Artur Rojszczak

FROM THE ACT OF JUDGING TO THE SENTENCE: THE TRUTH-BEARER AND THE OBJECTIVISATION OF TRUTH

1. An Introduction

1. It seems that the following questions have not yet been answered satisfactorily. The first question is: “How it is possible to go from the act of judging as a truth-bearer to the sentence as a truth-bearer?” And the second is: “Why should sentences and not, for example, judgments or something else play the role of truth-bearers?” Choosing sentences as truth-bearers, as Tarski did in his (1933) definition of truth, has a deeper historical and philosophical basis than is commonly believed. Tarski’s choice is not only the result of, so to speak, a “referential theory of meaning,” which is always formulated in a definition of a sentence as “an expression of language with its meanings.” These deepest grounds I would see as lying in the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School, specifically in Twardowski’s views about meaning and judgment, but also in the views on language and truth held by Twardowski’s pupils and Tarski’s teachers: Jan àukasiewicz, Tadeusz KotarbiĔski and Stanisáaw LeĞniewski. Tarski himself refers to these figures directly (see e.g. Tarski 1933, footnotes: 1, 3, 5; p. 17) and this entitles me to state that the tradition which I mention goes even further back in time – namely to the tradition of the Brentano School (or, if one will, to the tradition of Brentanian philosophy), to Franz Brentano himself and to Bernard Bolzano, whose ideas have been rediscovered only in our own century (e.g. the idea of variation in Husserl’s phenomenology or in Tarski’s semantics). What I am interested in, therefore, is the problem of the truth-bearer from Bolzano to Tarski. 2. To paraphrase Jan WoleĔski’s statement that the Brentanian tradition has been the natural context for research in semantics in Poland (see e.g. WoleĔski 1994, p. 85), I propose that the Brentanian tradition has

In: J.J. Jadacki and J. PaĞniczek (eds.), The Lvov-Warsaw School – The New Generation (PoznaĔ Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 89), pp. 401-419. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2006. 402 Artur Rojszczak been the natural context for research in the philosophy of the entire Lvov-Warsaw School and especially for the theory of truth and for the above-mentioned turn from mental acts to language as the locus of truth- bearers. I see the natural context of Brentanian philosophy for research in truth theory in Poland not only in Brentanian and post-Brentanian theories of intentionality, but also: • in theories of judgment (from Brentano, through Meinong, Husserl, and Reinach to Twardowski, àukasiewicz, CzeĪowski and Ajdukiewicz); • in the criticism of psychologism in post-Brentanian philosophy (Husserl, Twardowski, àukasiewicz, KotarbiĔski); • in the philosophy of language (Brentano, Marty, Twardowski, LeĞniewski) including the theory of meaning (Bolzano, Brentano, Twardowski, Reinach, àukasiewicz, Tarski, Ajdukiewicz); • in truth theories and in commentaries on these theories (on the part of Brentano, Bolzano, Husserl, KotarbiĔski, LeĞniewski, àukasie- wicz, Tarski); • in reforms and in the very discovery of logic in the modern sense (which includes not only the establishment of mathematical logic, but also in reforms such as that of Brentano); • in the problem of the objectivisation of the knowledge of the empirical subject (Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl, Twardowski). This last issue is in fact the main topic of the present paper. 3. It is not my aim to engage in a purely historical analysis or exegesis of published and unpublished texts relevant to my central problem. Rather, what I am going to do is to collect and put in order arguments for an account of the nature of the truth-bearer. The ordering of arguments sometimes has a historical basis. It may also, however, lie in the intrinsic rationality of given modes of philosophical speculation. The collection of arguments is arrived at by raising different questions in reference to the truth-bearer problem. These were in some cases raised by authors within the Brentanian tradition – as, for example, the question: “How is objective knowledge on the part of an empirical subject possible?” (see Husserl 1891; see also Dallas 1984). The present text is more a summary of research carried out in the relevant contexts of Brentanian philosophy than a rational-historical analysis of sources. 4. Note that the assumption of the relevance of the problem of the truth-bearer in the theory of truth served as a ground and presupposition for the kind of research I tried to do. As a result of this, reference to