal expres-sion that occurs in its function of designation (Meinong’s function of meaningin Figure 1 above) communicates something about an object (Meinong’s func-tion of communication), then the sentence which communicates to us some-thing about the object must also designate the same object. Meinong iden-tifies the semantic function of sentences with the semantic function of nom-inal expressions. The assumption made by him was that a sign is an objectwhich communicates something about another object (about what is desig-nated). What Meinong calls ‘objectives’ is, Ossowski argues, assigned to thenominal expression of the form ‘that which. . .’ The latter, however, is not a log-ical sentence.

Frege assignes Truth and Falsity as the objects of sentences. According toOssowski’s view, even though we say about a sentence that it is a truth or true,this does not in the least prove that the sentence designates the Truth. Prop-erly understood, Ossowski holds that when we say ‘this is true’, then we meanthat a sentence has the property of being true. Thus, a relation of assignmentbetween A and B, such as Frege’s assignment of the sentence and Truth can-

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not be properly expressed in the sentence ‘A is B.’ Yet the opposite is thecase: if an expression designates the Truth, then one cannot infer from this thatthe expression is true. Ossowski claims that Frege confuses the function ofdesignation with the property of being true. Ossowski explains as follows:

When we want to assign that which should correspond to the concept of truth and wedo not want to use the mere name ‘truth’, we resort not to true sentences but to nominalexpressions such as, for example, ‘the truth-value which the sentence has is the negationof the false sentence.’ (Ossowski 1926, p. 40—my translation)

He adds that:He who states that the sentence designates, clearly understands the term ‘to designate’in a somehow different way. (. . .) Sentences have exclusively properties of truth andfalsity.

The properties of truth and falsity do not belong to our investigations. Neither thefact that an expression is true, nor the fact that it is false is a semantic property. Yetthe fact that an expression is either true or false is a semantic property. I used thisproperty in order to distinguish among linguistic products. (Ossowski 1926, p. 41—mytranslation)

With regard to Ossowski’s last statement, we would nowadays say that theontic property of being true is quite different from the semantic property ofa sentence as expressed in the principle of bivalence, i.e. that every sentence iseither true or false.

4. Summary of Chapter 9Ontologism, together with the principle of intentionality in that part of Aus-trian Philosophy which I have in mind when speaking about Brentanian tra-dition, led representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School to the view that everylanguage is meaningful. The belief that there are only interpreted languageswas one of the most widespread and accepted assumptions in the Polish philo-sophical school. Therefore, formal languages, which rapidly developed in thefirst decades of the twentieth century, were also understood here as interpretedlanguages.

As far as the bearer of truth is concerned, the most important ideas in thearea of semantics prior to the year 1933 include:

1. The view that formal languages are improvements of ordinary languagesand they are conventional and consistent models (interpreted systems) foreveryday languages. Interest in ordinary language and in the conventional-ity of linguistic signs are also characteristic of the Brentanian tradition.

2. The distinction between language and metalanguage formulated by Les-niewski. The distinction was rooted in the discussion of the view that thetask of logic was the demarcation of true and false sentences.

3. The connection between logic and truth. As we would say today, the se-mantic approach of logical systems presented a natural way for defining


logic and explaining the usage of the adjective ‘logical.’ Thus, for example,Ossowski’s logical sentences were logical because of their having propertyof truth or falsity.

4. The conception of truth as a semantic predicate which is predicated of sen-tences.

5. The conception of inheriting some of the properties of intentional relations,such as being about an object, in a way which breaks with causal theoriesof inheriting intentionality in the style of Twardowski. The clear distinc-tion between expressing and other semantic functions of language are deci-sive here. Furthermore, the proposal of narrowing the term ‘expression’ tothe manifestation (betrayal) of a concrete mental experience also enabledthe treatment of language without its relation to the sphere of the mental.Husserl’s Logical Investigations played an important role in this demarca-tion, made clearly on the part of the Lvov-Warsaw School and describedexplicitly by Maria Ossowska.

6. The conception of the meaning-intention as a basic notion in explaininglinguistic behavior. The meaning-intention, on the one hand, was identi-fied with the meanings-bestowing acts of the speaker (or of the writer) inHusserl’s sense. On the other hand, however, in Ossowski’s semiotics itwas narrowed to the semantic attitude of the receiver of a sign.

7. The notion of a semantic product which goes hand in hand with the notionof meaning-intention.

Even if not inspired directly only by Brentanians, all of these ideas were sit-uated within the Brentanian framework or drew upon discussions about notionswhich originated in this framework.

Notes1 Lesniewski 1927, p. 181.´2 Wolenski 1985, pp. 139–140.´3 Lesniewski 1913a.´4 As I have already mentioned, Lesniewski distances from his early views. However, as we have also seen,´

this does not mean, first, that all the views he held changed, or, secondly, that all his early argumentsloose their value. On the contrary, some results which he obtained during his philosophico-grammaticalperiod, as well as most of the arguments for these results, after some modifications, were still taken forgranted by Lesniewski (only the discussed thesis of non-existence of general objects is here to mention).´

5 Lesniewski 1913a, pp. 317, 321.´6 In fact, in order to solve the paradox, Lesniewski needed also another notion of the symbolic function´

of the subject of the sentence. I shall refer to this notion below.

7 It is interesting that precisely this passage is lacking in the English translation of the paper.8 I refer to the topics investigated by Lesniewski which are mentioned during this study and do not want´

to deny the later influence of the Principia Mathematica, the lack of understanding of which inspiredhim in developing his system of ontology. But even the latter facts confirm only the thesis of ontologismas valid for Lesniewski.´

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9 Lesniewski 1913a, p. 329.´10 Lesniewski 1913a, pp. 326–327.´11 Lesniewski 1913a, pp. 327–329.´12 Lesniewski 1911, p. 342.´13 Lesniewski 1911, p. 343, Le´ sniewski 1913a, p. 324.´14 It should be added that the translation provides a clear interpretation of Lesniewski in that it uses the´

term ‘semiotic’ instead of ‘semasiology’, which is used in the original version and which was introducedby Anton Marty. Similarly, the term ‘proposition’ used in translation is inadequate, since Lesniewskiúses the term ‘sentence’, which refers to utterances and inscription rather than to propositions. More-over, ‘representational intention’ is clearly a contemporary interpretation of ‘symbolizing intention’ ora ‘presented intention’ in the text of Lesniewski, terms which I would prefer in this context.´

15 Lesniewski 1911, pp. 340–341.´16 Lesniewski 1913a, pp. 325–327. For more information as to the issue of how the analysis of existential´

sentences could effect a development of systems in Lesniewski’s style see Simons 1992b.´

17 Wolenski 1985, p. 232.´18 Ossowska’s concept of thought (or thinking) is similar to the concept of thinking as described by

Meinong: see chapter 3 above.

19 Ossowska 1931, pp. 207, 210–212, 238–239.20 Ossowska 1928, p. 148.21 Ossowska 1931, pp. 207, 212–214.22 Compare with Ossowska 1928, p. 146.23 See Ossowska 1931, pp. 208, 214–235, 238–241. It is most important to note that the parts of Ossow-

ska’s paper which focus on the issue of expressing include reviews of the concepts of expressions whichare described by Meinong and Husserl and were presented above in chapter 4. In particular, Ossowskarefers to the theory of Husserl’s Anzeige, which she sees as a model of what she later assumed as theproper sense of the word ‘expressing’ and ‘expression.’

24 Ossowska 1931, pp. 208–209, 235–239.25 Ossowska refers here to the problem of secondary expressions as investigated by Meinong. See Ossow-

ska 1928, p. 147, Ossowska 1931, pp. 224, 227–228; Meinong 1902, pp. 16–35.

26 Kotarbinski 1929 [1966, p. 103.].´27 Ossowska 1931, pp. 233–234.28 Ossowska 1931, pp. 251–254.29 Ossowski 1926, p. 30.30 Compare Ossowski 1926, p. 31.31 It is worth noting that this kind of association between semantic products and thought is not a mere

association of imaginations with a semantic product, as it was usually understood in the psychologicalcombination theory of judgment. Moreover, according to Ossowski, the psychologically complicatedcharacter of the association can also be described in terms of psychological reactions. In fact, it wasKazimierz Ajdukiewicz who derived one of his basic classes of meaning-directives of language, i.e.empirical meaning-directives, from behaviorist explanations of association such as that described byOssowski. See Ajdukiewicz 1931, 1934.

32 An interesting and grotesque example of this was shown by Witold Gombrowicz in his novel Pornografia[Pornography], where everything is related to everything with the intention of the figures of the novel.

33 Ossowski 1926, pp. 31, 56.34 Ossowski 1926, p. 35.35 Ossowski 1926, p. 34—my translation.36 In order to make the relation a little bit more complicated we can refer to every sentence of a similar

form or to the class of such sentences—see also Ossowski when referring to Husserl’s notion of thespecies in Ossowski 1926, p. 32.

37 It is an interesting fact that an expression in quotation marks does not fulfill the second condition. Thus,the name of a meaningful expression is not itself meaningful. This is because the function of syllablesis not normal when the expression in which they occur is given in quotation marks.

Chapter 10

JUDGMENT, BELIEF, AND SENTENCES:REMARKS ON THE TRUTH BEARERIN THE LVOV-WARSAW SCHOOL

1. Kazimierz Twardowski (VI) andTadeusz Czezowski (I):˙The Product of the Judging Act

1.1 The Theory of Knowledgeand the Theory of Cognition

Twardowski’s anti-psychologistic turn found its expression in his 1912 paperabout acts and products, already mentioned above. Even though Twardow-ski did not change his views on the bearer of truth in that the judgment wasstill seen as the proper entity which serves as the truth bearer, after this anti-psychologistic turn he did, however, change his view on judgments as the ob-jects of the theory of knowledge. The mental function of the judging act thatserved as the bearer of truth in 1900 (in the paper ‘On So-Called RelativeTruths’) now no longer belongs to the domain of epistemological investiga-tions but exclusively and unambiguously to the domain of descriptive psychol-ogy. The main difference between the psychology of thinking and the theoryof knowledge consists in that the latter considers products of mental activitiesrather than mental functions. Mental functions remain under the considerationof psychology. Hence, Twardowski clearly separated the two domains, i.e. thetheory of cognition and the theory of knowledge. The separation became pos-sible because a thought, considered as the product of a function of thinking,might have counter-properties related to the properties of the function. Amongthose properties are those of being true or of being false. They are, accord-ing to Twardowski, counterparts of the properties of acts of thinking such as‘to be correct’ or ‘to be incorrect’, predicates investigated by Brentano and hispupils. Thus, more precisely, the theory of knowledge should be a theory of

191

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true products of judging acts or, as Twardowski also puts it, a theory of truthof products of judging activities.1

