Chapter 9
In: The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy of Language
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Abstract
One of the key achievements of Kazimierz Twardowski was the introduction of a division between the content, act, and object of presentation (1894). This division was not only the cornerstone of Twardowski’s theory of the mind, but it also formed the basis of his semiotic and methodological views. Twardowski identified the content of a presentation with the meaning of a linguistic expression. His approach seemed to contain some inconsistencies and was criticized by Jan Łukasiewicz (1906, 1907). Twardowski, as he admitted, under the influence of anti-psychological criticism of Łukasiewicz, modified his views but he did not wholly renounce his original psychological convictions.
It seems, however, that it was Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz who reconciled Twardowski’s psychological approach with Łukasiewicz’s anti-psychological one. In his attempt to achieve this, introduced many terminological distinctions, including psychological meaning, linguistic meaning, connotation, the content of the name, the content of the concept, full content, characteristic content, constitutive content, pleonastic content.
On the one hand, it might be supposed that in (1934) he wanted to present an account of the relationship between content and meaning which could be treated as a thoroughly grounded and precise development of Twardowski’s views. On the other hand, this approach is intended as a polemical with Twardowski’s stance adopted in (1929).