Ajdukiewicz, Husserl and Tarski—Concerning the Semantic Theory of Knowledge

• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Polskie Towarzystwo Semiotyczne / The Polish Semiotic Society 2020-10-01
• Series: Studia Semiotyczne
• Subjects: Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz; Edmund Husserl; Alfred Tarski; Anna Jedynak; Jan Woleński; semantic theory of knowledge
• Online Access: http://studiasemiotyczne.pts.edu.pl/index.php/Studiasemiotyczne/article/view/193

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/stsen.xxxi.02 This article is polemical. It argues with those philosophers who see, in the semantic theory of knowledge of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, the significant and exclusive influence of Alfred Tarski’s semantic output. Listening to these philosophers, one gets the impression that they have overlooked the fact that the term “semantics” meant one thing in the case of Ajdukiewicz, presenting the semantic theory of knowledge, and something different in the case of Tarski, presenting the semantic theory of truth. There is another difference, related to the abovementioned, and fundamental in the case of both these logicians, namely their different approach to language, which seems to escape the attention of those who write about the semantic theory of knowledge. Ajdukiewicz’s approach was intensional, while Tarski’s approach was extensional: for the first of them, the intensional interpretation of language was basic, as for the second, was the extensional interpretation. The philosophers with whom I argue overlook one more fact, namely the impact, difficult to overestimate, that the intentional theory of language of Edmund Husserl had on the emergence of the semantic theory of knowledge. This article tries to restore Tarski’s real role in the matter referred to in the title, and do justice to Husserl: after all, without his philosophy of the semantic theory of knowledge, as a metaepistemological project, it would not have come to be. It was only in the implementation of this project that some of the achievements of Tarski’s semantics were used.