When using the words ‘truth’, ‘true’, or ‘truth-value’ in various kinds of phrases andwhen speaking about various types of truth, one sometimes uses these words univocallyand sometimes equivocally. Among the various meanings of these words one mightnote their primary epistemological meaning in that truth is a property of judgments,namely a property of those judgments which affirm what exists and reject what doesnot exist. (Twardowski 1922, p. 37b—my translation)

Moreover, according to Twardowski all parts and questions of the theoryof knowledge can be characterized according to the conditions for the truth ofproducts of judging acts. For example, the problem of the origins of knowl-edge can be conceived as a problem of the origins of true judgments, for theview on the nature of judgment decides about its truth. Similarly, the issue ofthe limits of our knowledge can be formulated in the question: which objectsare or can be the objects of true judgments? Moreover, both of these topics,that of the origin and that of the limits of knowledge are generalized in thequestion concerning the possibility of knowledge. ‘What is knowledge?’ canbe reformulate here as:

. . .what is truth due to which certain judgments are knowledge, i.e. [as] the problem ofthe essence of truth. This is the main issue. (Twardowski 1975, p. 250—my translation)

1.2 Elementary Judgments as Truth BearersA view similar to Twardowski’s was held by Tadeusz Czezowski, one of his˙students. In the latter’s book The Classical View on Judgment and Proof in theLight of Modern Logic of 1927, he gives an interpretation of classical calcu-lus and of first order logic as calculi of judgments. The terms of these logicalsystems are interpreted by Czezowski in the following manner: Propositional˙variables stand for judgments and the values of truth-functions are also judg-ments. Thus, the domain which is nowadays usually considered to be one ofpropositions is held by him to be a set of judgments. The judgment is under-stood here as the elementary propositional function of which extension is onlyone object.2 This is what Czezowski calls ’elementary judgment’ or ‘judgment˙about facts.’ Judgments are called here elementary because, according to thisinterpretation, they are on the one hand logical objects, while on the otherhand, since they are judgments about facts, they are elements of our knowl-edge. Thus, every judgment has its truth-value. Which one of the two truth-values it has depends upon the empirical fact to which the judgment refers. Theexplanation of the notion of truth belongs, therefore, to the theory of knowl-edge. Czezowski writes:˙

Contemporary Polish logicians use the term ‘sentence’ more often than the term ‘judg-ment’; the term ‘judgment’ seems to me more adequate with regard to the need to dif-ferentiate between a judgment and its symbol, a declarative sentence. At the same time,

Judgment, Belief, and Sentences: the Truth Bearer in the Lvov-Warsaw School 193

however, a judgment is different from the act of judging. (Czezowski 1927, p. 6—my˙translation)

This passage states clearly that, according to Czezowski, the elementary judg-˙ments are products of judging acts rather than those acts themselves. The inter-pretation of judgment along these lines also came to be expressed many yearslater in Czezowski’s˙ Main Principles of the Philosophical Sciences of 1946.3

A product is depicted here as the outcome of human activity. In particular,a judgment is the product of an activity of judging. Moreover, Czezowski de-˙clares the judgment-product to be the content of belief. It is thus clear thatthe notions of judgment and of belief are conceived by him in the same wayas they were conceived by Brentano, to the effect that every act of judging isstrongly connected with the moment of belief or assertion. A belief is con-sidered by Czezowski to be a mental fact that consists of an activity and its˙product, a judgment.

2. Jan Łukasiewicz (II):The Sentence in the Logical Sense

2.1 Judgment and BeliefAs mentioned in chapter 7, the strong separation of logic from psychologymade by Łukasiewicz in 1907 affects his later work, On the Principle of Con-tradiction in Aristotle of 1910, where he writes:

I emphasize the difference that exists between a judgment as a logical fact and a beliefas a psychological phenomenon. (Łukasiewicz 1910/1987, p. 13—my translation)

‘The act of judging’ means, according to Łukasiewicz, the same as ‘belief.’ Inconsequence, he uses the term ‘belief’ or ‘conviction’ rather than ‘the act ofjudging.’ Despite the way in which the term ‘belief’ was used in descriptive-psychological investigations prior to Łukasiewicz, i.e. whether it was consid-ered as a mental act, state, or process, belief has, in Łukasiewicz’s view, a cor-relate in what he refers to as a ‘judgment.’ A judgment is defined by Łukasie-wicz as:

A sequence of words or other signs indicating that an object has or does not have someproperty. (Łukasiewicz 1910/1987, p. 12—my translation)

Łukasiewicz also calls the judgment as described by this formulation a ‘logicalsentence’ or a ‘sentence in the logical sense.’ Every belief, therefore, has itscorrelate in a sentence in the logical sense that is either an assertive or a nega-tive judgment expressed in a sequence of words.

As we have already seen in the previous section on Łukasiewicz, to makehis account of judgment (i.e. of a sentence in the logical sense) clearer, Łu-kasiewicz refers to Meinong and to his notion of an objective. The notionof the logical sentence in Łukasiewicz’s view differs from that objectives inthat, as Łukasiewicz himself underlines, in the case of Meinong’s objectives

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it is rather a fact that is the object of an act of judging (i.e. of belief in Łu-kasiewicz’s terms). Here, however, Łukasiewicz is not clear as to whether hetakes Meinong’s objectives as states of affairs or as propositions (i.e. as object-entities or as meaning-entities). For the reasons mentioned below it seems thatŁukasiewicz himself wishes to consider objectives as object-entities. His judg-ments, when using Meinong’s terms, would rather be objectives (in the senseof object-entities) expressed in words or by means of other signs; they arestrongly connected with language.4 The comparison between Łukasiewicz’sjudgment and Meinong’s objectives brings to the light two important facts:Firstly, the objective is an object of belief, and, secondly, this object can beexpressed in a judgment (or as Łukasiewicz puts it, in a sentence in the logicalsense). This points out that entities like states of affairs, ideal meanings, andother abstract or higher-order object-entities (or whatever can be understoodby Meinong’s term ‘objective’), when placed somewhere between mental actsand their material linguistic expressions, were, in the Lvov-Warsaw School,very strongly tied either to mental activities or to their linguistic expressions.

Thus, for Łukasiewicz,

A judgment is a sentence uttered in words or by means of other signs, and it is a sentencethat means something. (Łukasiewicz 1910/1987, p. 14—my translation)

Taking this formulation of Łukasiewicz’s notion of judgment, however, a ‘judg-ment’ or a ‘logical sentence’ that mean something can have, I think, two mean-ings.

The first meaning of a ‘judgment’ or a ‘sentence in the logical sense’ wouldabove all emphasize an ideal meaning of indicative sentences that might havebeen conceived as sentences in itself in Bolzano’s sense, or in the sense ofMeinong’s objective (where the latter is taken as a meaning-entity rather thanas an object-entity). However, this ideal meaning would have been, along Łu-kasiewicz’s lines, always fixed in words, and there would have been no othersense in which we could speak about it. There were no meanings apart fromlinguistic entities in this interpretation. Yet again, this dependence relationbetween meanings and the sequence of words or other signs might still be un-derstood in a twofold way:

(1) It can mean that a judgment or a logical sentence is a species in Husserl’ssense, i.e. that it is graspable only when we are dealing with its linguistic formand that we grasp it in specie in an act of ideation. This would be an epistemicor cognitive relation between the sequence of words and their meanings. Fur-thermore, for this reason a sentence in the logical sense could be naturalized bymeans of a statement of its accessibility or even of its creativity in an epistemicact of ideation such as abstraction. This seems, however, to be a mistakeninterpretation of Łukasiewicz’s notion of a meaningful judgment, for in his ac-count, meanings should also be objects of belief, and belief, accompanied bycertainty, is not an act of ideation in Łukasiewicz’s view.


(2) The dependence relation between a sequence of words and its meaningcan also be conceived as a two-sided dependence relation: A relation in whichnot only are there no meanings if they are not expressed in an appropriate wayin a sequence of words, but even a sequence of words is meaningful only ifit expresses an already existent meaning. Thus, on this account, an uttered orwritten sentence refers to some objective or to some sentence in itself. Thisinterpretation seems to be justified also with regard to another term which Łu-kasiewicz uses instead of ‘judgment’, ‘logical sentence’, or ‘sentence in thelogical sense’, i.e. with regard to the term ‘logical fact.’5 The same objectiveor, using this term, logical fact can, on this interpretation, be an object of a be-lief and can serve as the meaning of a written or uttered sentence. In otherwords, an objective as an object of belief would be understood here as state ofaffairs, whereas the same objective when taken as the meaning of a sentencewould be a proposition. Thus, the same entity is taken as object-entity whenreferring to belief and as meaning-entity when referring to sentences.

Yet a second interpretation of ‘judgment’ or ‘sentence in the logical sense’in the above passage is also possible, one which would emphasize the linguisticentity rather than its meaning. The relation between a sequence of words anda judgment can be conceived here as that between a particular judgment anda sequence of meaningful words, i.e. the relation between a sequence of wordsand its meaning is one of a whole to its part. Thus, this interpretation givespriority to the sequence of words. In this respect, Meinong’s objective as anobject of belief would rather be a proposition whereas an objective with a con-nection to a judgment (i.e. a sequence of words understood mere as a writtenor uttered sequence of signs which are meaningful) would be the fact to whichthe judgment refers. This second interpretation is justified with regard to someof Łukasiewicz’s other remarks concerning the notion of a judgment. Firstly,it is closer to the view presented by Aristotle, whom Łukasiewicz recalls whenspeaking about his understanding of judgment. Following Aristotle, he distin-guishes between a mental state of belief (or state of conviction) immanent tothe mind on the one hand, and its counterpart in the sounds of speech on theother hand. Łukasiewicz refers to this counterpart as the meaningful sentencewhich is an assertive or negative judgment uttered in words.

2.2 The Truth of Judgments: An Argument fromthe Judgment’s Function of Reconstructing

Łukasiewicz’s view on truth also supports this last interpretation of his notionof a judgment as a meaningful sentence that is an assertive or negative judg-ment uttered in words. According to Łukasiewicz, not every sequence of wordswhich from a grammatical point of view counts as sentence in a given languagepresents a judgment. For it is not the grammar but the fact of being meaningfulthat decides when a written sign is a judgment. Only sentences that are mean-

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ingful can be called judgments. ‘Abracadabra is a bed’ cannot, according toŁukasiewicz, be a judgment in everyday English. Thus, there are sequences ofwords of the sentence-form which are not endowed in meaning.

Moreover, continuing along these lines, not every meaningful sentence isa judgment, for not every meaningful sentence can be true or false. What,then, are the entities to which truth and falsity are attributed? Łukasiewiczclaims that it is the attributes of entities that are meaningful.6 Yet, as Aristotleputs it, only a meaningful sentence which indicates that something is the casecan be true or false.7 Thus, judgments are those sentences which, in accordwith the grammar of given language, are indicative (stating that something isthe case) and meaningful.

