Jan Wolenski

This paper critically discusses two points concerning some recent views about the concept of truth. Firstly, contrary to Davidson, it shows that meaning of sentences cannot be explicated by T-equivalences. In particular, “is true” is an extensional predicate, but “means that” an intensional one. Secondly, the minimalist account of truth does not provide a satisfactory analysis of the concept of falsity. In this respect, minimalism does not satisfy Russell’s claim that any adequate truth-theory must be a theory of falsity as well.

Władysław Witwicki was first of all a psychologist, but he graduated in philosophy from Lvov University, being one of the earliest pupils of Kazimierz Twardowski. He was a representative of the descriptivistic branch of the Lvov-Warsaw School. In the area of phsychology he put into practice the important postulate of his teacher, who persuaded his students to write original handbooks, giving Polish scholar contributions their due: it is how the work on Witwicki's Psychology began. In the area of philosophy he was particularly interested in the foundations of (descriptive) psychology. Witwicki's ontological and epistemological views are close to realism. In ethics he defended the absolute character of moral norms against scepticism and relativism. In general, Witwicki subscribed to anti-irrationalism, the common standpoint in his School

Formal semantics is understood either as a formal analysis of semantical features of natural language or as model-theoretic semantics of formal(ized) languages. This paper focuses on the second understanding. The problem is how to identify the formal aspects of formal semantics, if we understand ‘formal’ as ‘independent of content’. This is done by showing that the form of semantical interpretation of a language L is given by its syntax and the parallelism of the signature of L and its interpretative structure SI. However, the content of interpretation, that is, the way of correlating of L-expressions with extralinguistic items depends of informal factors. The discussion shows that semantics is prior to syntax