Chapter 11
In: The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy of Language
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Abstract
The idea of parataxis, usually connected with Donald Davidson, can be traced to Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s ontological papers published since early 1920s. Though both versions of parataxis were applied to eliminate non-extensional contexts from language, the philosophical motivations underlying them were different – basically semantical in case of Davidson, and metaphysical in case of Kotarbiński who, as a reist, admitted only the existence of changing objects called bodies. The difference between Davidson’s and Kotarbiński’s metaphysical assumptions was, in fact, not dramatic since both philosophers were nominalists and the main difference was that Davidson’s ontology comprised events. The aim of the paper is to examine the role of parataxis in Davidson and Kotarbiński. First of all I reconstruct a theory of meaning underlying Kotarbiński’s version of parataxis. This theory of meaning, implicitly assumed in his ontological papers, can be described as a strongly reductionist version of associations and is susceptible to criticism concerning mainly the lack of compositionality. Both philosophers reduced the mental to the physical, and parataxis played the crucial role in their versions of reduction, as it permitted to represent the reduction on linguistic level. Kotarbiński advocated a very strong version of conceptual reduction, i.e. class to class reduction. In particular, the class of acts of understanding of a linguistic expression was reduced to the class of changes in nervous systems and, consequently, the meaning of an expression was identified with some pattern in a nervous system. Contrary to Kotarbiński, Davidson advocated a weaker version of metaphysical reduction – a token to token reduction. Though he would obviously accept Kotarbiński’s contention that any act of understanding was a change in a nervous system, in order to assure the intersubjectivity of meanings he had to abandon their reification and identified Tarski’s definition of truth with a holistic theory of meaning.