Next, there arises the question of whether truth and falsity can be attributesonly of judgments (sentences in the logical sense, logical sentences) or also ofmental beliefs. On the one hand, both beliefs and judgments are about some-thing. On the other hand, however, along the lines of the already mentionedview of Aristotle, not only the fact that an entity is meaningful decides aboutits ability to serve as a truth bearer. Łukasiewicz also follows Aristotle in ana-lyzing what it would mean to have the property of being true or of being false.According to Łukasiewicz the property of being true or of being false is rela-tive. It is relative in the sense that it is an attribute of meaningful entities withregard to their relations of concordance or non-concordance with the facts.Truth or falsity, in other words, is a property of meaningful entities, whichmeans that an object has or does not have a certain feature, i.e. it is a propertyrelative to the relation of concordance between these meaningful entities andthe fact that an object has or does not have the given feature. The question ofthe truth bearer thus has to do not only with which entities are meaningful, butalso with which entities are in a relation of concordance or non-concordancewith the fact of an object’s having or not having some feature. Meaningfulsentences are indicative when they are in such a relation.

Judgments or sentences in the logical sense are meaningful. According toŁukasiewicz, they also stand in a relation of concordance or non-concordanceto the facts. This is because, as a sequence of words or other signs, they recon-struct such facts. Only in this way can they be true or false. Yet, to repeat thequestion, what about our beliefs? According to Łukasiewicz mental acts (orstates or processes) do not indicate that something is the case, for they do notreconstruct facts. Thus, mental acts do not stand in a relation of concordanceor non-concordance to these facts. They do not reconstruct facts since the re-lation between a belief and a fact is an intentional relation. A belief is directedtowards an object; it has intentional object. The intentional relation obtainsbetween a mental act and a state of affairs, and Łukasiewicz understands thelatter in a manner similar to Meinong’s objective as a meaning-entity. Thusobjects of belief are, as Łukasiewicz puts it, imaginary states of affairs. Onlywhen an objective is expressed in words or by means of other linguistic signs


do we have a judgment that can be true or false, since a judgment reconstructsthe underlying state of affairs as an object-entity. An objective expressed inwords, then, is not any more imaginary in the same sense in which the objec-tive towards which we are directed intentionally in a mental act is imaginary.This is, concludes Łukasiewicz, the main difference between mental acts andjudgments: the relation in which they stand to states of affairs.8

Thus, according to Łukasiewicz the judgment is the truth bearer, i.e. thesentence in the logical sense, which should be understood as a perceptuallyaccessible sequence of words or other signs that reconstruct reality. Whena judgment reconstructs the existing state of affairs, then it is true.9

3. Tadeusz Kotarbinski (IV):´The Judgment and the Sentence

In what follows I shall refer to Kotarbinski’s so-called´ Pre-Elements, whichare authorized notes published by his students in 1926, three years before hisElements. . ., which was object of my consideration in the previous part of thisstudy.10 The notes contain several remarks referring to such terms as ‘judg-ment’, ‘judging’ and ‘sentence.’ In fact, the notes were the basis for his laterwork of 1929, but in the latter study the certain sections were shortened anddepicted by Kotarbinski from a purely reistic standpoint, something visible butńot decisive in the Pre-elements. For these reasons and because of the fact thatthe notes are almost unknown within philosophical circles, I shall return fora moment to this earliest work of Kotarbinski. It is worth mentioning onceágain that it is this work that includes prototypes of the T convention, of whichTarski took advantage in order to formulate the material condition of correct-ness of his semantic definition of truth in 1933.

3.1 The Judgment and States of AffairsSince the term ‘judgment’ is ambiguous, says Kotarbinski in the´ Pre-Elements,it is therefore worth looking once again at its uses, taking the perspectives ofdescriptive psychology, as well as that of the everyday use of language.

The usual usage of the term ‘judgment’ is known from both everyday lan-guage and from the science of descriptive psychology, and the latter is the sensein which it refers to an act of judging. On the one hand, for empirical reasons(empirical in the sense of psychological experience of inner perception), Ko-tarbinski rejects the strong opposition between acts of presenting and acts of´judging which was maintained by Brentano and his students. For Kotarbinski´the appropriate opposition would rather be that between judging and imagin-ing. This is because mental presentations of concepts and acts of judging arenot clearly separable in inner experience. In particular, Kotarbinski considers´the presentation of a concept to already involve an act of judging. There areno general presentations that could serve as mental entities called ‘concepts.’11

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Concepts arise in acts of judging. On the other hand, there is a sense in whichjudging should be treated as a separate class of mental acts of thinking, for theact of judging itself presents a special case of thinking. This is because onecan think either with the moment of conviction or without it. Moreover, onlywhen it is accompanied by the moment of conviction, i.e. by the belief thatsuch and such is the case, is thinking an act of judging. Thus, Kotarbinski doesńot argue against the idiogenic theory of judgment as known from Brentanoand his pupils. However—and still on the basis of the empirical experience ofinner perception—Kotarbinski remarks that a clear demarcation between the´thinking with the moment of conviction and the thinking without this momentis impossible. This is because an act of thinking admits of grades of conviction.

Yet for Kotarbinski there is no danger in using of such terms as ‘thinking’ánd ‘judging’ interchangeably in the area of logic, since for the purposes oflogic the psychological moment of conviction is redundant. Moreover, theseterms are in fact apparent names. Indeed, instead using these terms, one shoulduse correct, literal expressions such as ‘he/she thinks that. . .’ or ‘he/she judgesthat. . .’12 When the terms like ‘judgment’, ‘judging’, ‘thinking’, and ‘thought’are used literally they can lead to various mistakes and misinterpretations.A standard example of such a mistake consists, for Kotarbinski, in distinguish-íng between acts or functions and their products or formations, as was done byStumpf and Twardowski.13 Such metaphors, claims Kotarbinski, led to the as-´sumption of ideal objects such as judgments in the logical sense. According tosuch views a judgment is not thinking with the moment of conviction that suchand such is the case, but it is something which is designated by phrases of theform ‘that which. . .’ or, even worse, by Meinong’s ‘das Sosein.’ Kotarbinski´does not want to accept any such referents which come from the literal uses ofapparent names.

However, even with regard to a judgment in the psychological sense thereare examples of the assumption of non-existent entities. For instance, Kotar-binski claims that some philosophers say that a judgment in the logical senseís the same as the content of an act of judging. Moreover, one makes an objectof an act of judging from the referent of the phrase scheme ‘that which. . .’where Meinong’s objective is here, again, a good example. The same phrase,therefore, designates both the object and the content of a judging act: in onecase it is an ideal object, in the other it is the state of affairs to which the phraserefers.14

3.2 The Sentence: Another Semantic-Reistic ArgumentThe term ‘judgment’ can be used unambiguously as referring to the act ofjudging in the sense given by descriptive psychology. Yet in order to avoidany misunderstanding of the type already described, we should, according toKotarbinski, use the sentence-terminology, i.e. terminology that uses the no-´


tion of sentence instead of the notion of judgment. Sentences are somethingreal; the term ‘sentence’ is a real name and can be taken literally, whereas notonly judgment-contents and judgment-objects are fictitious objects, but eventhe existence of the act of judging itself is questionable. The latter is dubioussince we in fact speak about someone who judges when speaking about judg-ments or judging activities. For Kotarbinski the problem of the contents and´the objects of the act of judging presents an apparent problem, especially whenformulated in terms of the relation between a judgment in the logical senseand states of affairs. We do not need to introduce any entities such as judg-ments in the logical sense when we want to contrast logical and psychologicalproblems. In order to distinguish logic from psychology all we need are thefollowing assumptions: that sentences of the form

(PS) X thinks (correctly, quickly. . . and so on).

are psychological sentences and that the sentences obtained from the scheme

(LS) X when thinking that such and such is the case, thinks truly.

are logical sentences. Both kinds of sentences, logical and psychological, aresentences about someone who judges.15

A sentence is thus contrasted by Kotarbinski with a judgment. A sentenceís an ordered sequence of letters, sounds, or gestures. Indicative sentences,i.e. statements understood as utterances [wypowiedzi], constitute a sub-class ofsentences. Only the latter can be true or false; more precisely, only of the lattercan ‘true’ or ‘false’ be predicated.

A sentence is also conceived by Kotarbinski as a phrase that can be an indi-ćation (i.e. a statement) of a thought. Here, the notion of the function of a sen-tence that consists in the expression of thought is conceived by him in a verybroad sense, as already known from Ossowski. An ordered sequence of signscan intentionally be the expression of a thought, i.e. it can be created as an ex-pression with an act of meaning-giving intention. The same ordered sequenceof signs, however, can also be taken as only an expression of a thought, i.e. itcan be taken with the semantic attitude.16 Thus, Kotarbinski defines a sentenceás a phrase that can be an indication (statement) of thinking that such and suchis the case. This is equivalent, claims Kotarbinski, to the definition of a sen-´tence as a true or false expression.17 Finally, Kotarbinski contrasts a sentenceánd a sentence-function. The latter has the same form as a sentence; it cannot,however, be true or false.18

4. Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (I): The Picturing SentenceLet us recall the problem of the distinction between imaginations and judgingactivities, on the one hand, and between judging and thinking, on the other,

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as presented by Kotarbinski, which led him to the revision of Brentano’s viewás regards the classification of mental phenomena. In the light of this, whycould it not be said that inner experience does not provide enough evidencefor the claim that ‘truth’ can also be predicated, for instance, of presentations?Some remarks as far as this problem is concerned were made, for example,by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz in his lectures ‘Principal Issues in the Theory ofKnowledge’ that he gave at the University of Lvov in the 1930–31 academicyear.19 The lectures were devoted for the most part to the notion of truth, be-ginning with the problem of true imaginations. It is interesting to see at least anoutline of Ajdukiewicz’s argumentation with regard to the problems mentionedin the previous sections. It is above all important to mention that the problemof true imaginary presentations is, for Ajdukiewicz, strongly related to suchtopics as perception and (immanent and transcendent) objects of imagination.In this respect he discusses, among other things, the views of Russell, Moore,Mach, and, what is important here, of the Brentanians.20 Roughly speaking,according to Ajdukiewicz the issue of the truth of imaginary presentations canbe transformed into the question about the truth of judgments, convictions, orbeliefs (following Kotarbinski, he considers these terms to be synonymous).Ájdukiewicz’s argument, when drawn into a Brentanian framework, can bepresented as follows.

4.1 The Motives of True BeliefIn saying that an imaginary presentation is true, one claims that somethingwhich is real, has all the properties which the immanent object of the presenta-tion in question possesses. Despite various interpretations of the notion of animmanent object, and despite other notions involved in the quasi-definition ofa true imaginary presentation given above, it is correct, according to Ajdukie-wicz, to say that an imaginary presentation is true if the transcendent object ofthis presentation (i.e. the object of presentation in Twardowski’s sense) does infact have all of the properties that appear in one’s imagination as properties ofthis object. In other words, an imaginary presentation is true if on its basis itseems to one that there is an object having such and such properties and thisobject actually exists.

