Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz

Dzieła

• 1934Język i znaczenie

  Znaczenie jest ustalane przez reguły języka; ponieważ różne języki dają różne, nieprzekładalne obrazy świata, wybór języka rozstrzyga o tym, jaki mamy obraz świata – radykalny konwencjonalizm.

• 1935O spójności syntaktycznej

  Przypisuje każdemu wyrażeniu kategorię i pokazuje rachunkiem, czy zdanie jest poprawnie zbudowane – fundament gramatyki kategorialnej.

Stanowisko

Ajdukiewicz is a central figure of the Lwów–Warsaw School. In “Language and Meaning” and “The World-Picture and the Conceptual Apparatus” (both 1934) he argued that the meaning of an expression is fixed by rules – axiomatic, deductive and empirical – that speakers must accept. Since closed languages with different rules cannot be translated into one another, which judgements we accept depends on the conceptual apparatus we choose. This “radical conventionalism” went beyond Henri Poincaré and Édouard Le Roy; Ajdukiewicz himself gave it up in the late 1930s, conceding that real languages are neither closed nor connected in his sense, and turned to a semantic epistemology and later to a radical empiricism. His 1935 paper on syntactic connexion, building on Husserl’s categories of meaning and Leśniewski’s semantic categories, assigned every expression a category and gave a procedure for testing whether a string is well formed; Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Joachim Lambek developed it in the 1950s into categorial grammar, a basis of later formal semantics. His view of meaning as acceptance according to rules is discussed today as an early form of inferential role semantics. Critics have objected that such rules are hard to identify in natural languages.

Życie i kontekst

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz was born on 12 December 1890 in Tarnopol in Austrian Galicia (today Ternopil, Ukraine). He studied philosophy, mathematics and physics in Lwów, where Kazimierz Twardowski supervised his doctorate on Kant’s theory of space (1912); he later married Twardowski’s daughter Maria. In 1913 he spent a semester in Göttingen with Edmund Husserl and David Hilbert. During the First World War he served in the Austrian army. After his habilitation in Warsaw (1921) he taught there and in the 1920s returned to Lwów as professor. In 1934–35 he published his main papers on meaning and on syntactic connexion in “Erkenntnis” and “Studia Philosophica”; he also wrote textbooks of logic for schools. He lived through the Second World War in Lwów under Soviet and then German occupation. After 1945 he moved to Poznań, where he was rector of the university from 1948 to 1952, and in 1955 to Warsaw. In 1953 he founded the journal “Studia Logica”. He died in Warsaw on 12 April 1963.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Main Directions of Philosophy (Główne kierunki filozofii, 1923)
• Language and Meaning (Sprache und Sinn, 1934)
• The World-Picture and the Conceptual Apparatus (Das Weltbild und die Begriffsapparatur, 1934)
• Syntactic Connexion (Die syntaktische Konnexität, 1935)
• Problems and Theories of Philosophy (Zagadnienia i kierunki filozofii, 1949)
• Pragmatic Logic (Logika pragmatyczna, 1965)