Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz 1890 – 1963
Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz was a Polish philosopher and logician of the Lwow-Warsaw school and one of the leading philosophers of language and theory of knowledge of the interwar period. A pupil of Twardowski and a colleague of Lesniewski and Tarski, he held chairs at Warsaw, Lwow, and Poznan and developed the position he called radical conventionalism, according to which the meaning of expressions depends on the rules of an entire conceptual scheme that we have a limited but real freedom to choose. His Pragmatic Logic, Categorial Grammar, and the many essays later gathered in The Scientific World-Perspective shaped subsequent work on formal semantics and the philosophy of science.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Polish
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz:
“The meaning of a term depends on the rules of the language to which it belongs.”
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Attributed to Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz:
“Worldviews are products of conceptual schemes; conceptual schemes can be chosen.”
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Attributed to Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz:
“Logical analysis is the work of patient categorial grammar.”
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Attributed to Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz:
“Rationality requires the harmony of axioms, definitions, and rules of inference.”
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Attributed to Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz:
“Philosophy is best done in the company of logic.”