But now, the whole issue of true imaginations can be moved to the issue not of true actsof imagination but true acts of judgment. My imagination is true when the judgmentwhich relies on this imagination is true. (Ajdukiewicz 1988, p. 460—my translation)

Thus, the truth of imagination is a type of secondary truth. For Ajdukiewicz,judgments are true in the primary sense.

The relation between the truth of imaginations and the truth of judgment can,however, be presented in various ways. Firstly, this relation can be treated asa causal relation, i.e. the imagination might causally evoke the judgment basedon it. For example, the imagination of a map of Austria reminds me about my


belief that Salzburg is a beautiful city. Yet this type of causal association is,according to Ajdukiewicz, not representative as far as the relation between thetruth of imagination and the truth of judgments is concerned.

Thus, secondly, a judgment can be motivated by an imagination. An ex-ample here would be a sensual imagination of a rose, an imagination thatmotivates my statement that the rose is red. On several occasions ‘motiva-tion’ means the same thing as ‘warranty’ for Ajdukiewicz. This is becausean imagination might give a warranty for a true judgment. If this is the case,then the imagination motivates this judgment. However, Ajdukiewicz consid-ers this somewhat unfortunate comparison to be only as a metaphor that helpsto describe the fact of motivation. In fact, motivational relations are objects ofpsychological experience rather than objects of description.

Now, an imaginary presentation is true in a secondary sense if the judgmentsthat are motivated by it are also true. Moreover, in that case not only one butall judgments motivated by the underlying imaginary presentations must betrue. As Ajdukiewicz puts it, we are dealing with such a case if the underlyingimaginary presentation wholly motivates these judgments (as opposed to par-tial motivation). Thus, if my presentation of a handful of red roses of a givenshape motivates my judgments, then every judgment based on this presentationis true. If, for example, a judgment about the number of roses, e.g. that thereare eleven red roses, is false because there is a dozen, then this presentationdoes not motivate my judgment. Thus, it seems that Ajdukiewicz’s notion ofmotivation is based on the notion of true judgments but does not explain whysome judgments, when motivated by imaginary presentations, are true.

It also seems that discussions about the topic of true imaginary presentationstook place not only during Ajdukiewicz’s lectures in epistemology provided inthe Lvov-Warsaw School. Twardowski, for example, in his lectures on thetheory of knowledge, formulated the issue in the following way:

The relation between presentations and their objects is a relation of faithfulness andnot of truth. As long as there is in me only a picture, there is neither truth nor falsity.(Twardowski 1975, p. 254—my translation)

In fact, Ajdukiewicz’s view is similar to that of Twardowski insofar as we canfind a secondary sense in which imaginary presentations are true.

Yet the descriptive-psychological level of the discussion on truth in Ajdu-kiewicz’s lectures is in this respect not his last word about truth bearers. Thislevel, however, shows Ajdukiewicz’s empirical tinge in his argumentation, andthis not only in the sense in which he used the term ‘empirical’ when he wasconcentrated on the empiricism of the Vienna Circle. Like the above remarkson judgments by Twardowski, Kotarbinski, and others, it expresses the view,ćommonly acknowledged among Poles at this time, of the importance and va-lidity of the experience of inner perception (introspection) which, as empirical,could also be used to support an argumentation relying on empirical evidence.

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4.2 An Argument from the Possibility of Describinga Judgment

As a matter of fact Ajdukiewicz considers in his lectures the notion of truthabove all in its relation to judgments, sentences, and beliefs. The main ob-ject of his investigations of truth is truth as predicated of these entities.21 Theterms ‘judgment’, ‘sentence’, and ‘belief’ which appear in his lecture notesare, however, not defined. On one occasion, for example, the term ‘judgment’is used by Ajdukiewicz as referring to acts of judging and, in this respect, it issynonymous to ‘belief.’ On another occasion, the term is conceived by Ajdu-kiewicz as referring to expressed judgments, i.e. as synonymous to the phrase‘the judgment expressed in a sentence.’ The latter might mean a judgment inthe logical sense as it was defined, for instance, by Łukasiewicz. This vague-ness of the notion of judgment, however, does not effect the most importantdistinction needed by Ajdukiewicz with regard to our problem, that betweenthe act of judging with the moment of conviction and the judgment expressedin an uttered or written sequence of words.

Truth is predicated most frequently of judgments which are accompanied bythe moment of conviction, holds Ajdukiewicz. As an empirical fact, he empha-sizes that we are speaking about truth not only when we deal with judgmentswhich are our beliefs:

. . . everyone is ready to say that a judgment in which we believe is true. Furthermore,we believe that there are true judgments in which we do not believe. (Ajdukiewicz1988, p. 467—my translation)

From the psychological point of view it is somewhat extraordinary that therebe true judgments that are be not beliefs. Ajdukiewicz rejects any possibilityof such judgments, for he claims that it is psychologically impossible to makea judgment without the moment of conviction. From the psychological per-spective, a judging act is always a belief. Judgments without the moment ofconviction, therefore, cannot be the subjects of expressions. However, eventhough they cannot be expressed (in the sense in which ‘expressing’ is under-stood in the previous sections and chapters of this study), they can be named.22

There undoubtedly exist true sentences in which we do not believe. If there were nosuch sentences, we would know every truth. When I say that I do not believe in a truththen it does not mean that I reject it, but only that I do not believe in it because I donot know it. It seems, however, that it is psychologically impossible to give an exampleof a true sentence in which I do not believe. Such a giving is possible only in somecases. It is possible, namely, to quote or describe such a sentence. (Ajdukiewicz 1988,p. 469–470—my translation)

The naming of judgments takes place on the level of language and it can bedone in two ways: It can be obtained by means of description, or by meansof quotation. Ajdukiewicz sees the quotation of a judgment in the usage ofthat-clauses when uttering or writing sentences. Thus, for example, the sen-tence ‘The judgment that the rose is red’ includes as its part a quotation of the


name of a judgment. Naming as describing is, according to Ajdukiewicz, theconstruction of a name as occurs in the following phrase: ‘The first judgmentwritten in quotation marks in the section about Ajdukiewicz’s argument aboutthe possibility of describing judgments in Artur Rojszczak’s study on bearersof truth.’ Thus, by being able to name judgments which are not beliefs, wecan express all truths in language. This is one of the reasons why we shouldpredicate ‘true’ or ‘false’ of sentences rather than of judgments or beliefs.

This argument is, so to speak, abstracted from Ajdukiewicz’s lectures. Asalready mentioned, he uses the words ‘judgment’ and ‘sentence’ ambiguously.He also argues against the predication of ‘truth’ of descriptive judgments sincethis very often leads to paradoxes. However, it is important to note here thatAjdukiewicz’s predication of ‘true’ and ‘false’ is not metalinguistic. He has anapproach to the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ in which they function as one-placefunctions (operators) that make sentences having sentences as their arguments,and this does not lead to paradoxes such as the liar paradox. Thus, on the onehand, my argumentation is not faithful to the argumentation presented by Aj-dukiewicz in that mine refers to the metalinguistic understanding of the predi-cates ‘true’ and ‘false.’ On the other hand, however, Ajdukiewicz himself sawthe advantages of a metalinguistic approach of these words. It enables us, forexample, to make such statements as ‘All of the arguments in this study areweak.’

It is also worth mentioning that after 1936 Ajdukiewicz accepted both Tar-ski’s semantic theory of truth, in which predicates ‘truth’ and ‘false’ are met-alinguistic predicates, as well as the distinction between language and meta-language. From the point of view of this study it is interesting to see howAjdukiewicz later argues for the translation of speech about judgments andconcepts into speech about sentences. This is important because he formulatedthe program of the theory of knowledge as a semantic analysis of language,thereby contrasting the theory of knowledge with the theory of cognition.23

Epistemology is, according to Ajdukiewicz, partly psychology and partlylogic. Every sentence about a judgment has its correlate in an equivalent as-sertion about a sentence whose meaning consists of the underlying judgment:every sentence about judgments and concepts has a correlate in a sentenceabout sentences and terms. Thus, the semantic theory of knowledge replacesspeech about judgments and concepts by plain speech about their linguisticcorrelates, i.e. sentences having these judgments as their meaning and termswhose meanings are concepts. Thus, we can obtain equivalents of sentencesabout judgments in sentences about sentences. The semantic theory of truthconsiders issues of the theory of knowledge explicitly from the point of viewof language, which is conceived as a system of expressions with fixed mean-ings. The theses of the semantic theory of knowledge refer to sentences andterms, but they always do this with regard to the sentences and terms of somelanguage, which possess a definite meaning. There is no pure theory of knowl-

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edge: if someone confines himself to the syntax of language, eliminating de-scriptive terms, then he will not find any road leading to the world of realthings, Ajdukiewicz claims. There is no pure theory of knowledge which elim-inates concepts of things. Why we should speak about language rather thanabout concepts can be seen from the following example:

Let us take the expressions: ‘the father of John’, ‘the concept of triangle’,and ‘the concept of trilateral.’ At the first glance it would seem that we canspeak about objects such as John’s father and the concept of triangle or trilateralomitting speech about the language we used.

‘The concept of triangle’, for example, seems to be clearly about the conceptof triangle. Yet this is not the case, claims Ajdukiewicz. We do not nameconcepts using such expressions as ‘the concept of triangle.’ First of all, theterm ‘triangle’ is not used in this expression in its normal way, i.e. in the wayin which names occur, for it is used in suppositio materialis, i.e. it is a nameof itself. Consider the expression ‘the father of John’: It refers to an objectwhich is in a relation to the object to which ‘John’ refers. The father of Johnis the only object whose relation to John is that of being father. Thus, if ‘theconcept of triangle’ is similar to the expression ‘the father of John’, then itshould refer to the single object which is in a relation to triangle which isthe relation of being the concept of this triangle. Similarly, if ‘trilateral’ in‘the concept of trilateral’ functions as ‘John’ in ‘the father of John,’ then theconcept of trilateral should be the only object whose relation to trilateral is thatof being its concept. Now, the triangle is the same as the trilateral. Accordingto the previous investigation, the only object having the relation to triangleof being its concept is the concept of triangle, and the only object having therelation to trilateral of being its concept is the concept of trilateral. But then, theconcept of triangle is the same as the concept of trilateral, which is not the case:The concept of triangle is not the same as the concept of trilateral if the term‘concept of. . .’ is a name, and if it is not an extension of the term. It followsthat we cannot take the nouns ‘triangle’ and ‘trilateral’ in the expressions suchas ‘the concept of triangle’ and ‘the concept of trilateral’ in the normal way(in suppositio formalis) but only as names of themselves. Thus, the correctway of reading such expressions are ‘the concept which is the meaning of thename «triangle»’ or ‘the concept of «triangle».’ We can, of course, use theexpressions in the way in which they are usually used, i.e. without quotationmarks, but then we always should remember that they are used in suppositiomaterialis, holds Ajdukiewicz. Thus, the best way to guarantee correctness inthis respect is to speak about sentences and terms instead of about meaningsand concepts, i.e. to speak in such a way that all terms and sentences occur intheir normal way.


