Chapter 6
In: The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy of Language
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Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to retrace Ajdukiewicz’s semantical path by highlighting that the originality of his approach is to have put forward that the syntactical calculus should be carried out in taking into account the semantical well-formedness of the sentence. In order to achieve this goal, Ajdukiewicz had two successive sources of inspiration: Husserl’s Fourth Logical Research in the thirties and Frege’s theory of meaning in the sixties. The first part of this chapter focuses on the thirties and compares Ajdukiewicz’s syntactical and semantical approach with that of his contemporary Rudolf Carnap who had an opposite theoretical position, since he considered that syntax has to operate on meaningless words. This analysis explains why Ajdukiewicz failed to elaborate a syntactico-semantical approach in the thirties and looked for another solution by drawing inspiration from Frege’s work. The second part outlines this new conception of meaning propounded by Ajdukiewicz in 1960 and underlines that it results from a misuse of the Fregean theory. Thus, if using philosophical theories to develop a semantics turns out to be a very difficult task, Ajdukiewicz’s goal to jointly calculate the syntactic and semantic dimensions of sentences is innovative, since it does justice to the fact that any speakers assesses simultaneously the grammaticality and the meaning of the statements read or heard.