Jan Wolenski

This paper proposes a formal framework for the cognitive relation understood as an ordered pair with the cognitive subject and object of cognition as its members. The cognitive subject is represented as consisting of a language, conequence relation and a stock of accepted theories, and the object as a model of those theories. This language allows a simple formulation of the realism/anti-realism controversy. In particular, Tarski’s undefinability theorem gives a philosophical argument for realism in epistemology.

Finland is internationally known as one of the leading centers of twentieth century analytic philosophy. This volume offers for the first time an overall survey of the Finnish analytic school. The rise of this trend is illustrated by original articles of Edward Westermarck, Eino Kaila, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka. Contributions of Finnish philosophers are then systematically discussed in the fields of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, ethics and social philosophy. Metaphilosophical reflections on the nature of philosophy are highlighted by the Finnish dialogue between analytic philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory.

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

This paper investigates relations between truth and consistency. The basic intuition is that truth implies consistency, but the reverse dependence fails. However, this simple account leads to some troubles, due to some metalogical results, in particular the Gödel-Malcev completeness theorem. Thus, a more advanced analysis is required. This is done by employing the concept of ω-consistency and ω-inconsistency. Both concepts motivate that the concept of the standard truth should be introduced as well. The results are illustrated by an interpretation of the well-known logical square and its generalization.

Klemens Szaniawski has been dealing with many philosophical problems, but the philosophical foundations of statistics and theory of decision were his main interest. Unfortunately, he did not present his results and considerations in a synthetic monograph. One can suppose, however, that it would be an attempt to look at science from the point of view of someone who makes epistemic decisions and to regard statistical inferences as paradigmatic scientific procedures. The material concerning that subject contained in Szaniawski's published papers justifies the claim that it would be an extremely interesting synthesis. The author presents consequences for naturalism and antinaturalism that the discussions surrounding the foundations of statistics and decision theory has brought about. He often employs the results obtained by Szaniawski

The paper consists of two parts. The first contains the paradox of Truth-teller, i.e. a sentence which asserts own truth. The paradox appears when we apply logic of rejection to the Truth-teller sentence. The Truth-teller paradox is symmetric with respect to the Liar paradox. The second part considers a sentence which asserts own provability. This sentence is unprovable on the base of rejection logic. This leads to counterparts of the Gödel incompleteness theorems and other metamathematical results