5. Alfred Tarski on the Truth BearerThe bearer of truth, according to Tarski’s definition of truth as given in his1933 work, is the sentence. It is of a sentence in a given language of whichthe metalinguistic predicate ‘true’ is affirmed. This does not in the least prove,as I mentioned at the very beginning of this study and as I have tried to un-derline throughout this study, that the notion of the sentence is unambiguous.I stated that the answer to the question of a unique notion of sentence in Tar-ski’s semantic conception of truth is negative, unless one takes it into a broadphilosophical framework. Now, I believe, we are able to make Tarski’s choiceof sentences as bearers of truth-values more consistent. In order to do thisI shall recall once again those passages from his 1933 work on truth that canbe seen as definitions or, at least, as descriptions of the notion of sentence, andon this occasion reformulate and analyze them.

5.1 The Sentence and SyntaxThe very first definition of the sentence would be the following:

(DSS) SDSS is a sentence of the language L if it is an expression of L andS satisfies the constraints determined by the grammar of L.

According to the DSS a sentence is a linguistic expression in the sense of thegrammar of a given language.

Among all possible expressions which can be formed with these signs, those calledsentences are distinguished by means of purely structural properties. (Tarski 1933,p. 16; 1983, p. 166. See also pp. 12–13 of 1933)

The definition DSS has a general character since the structure of a sentenceis prescribed differently in different languages, and not only in scientific ordeductive languages, but also in colloquial or ordinary languages. Both typesof languages, however, if they are able to identify sentences in the sense ofthe DSS, must be formalized languages. Among the properties of the latterthere are, for Tarski, inter alia the following: A formalized language is anextensional language in which the meaning of an expression is determined un-ambiguously by its form. The vocabulary of such a language consists of alldemonstrated or written signs by means of which all expressions of this lan-guage are recursively built. It is highly important to underline that all signs offormalized languages in Tarski’s sense have at least intuitive definite meanings.This means that the sentences of formalized languages still remain sentenceswhen translated into ordinary languages. The heritage of Lesniewski with re-´gard to this fact is indisputable. The thesis of Tarski’s teacher that expressionsof formal languages should be endowed with certain meanings was adopted byhis student in its entirety.24

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5.2 The Sentence as a Function without VariablesA second definition of the sentence that is to be found in Tarski’s 1933 work isrelated to formalized languages which contain signs called ‘variables’ in theirvocabulary. Such, according to Tarski, are the languages of most deductivesystems. The sentence is then defined as a sentential function without freevariables:

(DSSV) SDSSV is a sentence of the language L if S is a sentential functionSF and none of the variables occurring in SF is a free variable.25

The definition DSSV assumes, of course, a definition of the sentence-functionwhich is very easy to obtain by means of syntactic methods for that type oflanguage.26

It seems that both definitions are equivalent, i.e. the extension of the DSSand the extension of the DSSV are equivalent, unless L which is formalized inthe sense of Tarski does not contain variables, and thereby, has no sentence-functions but only sentences. In this case the set of sentential-functions whichare not sentences is empty. However, the sentential-function might be stilldefined as an expression which contains free variables, and it might be definedas being capable of being transformed into a sentence by the substitution ofvariables by names or by bounding the variables by means of quantification.

5.3 The Sentence as a ProductA third definition of the sentence given by Tarski relies on the intentional no-tion of product:

Normally expressions are regarded as the products of human activity (or classes of suchproducts). (Tarski 1933, p. 25; Tarski 1983, p. 174)

Thus:

(DSP1) SDSP1 is a sentence in the language L if it is a product (or a classof products) of human activity.

In this formulation of a sentence Tarski refers to the theory of acts and productsas presented by Twardowski. It was Twardowski who depicted language andtheir expressions, and thus sentences, as a set of psycho-physical products oras a set of classes of such products. The word ‘normally’ might also be con-ceived as referring to the ordinary usage of the notion of sentence in everydaylanguage.

As far as the origin of psycho-physical products is concerned, a linguisticexpression is a product of a function of thinking. Thus, a sentence is in thisrespect a product of a judging act or, as it was in the case of Twardowski,a product of the presentation of a judgment. With regard to the various ways inwhich such products might exist, a sentence can be a transient physical product,


such as an utterance or it can be durable physical product like an inscription.Regarding the function of the expression of a linguistic sign a sentence wouldbe an expression of a judgment (or of the function of a judging act or of a tran-sient product of the latter), or it would be an expression of a presentation ofa judgment (or of the function of presenting a judgment or of a product of thelatter, such as a presentation of a judgment). Generally speaking, an expres-sion S can be conceived as a sentence of a given language L if and only if Sexpresses a judgment (a function or a presentation of a judging activity). Thus,as regards its function of expressing, a sentence is psycho-physical product inthat mental functions became fixed in a physical product:

(DSP2) SDSP2 is a sentence in a given language L if it is a transient ordurable psycho-physical product.

DSP2 refers to utterances as sequences of sounds as well as to inscriptions,i.e. to things which have been written down. DSP2 is also coherent with theconcept of formalized languages. We can read this along the following lines:Sentences are expressions of mental products and the latter are dependent onmental functions. Since in the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School, as well asin the Brentanian tradition, mental functions are characterized as intentional,every sentence in the sense of SDP2, i.e. one which is an expression of a mentalfunction that is always directed towards an object, is a sentence about some-thing.

As already mentioned, a sentence in the sense of DSP2 can also be takenas a class of products. This can be understood in a twofold manner. On oneinterpretation, a sentence would be an abstract object that is a class of utter-ances or inscriptions. Thus, the sentence ‘The rose is red’ and the sentence‘THE ROSE IS RED’ are products belonging to the same class of sentences.On the second interpretation, a sentence is a concrete utterance or a concreteinscription, which is a product not of a single judging act or of a single mentalproduct of this act, but it is a product of a class of such mental products. Thesecond interpretation might, for example, lead to the assumption of abstractobjects such as act-species, of which the particular utterance or inscription isthe next product.

It is also possible, however, to present an interpretation of the DSP1 differentfrom that given by the DSP2. It would be an interpretation which, instead ofusing the concept of a product in Twardowski’s sense, takes into account thetheory of semantic products as presented by Ossowski.

(DSP3) SDSP3 is a sentence in a given language L if it is a semantic prod-uct that can be true or false.

The phrase ‘semantic product’ that occurs in this definition means that thesentence should be taken by someone in his or her semantic attitude in the

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sense described by Ossowski. The second condition included in the SDP3is connected with the definition of a sentence which is usually seen as thesemantic definition:

(DSSE) SDSSE is a sentence in language L if it has a truth-value.

The definition already called the semantic definition of a sentence was in factthe definition which Ossowski and other members of the Lvov-Warsaw Schoolconnected with Aristotle’s view. The phrase ‘having a truth-value’ can suggestthat there are objects such as Frege’s Truth and Falsity that are denotations ofsentences. However, when considering Ossowski’s critique of Frege in thisrespect, mentioned in the section on Ossowski, the definition DSSE shouldinstead be reformulated in the following manner:

(DSSE’) SDSSE′ is a sentence in language L if it has the property of beingtrue or false.

DSP2 and DSP3 present two different interpretations of DSP1. They mustnot, however, be considered equivalent. This depends upon whether all sen-tences which are products in Twardowski’s sense (i.e. intentional transientutterances or intentionally written durable inscriptions) are also products inOssowski’s sense. The latter include linguistic entities that might be conceivedas semantic only on the part of the hearer or of the reader, i.e. they include alsoentities towards which one takes the semantic attitude and which are not neces-sarily intentional products of their creators (if there are any). According to thisview, a plain physical product can be seen with the semantic attitude. One can,however, doubt whether expressions of the formalized languages in Tarski’ssense include sentences that can fulfill their semantic functions without beingcreated intentionally.

The DSP1 is coherent with definitions DSS and DSSV given in the previoussection. The difference between them consists in the fact that the DSS andDSSV depict sentences from a purely syntactical point of view, whereas DSP1also takes into account their function of expression, as well as their semanticfunction in Ossowski’s sense, i.e. it takes into account the pragmatic point ofview. Generally speaking, a sentence in DSP1 is defined with regard to themeaning-giving intention either of its maker or of its reader or hearer. Thus,the extensions of DSP1, DSS and DSSV might also be conceived as equivalent.

5.4 The Sentence as a Physical BodyDefinitions DSP1 through DSP3 consider an intention on the part of the writerand of the speaker, as well as on the part of the reader or of the hearer of thesentence. However, metalogical axioms demand infinitely many expressions.27

It would be a quite strong assumption to suppose that human beings can cre-ate an infinite number of meaningful expressions in a finite period of time.


Thus, definitions which consider sentences from the point of view of inten-tional meaning-giving acts seem to be insufficient for metalogical purposeswhich require an infinite multiplication of sentences. There is, therefore, a ten-sion between the infinity required by metalogic and the empirical subject whois capable of taking the semantic attitude. Hence Tarski writes:

But another possible interpretation of the term ‘expression’ presents itself: we couldconsider all physical bodies of a particular form and size as expressions. (Tarski 1933,p. 25, Tarski 1983, p. 174)

According to this passage the view that considers an infinite number of expres-sions, where the latter are physical bodies, seems not to contain the tensionwhich was present in the case of entities endowed with meanings by meansof intentional acts. Recalling the previous definitions of a sentence, we canformulate another one:

(DSB) SDSB is a sentence in a given language L if it is a physical bodywhose shape and quantity satisfies the constraints determined bythe grammar of L.

The definition DSB and definitions of the type DSP, for example, are at thefirst glance inconsistent. We can, however, attempt to make them coherentby taking the DSB and, for example, the DSP3 together, treating linguisticentities as physical bodies toward which one can take the semantic attitude inOssowski’s sense. The extension of the DSP3 would then be a sub-class of theextension given by the DSB.

5.5 The Sentence as an InscriptionAnother of Tarski’s definitions of a sentence relates it to the notion of a lin-guistic sign:

Statements (sentences) are always treated here as a particular kind of expression, and,thus, as linguistic entities. (Tarski 1933, p. 5; Tarski 1983, p. 156)

Here sentences are expressions in the sense that they are sequences built up ofunits belonging to the vocabulary of a given language, i.e. they are its phrases.The latter are to be understood, according to what was said previously, assounds or inscriptions. Yet considering the previous definition of sentences asphysical bodies, it would be better to depict them as if they were inscriptions.The class of sentences as a subset of the class of all expressions of a givenlanguage L can be determined by a syntactical definition of the sort given byDSS or DSSV. Thus, the fusion of definitions DSS and DSB can be formulatedas follows:

(DSE) SDSE is a sentence in a given language L if it is a concrete in-scription in the sense of a physical body whose shape and quantitysatisfy the constraints determined by the grammar of L.

