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Kazimierz Twardowski (1866-1938), the founder of the so-called Lvov-Warsaw school,
studied in Vienna with F. Brentano. He developed an approach to philosophical problems that focused on language. He treated
metaphysical concepts as pre-scientific in the sense that they
could be explored by being incorporated in particular scientific
disciplines.
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Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz
(1890-1963) studied in Göttingen (philosophy with Husserl and
mathematics with Hilbert). He followed Twardowski to emphasize the
dependence of knowledge on language. He invented the field of
categorical grammar, of current interest in formal linguistics. He also
proposed "radical conventionalism", a doctrine elaborated in the
1930s. It holds that there exist conceptual systems which are not
intertranslatable, and that scientific knowledge grows through the
replacement of one such conceptual system by another. (Shades of
Kuhn and Feyerabend.)
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My teacher, Henry Mehlberg (1904-1979),
was a student of Ajdukiewicz. He also studied with Twardowski, and with
M. Schlick in Vienna. Mehlberg wrote an important essay on the causal
theory of time, essentially deriving the spacetime of special
relativity from a single symmetric primitive, "is causally related to". In The
Reach of Science
(Toronto:1958) he defends a neo-positivist conception of the cognitive
hegemony of
science. In addition to works on philosophy of mathematics and physics,
Mehlberg introduced a form of functionalism in philosophy of
mind and also pioneered a treatment of truth and vagueness along lines
that
David Lewis later developed. (Here is a photograph from 1936-37 of Twardowski and students with – top and bottom left – both
Henry Mehlberg and his wife, the mathematician Josephine Mehlberg, who
worked for the Polish underground during WW II under the alias
"Countess Janina Suchodolska".)
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