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5.6 The Sentence-Type and a Sentence-Name of a TypeFor a plain formal reason that is similar to the requirement of an infinite numberof expressions in the case of the problem of the multiplicity of expressionsin a given language L, Tarski supposes another formulation of the notion ofa sentence. This is because his formulation of convention (T) demands multipleexpressions of the same shape:

Nevertheless, when the terms ‘expression’, ‘statement’ etc., are interpreted as namesof concrete series of printed signs, various formulations which occur in this work donot appear to be quite correct, and give the appearance of a widespread error whichconsists in identifying expressions of like shape. (. . .) It is convenient to stipulate thatterms like ‘word’, ‘expression’, ‘sentence’, etc., do not denote concrete series of signsbut the whole class of such series which are of like shape with the series given; onlyin this sense shall we regard quotation-mark names as individual names of expressions.(Tarski 1933, p. 5, Tarski 1983, p. 156)

This fragment of Tarski’s work on truth very often leads to the interpretationof his sentences (as well as other linguistic inscriptions given in his study) astypes, in contrast with concrete inscriptions (commonly known as the type-token distinction). From this passage, however, can also be pointed out thatTarski argues against the view that sentences are types. This, I believe, isbecause sentences of the same shape (‘The rose is red’ and ‘The rose is red’) orof like shape (‘The rose is red’ and ‘THE ROSE IS RED’) cannot be identifiedwith one another. In accordance with the intuitive function of quotation-marksin everyday language, in which they are operators that make sentences intonames, one can also claim that some concrete written or printed inscription isan individual name, one that refers not to a single inscription, but to a classof inscriptions of like shape. Thus, a sentence of which the predicate ‘true’ isaffirmed is not a sentence-type itself, but the name of a class. The expression‘sentence’ or the following sentence in quotation marks, ‘Snow is white’, asthey occur in the metalanguage in which convention (T) should be written,being themselves physical bodies, refer to the class of sentences of the sameshape.

5.7 Summary of Chapter 10One can assume that in Tarski’s 1933 semantic definition of truth, it is thesentence that is the bearer of truth, in the sense given by the definitions DSS,DSSV, DSSP3, DSB and DSE. All of these definitions may be conceived as be-ing equivalent. They present various standpoints from which a sentence can bedescribed. Thus, a sentence in a given language is an entity that is syntacticallydetermined by definitions DSS and DSSV. Following Tarski, we can call these‘structural definitions of a sentence.’ According to definition DSSP3, a sen-tence is a semantic product. Since this definition refers to a semantic intentionof an empirical subject, it can be called, following habits of semiotic jargon,a ‘pragmatic definition of a sentence.’ Definition DSB takes the sentence as


a physical body determined with regard to its shape and quantity. It thereforepresents what we might call the ‘ontological definition of a sentence.’ Defini-tion DSE, in which a sentence is viewed as an inscription, might be conceivedas an ‘ontological-structural’ or ‘linguistic’ definition of a sentence. By unify-ing these various definitions into a single definition of a sentence we can obtainthe following formulation, which can serve as Tarski’s coherent definition ofa sentence assumed in his 1933 work on truth:

(TDS) STDSSS is a sentence of language L iff it is a concrete finite inscription(in the sense of a physical body) and S satisfies the constraints determined bythe grammar of L with regard to what can be treated from the semantic attitude.

Notes1 Twardowski 1975, pp. 246–247.2 Czezowski 1927, pp. 7, 9, 21.˙3 Czezowski 1946/1957.˙4 Łukasiewicz 1910/1987, p. 14.5 Łukasiewicz 1910/1987, pp. 12–14.6 Łukasiewicz 1910/1987, p. 29.7 Hermeneutics, 1, 16a.8 Łukasiewicz 1910/1987, pp. 28–30.9 Łukasiewicz 1910/1987, pp. 106–109.10 Kotarbinski 1926.´11 See also discussions about general objects in chapter 8 above.12 As regards literal meaning and apparent names see chapter 6 above.13 Kotarbinski 1926, pp. 101–105.´14 Kotarbinski 1926, pp. 101–105.´15 Kotarbinski 1926, p. 104.´16 Kotarbinski 1926, pp. 106–107. See also above chapter 9.´17 Compare to Kotarbinski 1926, p. 107.´18 Kotarbinski 1926, pp. 107–109.´19 Ajdukiewicz 1988.20 Ajdukiewicz 1988, pp. 448–460.21 Ajdukiewicz 1988, p. 466.22 Ajdukiewicz 1988, pp. 466–468.23 Ajdukiewicz 1988.24 Tarski 1933, pp. 16–17, 62–63; Tarski 1983, pp. 166–167.25 Compare: Tarski 1933, p. 29; Tarski 1983, p. 178.26 See Tarski 1933, pp. 27–29, 63, 65.27 Tarski 1933, pp. 24–25; Tarski 1983, pp. 173–174.

Chapter 11

FINAL COMMENTS

1. The Weakened ThesisAlthough the historical contexts presented in this study in which the move fromthe act of judging to the sentence-inscription as the entities that serve as truthbearers took place may be seen as drawn into a consistent history of ideas,one still can be skeptical about attributing these contexts to the philosophicalbackground of Alfred Tarski’s choice of truth bearer. Despite the facts whichI mentioned at the beginning of this study, i.e. despite the fact of what Tarskihimself points out as the tradition he belongs to and the genetic connections be-tween him and other members of the Lvov-Warsaw School that were described,one can assume these matters too weak in order to state the thesis I made atthe beginning of this study. Moreover, I also remarked that I do not want toleave the reader with the impression that Tarski himself considered every issuewhich appears in this study, especially those which arose in the area of descrip-tive psychology. Therefore, for those who remain unconvinced, I would liketo weaken the main thesis in the following way: If the semantic conceptionof truth given by Tarski in his 1933 paper on truth can be seen as the explica-tion (explicatum) of the classical correspondence theory of truth (explicandum)with regard to the goal of the introduction of the notion of truth into formal-ized languages (languages of deductive sciences), then the Brentanian traditionserves as the best explanation of the choice of the sentences of a meaningfullanguage as the bearers of objective semantical truth.1

As far as the first part of the conditional is concerned, the very first para-graphs of Tarski’s work should not leave any doubts as to its truth. Moreover,it seems to be the standard way in which Tarski’s semantic notion of truth ispresented in both his own presentations of the result obtained and in contem-porary studies on truth. The explicative character of his work also remains oneof the main points of dispute as regards Tarski’s success in this respect. Thus,

213

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having the three-step scheme of the process of explication, the choice of theexplicandum would end with the classical notion of truth, the introductory ex-planation would be the formulation of T-scheme together with the conceptionof a partial definition of truth based on T-equivalences, and finally, the explica-tum whose goal is the incorporation of the notion of truth into the languages ofthe deductive sciences would be the well-known definition of truth, by meansof the notion of satisfaction by an infinite sequence of objects in a given do-main.

The question is what can be meant by ‘the classical correspondence theoryof truth’, or, more generally, what notion of truth is to be explicated? In his1944 and 1968 papers Tarski suggests that what serves as the explicatum forhis semantic notion of truth is the usage of the predicate ‘true’ in ordinarylanguage. In the usual situations of ordinary life we predicate truth, accordingto Tarski, of someone’s utterances. First, this statement comes from later andrather popularized texts on the semantic conception of truth written by Tarski,while I have tried to stay with the 1933 paper throughout this study. Second,Tarski’s argument is in this respect quite weak, for on the ground of the samefact (or, rather, assumption) that it is the usual way of predicating truth ofsentences or utterances, there arose several deflationary theories of truth, suchas redundant or prosentential of Kotarbinski, Glover, or Belnap. It would be´more reasonable, I think, to find a philosophical tradition along the lines ofwhich the explicandum could be found.

Thus, on the one hand, the tradition of the correspondence (classical) con-ception of truth goes so far back as to Aristotle. And it is the tradition inquestion. Yet, it would be the same kind of strong assumption as that madewith respect to the Brentanian tradition that Tarski made a historical analysisof the classical theories of Aristotle, Leibniz, or Thomas Aquinas. On the otherhand, as it was already stated, the so-called classical correspondence theory oftruth as formulated by Tarski in his writings comes, in fact, in the formulationsof Kotarbinski. Moreover, Tarski’s T-scheme is a merely formal correct ver-´sion of Kotarbinski’s proposals of several of such schemes for understanding´the ways in which truth can be predicated, which Kotarbinski gave in his first´version of Elements called the Pre-elements. Thus, the classical Aristoteliancorrespondence notion of truth in fact comes to Tarski through the formulationsand filters of his teacher.

As it was in case of a heuristic analyses of historical studies on the cor-respondence theory of truth, we can eliminate another philosophical traditionwithin which we could look for the explicandum. It is the Vienna Circle tra-dition of logical empiricism. Despite the facts described in the first chapterof this study, one must note that the Vienna Circle did not propose any corre-spondence or classical theory of truth in a sense which could be seen as theexplicandum for the semantic definition of truth.

Final Comments 215

As for the second part of the conditional, it was the task of this study to showthat the Lvov-Warsaw School in its relation to Brentano’s School can serve asthe best explanation of the bearer of truth chosen by Tarski in his explicatumgiven in the 1933 work. Moreover, given the explicative character of his de-finition, the philosophical discussions around the semantic definition of truth,such as the notion of the sentence, the conception of meaningful language, theconcept of correspondence, and the objectivity of truth can be seen in a twofoldmanner. On the one hand, the discussions can be about the consequences ofthis definition with respect to the goal of the explanation. On the other hand,the discussions may take the perspective of its explicational function. Thus,some of the discussions are in fact about the reason for the choice of the ex-plicandum, and about what the reason for the choice of explicatum is (withrespect to the goal of this explication, i.e. to incorporate semantic notions intodeductive languages).

Let me give an example of the discussion about the meaningfulness of thelanguage in which we formulate a definition of truth, i.e. about whether thelanguage in question has fixed meanings or not. The discussion depends, infact, on whether we treat Tarski’s definition as an explicatum of the notionof truth developed within Brentanian tradition or whether we try to find theconsequences of this definition without taking into account its philosophicalbackground, but having in mind the purpose of the explication. From the per-spective of the explicandum, the sentences of a language are capable of be-ing depicted as inscriptions determined by the syntax of this language, i.e. byphysical bodies toward which we can take the semantic attitude (by ascribingto them a referential function, for example). Such objects are, among hav-ing other properties, easily objectivized in the sense explained in Chapter 7;they are meaningful, i.e. they can be related to objects which are the objectsof thought and which can play the role of truthmakers; they can make possi-ble the distinction between intentional and correspondence relations and canbe incorporated within the framework of a causal theory of the inheriting ofintentional relation by the products of intentional acts. From the point of viewof the project of the incorporation of the notion of truth into deductive sys-tems we can, and even probably should, eliminate pragmatic and other kindsof notions which cannot be defined syntactically. In this respect, then, thesentences understood in the sense just given are linguistic objects. They areobjects which can be described syntactically, to which we can ascribe seman-tic functions (such as reference or representation), and which can, moreover, beeven incorporated into physicalistic worldview presented by the Vienna Circle.

216 CHAPTER ELEVEN

2. The Heritage of BrentanoThroughout this study I investigated the following contexts which determinethe explanatory power of the Brentanian tradition with regard an explainationof the choice of the truth bearer in Tarski’s semantic definition of truth:

1. The change of the concept of truth, i.e. the turn from an epistemologi-cal and criteriological attitude to the problem of truth to the classical conceptof truth as correspondence. This turn was at least partly caused by investiga-tions of Brentano’s pupils carried out in the domain of descriptive psychology,especially with regard to the ontology of judgment.

2. The turn from the primacy of descriptive-psychological investigations inlogic and in the theory of knowledge to an anti-psychologistic attitude in thesedisciplines. The move from the judgment to the sentence might be consideredhere as a turn from the theory of cognition (i.e. the psychology of cognition) tothe theory of knowledge (i.e. the theory of the products of cognition).

3. Linguistic analysis of the ordinary usage of linguistic expressions, and,especially, of the words ‘true’ and ‘false. Such analysis is present as a very im-portant topic of both epistemological and classical theories of truth as carriedout in both descriptive-psychological and logico-semantical investigations.

4. The turn in the treatment of the semantical functions of linguistic ex-pressions. This is a move from the primacy of the communicative functionof language in Brentano’s School to the primacy of the semantical functionsof language in the Lvov-Warsaw School. The move from the judgment to thesentence was, in fact, a turn from the primacy of the expressive function to theprimacy of the presentational function of linguistic signs. In other words, itpresents the turn from intentionality to the presentational function of the lan-guage.

5. The theory of meaning-intentions. The turn from meaning-giving inten-tions to the semantical attitude represented an important moment in the formu-lation of the conditions for the meaningfulness of linguistic signs.

6. Ontological investigations with regard to the object of judgment. This isa turn from the distinguished place of psychological investigations with regardto judgment to the ontology of judgment.

7. Ontological investigations concerning theory of objects. One of the re-sults of what in this study was called ‘ontologism’ were the nominalistic pref-erences of Polish philosophers that led them to the choice of the truth bearer inthe ontological realm admitted by nominalism.

8. The problem of the objectivity of truth and knowledge. The problemof the objectivization of truth represents one of the most evident influences ofBrentano’s tradition as regards the turn from the judgment to the sentence asthe truth bearer. Language seems to be in this respect a golden middle, at leastin the sense in which it offers a number of possibilities for objectivizing truth.

Final Comments 217

After taking some of the above distinguished contexts into consideration itwould be not an exaggeration to say that the development of scientific seman-tics in the Lvov-Warsaw School was possible directly because of Brentano’sheritage in the background of this school, which led to discussions and argu-mentation within the framework outlined by the Brentanians. In other words,in order to explain at least some of the semantic ideas which appeared in thefirst three decades of the twentieth century it is insufficient to recall only therapid at this time development of mathematical logic.

3. The Truth BearersBefore I make a survey of the truth bearer in the Brentanian tradition I wouldlike to note that the definition of the truth bearer which was in general im-plicitly assumed in the Lvov-Warsaw school was the hybrid definition of thetruth bearer, formulated in the second chapter of this study, where the truthbearer is an entity of which the predicate ‘is true’ can be attributively affirmedin a determining way.

Now, the candidates for the bearer of truth which appeared throughout thisstudy, those which came from Brentano’s School and from the Lvov-WarsawSchool, can be listed as follows:

concrete mental entities:1. an act of judging (Brentano, Twardowski, Czezowski)˙2. a belief (Brentano)3. a supposition or assumption (Meinong)4. a presentation of the act of judging (Twardowski)5. someone who makes a judgment (der Urteilende, a judger—Brentano)

abstract mental entities:6. the mental product of an act of judging (Twardowski, Czezowski)˙7. the content of an act of judging (Marty)8. an act-species (Husserl)

concrete psycho-physical entities:9. a sequence of sounds taken with the semantical attitude (Ossowski)10. a sequence of signs taken with the semantical attitude (Ossowski)11. an utterance as a psycho-physical product (Twardowski, Kotarbinski,´

Tarski)12. an inscription as a psycho-physical product (Twardowski, Kotarbinski,´

Tarski)

concrete linguistic entities:13. a sequence of sounds with a fixed meaning (Łukasiewicz)14. a sequence of signs with a fixed meaning (Łukasiewicz)15. an inscription as a general name (Kotarbinski, Tarski)´16. an inscription as an individual name (Tarski)

218 CHAPTER ELEVEN

abstract psycho-physical entities:17. an utterance-type as a psycho-physical product (Tarski)18. an inscription-type as a psycho-physical product (Tarski)

abstract linguistic entities:19. an inscription-type as a general name (Tarski)20. an inscription-type as an individual name (Tarski)

physical entities:21. an utterance as a physical object (Tarski)22. an inscription as a physical object (Tarski)23. a judging person (Kotarbinski)´

abstractions from physical entities:24. an utterance as a judgment in the logical sense (Łukasiewicz)25. an inscription as a judgment in the logical sense (Łukasiewicz)

ideal entities:26. a sentence in itself (Satz an sich – Bolzano)27. an ideal meaning (Husserl)28. a judgment-content (Marty)29. an objective as an ideal meaning (Meinong)30. an objective as a state of affairs (Meinong)31. a state of affairs (Reinach)

The order of truth bearers in this list leads from mental entities, throughpsycho-physical and physical, to ideal entities. Abstract entities here are de-pendent entities in the sense that they cannot exist without existence of anotherentity. In all cases abstract entities depend upon one of the entities found priorin the listing. For example, a judgment as a psychological product (6) cannotexist without the existence of an act of judging (1). Similarly, expressed ob-jectives (24, 25) cannot exist without the existence of the linguistic entities inwhich they are expressed (9–22).

The classification of judgers (5, 23) can evoke some objections. They appearin two different places: Brentano’s judging subject is placed within the groupof concrete mental entities, whereas Kotarbinski’s judger belongs, according to´the list, to concrete physical objects. This is because, according to Brentano,the judging subject is a mental event, whereas, for Kotarbinski, the judging´person should be interpreted rather as a physical body.

In this respect all of the entities which serve as truth bearers on the list canbe ascribed to such ontological categories as events, processes, bodies, statesof affairs or ideal objects. Abstract entities are treated here as species, on oneoccasion, and as types, on another occasion. Such an ontological taxonomymakes it possible, for example, to determine whether the entities that serve astruth bearers are durable or not in Twardowski’s (and in the ordinary) sense ofthis word.

Final Comments 219

An interesting fact is that all entities included in the list are, accordingto philosophers who claimed their existence, capable of being expressed bymeans of the linguistic entities which are to be found in the middle part of thelist, i.e. they are able to be ‘brought into existence’ with the help of sentencesand utterances of different sorts.

The taxonomy on which the list is based is, unfortunately, not unique ina logical sense. This is because there are several different overlapping divisionsamong the entities that appear on this list. The same entity as seen from differ-ent standpoints can be written down on the list in various places. In particular,this study shows that every sequence of ink-dots of a given shape (determinedby English grammar and habits) can be listed in many places, depending ofhow we treat them: as concretes or as species, as names or as types, as indi-vidual names or as general names, as physical bodies or as psycho-physicalproducts, as intentionally produced or as capable of being intentionally read,as expressing acts or as fixing meanings, as having contents or as referring, andso on.

Notes1 I use here the notion of explication as defined by R. Carnap in Carnap 1950 and, with some changes, by

T. Pawłowski in Pawłowski 1986.

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Appendix APublications of Artur Rojszczak

1. Edited VolumesFilozofia Austriacka [Austrian Philosophy], Kraków 1994, Uniwersytet Jagiellonski (=´ Prin-cipia 8–9); together with T. Lubowiecki.

The Legacy of Brentano, Würzburg 1998/1999, Röll Verlag (= Brentano Studien 8); togetherwith W. Baumgartner, A. Kraus, and J. Wolenski.´

Philosophical Dimensions of the Unity of Science. Contributed Papers of the 11th In-ternational Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht 2003,Kluwer; together with J. Cachro and G. Kurczewski.

Logic and Philosophy. In Search of Polish Tradition. Essays in Honour of Jan Wolenskión the Occasion of his 60 th Birthday, Dordrecht 2004, Kluwer; together with J. Hintikka,T. Czarnecki, K. Kijania-Placek and T. Placek.

2. ArticlesO pewnej krytyce teorii deskrypcji [On a Certain Critique of the Theory of Description],Principia 2 (1990), 65–69.

Polnische deskriptive Psychologie. Die Geschichte und Untersuchungen zu den anschauli-chen Vorstellungen, Brentano Studien 5 (1994), 129–147.

Wahrheit und Evidenz bei Franz Brentano, Brentano Studien 5 (1994), 187–218.

Prawda i oczywistosc w filozofii Franciszka Brentany [Truth and Evidence in the Philos-óphy of Franz Brentano], in Filozofia Austriacka [Austrian Philosophy], ed. by T. Lubo-wiecki and A. Rojszczak, Kraków 1994, Aureus (= Principia 8–9), 137–169.

Od sadów do zda˛ n. No´ snik prawdy a obiektywizacja wiedzy [From the Act of Judging to´the Sentence. Truth-bearers and the Objectivisation of Knowledge], Filozofia Nauki [Phi-losophy of Science] 2(1997), Warszawa, UW, 93–106.

The Problem of Truth-Bearers from Twardowski to Tarski, in The Lvov-Warsaw School andthe Contemporary Philosophy, ed. by K. Kijania-Placek and J. Wolenski, Dordrecht 1998,´Kluwer, 73–84.

Dlaczego za nosniki prawdy uwa´ za si˙ e obiekty fizyczne? [Why Physical Objects Are Taken˛To Be Truth-Bearers?], Filozofia Nauki [Philosophy of Science] 1 (1998), Warszawa, UW,65–79.

235

236 APPENDIX A

Die Gegenstandstheorie in der polnischen deskriptiven Psychologie, in The Legacy of Bren-tano, ed. by W. Baumgartner, A. Kraus, A. Rojszczak and J. Wolenski, Würzburg 1998/´1999, Röll Verlag = Brentano Studien 8, 67–80.

Why Should a Physical Object Take on the Role of Truth Bearers?, in Alfred Tarski and theVienna Circle, ed. by E. Köhler and J. Wolenski, Dordrecht 1999, Kluwer, 115–125.´

Uwagi o intencjonalnosci w programie epistemologii tradycyjnej [Some Remarks on Inten-´tionality in the Traditional Epistemology], in Filozofia i logika. W strone Jana Wole˛ nskiego´[Philosophy and Logic. Around the Philosophy of Jan Wolenski], ed. by J. Hartman,´Kraków 2000, Aureus, 314–333.

Wstep. Sylwetka Profesora Jana Wole˛ nskiego [An Introduction. The Figure of Professor´Jan Wolenski], in´ Filozofia i logika. W strone Jana Wole˛ nskiego´ [Philosophy and Logic.Around the Philosophy of Jan Wolenski], ed. by J. Hartman, Kraków 2000, Aureus, 8–15;´together with T. Placek.

Urteilstheorien und Sachverhalte, in Satz und Sachverhalt, ed. by O. Neumayer, Salzburg2001, Sankt Augustin Academia Verlag, 9–74; together with B. Smith.

Mentalizm, psychologizm, intencjonalnosc i semantyka referencjalna [Mentalism, Psychol-ógism, Intentionality and Referential Semantics], in Psychologizm i antypsychologizm [Psy-chologism and Anti-Psychologism], ed. by A. Olech. Kraków 2001, Aureus, 97–122.

Philosophical Background and Philosophical Content of Semantic Definition of Truth,Erkenntnis 56(1) (2002), 29–62.

Ekstensjonalnosc / intensjonalno´ sc [Extentionality / Intensionality], in J. Bobryk,´ Teoriadziałania K. Twardowskiego [K. Twardowski’s Theory of Action], Warszawa 2001, Pró-szynski i S-ka, 128–141.´

Theories of Judgement, in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1914, ed. by T. Bald-win, Cambridge 2003, Cambridge University Press, 157–173; together with B. Smith.

Uwagi o filozoficznym tle semantycznej definicji Tarskiego [Remarks on the Philosophi-cal Background of Tarski’s Semantic Definition], in Alfred Tarski: Dedukcja i semantyka[Alfred Tarski: Deduction and Semantics], ed. by J.J. Jadacki, Warszawa 2003, Semper,85–89.

Objective Truth before Tarski, in Logic and Philosophy. In Search of Polish Tradition, ed.by T. Czarnecki, J. Hintikka, K. Kijania-Placek, T. Placek, A. Rojszczak, Dordrecht 2004,Kluwer, 229–268; together with B. Smith.

From the Judging to the Sentence. Truth-Bearers and the Objectivisation of Knowledge,submitted to The Lvov-Warsaw School. The Third Generation, ed. by J.J. Jadacki andJ. Pasniczek, Amsterdam, Rodopi (forthcoming).´

3. Conference PapersWahrheitsträger, Urteile und Sätze, in Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences. Papers ofthe 16th international Wittgenstein Symposium, ed. by R. Casati, G. White, Kirchberg amWechsel 1993, The Austrian L. Wittgenstein Society, 455–458.

Über die Korrespondenz von Tarskis Definition der Wahrheit. In: ANALYOMEN I. Pro-ceedings of the 1st Conference ‘Perspectives in Analytical Philosophy’, ed. by G. Meggle,U. Wessels, Berlin, New York 1994, de Gruyter, 539–543.

Some remarks on Semanticalistic Representation of Intentionality, in Rationality and Irra-tionality. Contributed papers to the 23rd International Wittgenstein Symposium, ed. B. Bro-gaard, Kirchberg am Wechsel 2000, The Austrian L. Wittgenstein Society, 115–121.

INDEX 237

4. Reviews and AbstractsÜber die Korrespondenz von Tarskis Definition der Wahrheit, in Analyomen I (Abstracts),Saarbruecken, 9–12 Oktober 1991.

Review of Ryszard Jadczak, Człowiek szukajacy etyki. Filozofia moralna Kazimierza Twar-˛dowskiego [Review of Ryszard Jadczak, The Man in Search of Ethics. Moral Philosophy ofKazimierz Twardowski], Reports on Philosophy 15 (1995), 163–166 (in German).

Intentionality—Orthodox and Modern Approaches. In: 11th International Congress ofLogic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science—Volume of Abstracts, ed. by J. Cachro,K. Kijania-Placek, Kraków 1999, IF UJ, p. 368.

On Philosophical Background of Semantic Definition of Truth, in Alfred Tarski CentenaryConference (Abstracts), 28 May – 1 June 2001, Technical Report, Institute of Informatics,Warsaw University, p. 44.

5. Varia (translations, editions, polemics)Franz Brentano: W kwestii metafizyki [On Metaphysics], in Filozofia Austriacka [AustrianPhilosophy], ed. by T. Lubowiecki and A. Rojszczak, Kraków 1994, Aureus (= Principia8–9), 101–136. Translation of the manuscript from German into Polish.

(1994): Kazimierz Twardowski: Wykład wstepny na Uniwersytecie Lwowskim (z 15.˛listopada 1895 roku) [The Inaugurational Lecture at the Lvov University (from 15th No-vember 1895)], in Filozofia Austriacka [Austrian Philosophy], ed. by T. Lubowiecki, andA. Rojszczak, Kraków 1994, Aureus (= Principia 8–9), 225–236; edition of Twardowski’shandwriting manuscript.

Index

Ajdukiewicz, K., 6, 7, 9, 12–14, 18, 20, 21, 106,110, 143, 154, 158, 190, 199–204,211

Armstrong, D., 24, 30

Berg, J., 86, 101, 130, 157, 158Blaustein, L., 14, 54, 157Bolzano, B., 12, 17, 18, 21, 41, 84, 85, 96, 98,

99, 101, 111–116, 121–128, 130,133–135, 138, 144, 145, 147–149,151, 152, 157–159, 161, 167, 168,174, 194, 212, 218

Brentano, F., 2, 8, 9, 11–18, 20, 21, 25–27,29, 33–43, 45, 47–53, 54, 57–62,64–66, 69–72, 74, 75, 78, 81, 84–90, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103–106, 109,109, 110, 111, 116–125, 128, 137,138, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 154,157, 168, 171, 172, 176, 177, 191,193, 197, 198, 200, 215–218

Carnap, R., 9, 219Cavalin, J., 54Chisholm, R., 54, 109Czezowski, T., 14, 18,˙ 21, 81, 191–193, 211,

217

Dambska, I.,˛ 20, 21Dummett, M., 21

Ehrenfels, Ch. von, 101

Field, H., 2, 20Findlay, J.N., 54Fodor, J., 212Frege, G., 9, 15, 16, 60, 81, 84, 87, 101, 107,

151, 157, 176, 186–188, 208

Haller, R., 54, 168Hillebrand, F., 14, 81, 157Hintikka, J., 102

Hosiasson, J., 21Husserl, E., 3, 11–14, 17–19, 21, 24, 41, 83, 85,

88–101, 102, 107, 121–125, 127–130, 133, 141, 144, 145, 147, 148,150–152, 157, 158, 165, 168, 171,172, 176, 181, 189, 190, 194, 217,218

Jadacki, J., 21

Köhler, E., 20Kastil, A., 36Kokoszynska, M., 8–10, 18,´ 21, 142, 143, 158Kotarbinski, T., 6, 7, 9, 12–15, 17, 18,´ 20, 21,

27, 82, 103, 106–109, 109, 110,134–141, 154, 158, 162–166, 168,169, 182, 190, 197–201, 211, 214,217, 218

Kraus, O., 110

Lesniewski, St., 6, 7, 9, 11–15, 18,´ 20, 21, 27,72, 82, 103, 106, 109, 134, 135,138–142, 158, 162–168, 169, 171–177, 188, 189, 190, 205

Lotze, H., 84, 86, 87, 101

Łukasiewicz, J., 6, 7, 9–12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21,120, 128–130, 132–134, 154, 157,158, 173, 193–197, 202, 211, 217,218

Münch, D., 54Mally, E., 54Marty, A., 12, 13, 15, 17, 21, 49–53, 55, 57, 72–

79, 81, 82, 83, 87, 90, 95–101, 102,125, 134, 139, 141, 142, 151, 168,172, 176, 178, 190, 217, 218

McDowell, J., 20Meinong, A., 11, 12, 15, 17, 21, 39, 41, 44–

49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 65–71, 76, 78,

239

240 INDEX

81, 82, 86, 87, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101,102, 128, 130, 142, 168, 168, 175,187, 190, 193–196, 198, 217, 218

Morscher, E., 30, 157, 158, 161, 162, 168Mulligan, K., 55

Neurath, O., 7, 9–11, 21Nuchelmans, G., 30Nyiri, J.C., 168

Ossowska, M., 18, 19, 177–183, 189, 190Ossowski, St., 18, 19, 82, 183–189, 190, 199,

207–209, 217

Pasniczek, J.,´ 54Paczkowska-Łagowska, E., 44, 54Pawłowski, T., 219Popper, K.R., 133, 145, 147, 150, 158, 159Puntel, L.B., 24, 28

Reinach, A., 3, 17, 83, 99–101, 102, 125, 142,168, 218

Rojszczak, A., 20, 21, 169, 203Russell, B., 9, 13, 15, 16, 23, 24, 30, 163, 171–

173, 176, 178, 183, 186, 200

Schaar, M. van der, 101Schuhmann, K., 102Simons, P., 7, 8, 12, 14–16, 20, 21, 30, 55, 81,

109, 157, 158, 162, 168, 169, 190Skolimowski, H., 7, 20Sluga, H., 101

Smith, B., 7, 20, 55, 101, 102, 109, 110, 153,159, 168

Stout, G.F., 87, 101Stumpf, C., 85–87, 96, 101, 130, 198Szaniawski, K., 7, 20Sztejnbarg, D., 21

Tarski, A., 1–11, 13–19, 20, 21, 24, 27, 81, 116,128, 142, 143, 158, 159, 162, 163,171–177, 183, 197, 203, 205, 206,208–211, 211, 212, 213–218

Tenner, D., 44, 54Twardowski, K., 3, 7–12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24,

26, 27, 30, 31, 38–48, 51, 53, 54,60–65, 78, 81, 86–88, 90, 99, 100,101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110,111, 112, 120, 125–134, 137, 138,141, 146, 154, 158, 159, 162, 163,165, 166, 168, 173, 175, 180, 181,183, 184, 189, 191, 192, 198, 200,201, 206–208, 211, 217, 218

Weingartner, P., 157Willard, D., 102Witasek, S., 130, 158Wittgenstein, L., 16, 128, 158, 183Wolenski, J., 7, 8, 14–16,´ 20, 21, 109, 110, 163,

166, 168, 169, 172, 173, 177, 189,190

Zawirski, Z., 21

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