Polish philosophy and the Lvov–Warsaw school were considerably influenced

by Franz Brentano and his pupils ,  Anton Marty ,Kazimierz Twardowski and 
Twardowski founded the philosophical school when he became the chair of the Lvov
University.
Principal topics of interest to the Lvov–Warsaw school included formal ontology,
mereology, and universal or categorial grammar.
The Lvov–Warsaw School began as a general philosophical school but steadily
moved toward logic. The Lvov–Warsaw school of logic lay at the origin of Polish
logic and was closely associated with or was part of the Warsawschool of Mathematics.
According to Jan Wolenski, a decisive factor in the school's development was the
view that the future of the Polish school of mathematics depended on the research
connected with the new branches of the field such as 
theory and topology, which are closely related to mathematical logic. The
"philosophical branch" followed Twardowski's tradition and produced notable
thinkers such as Bronisław Bandrowski, who addressed the problem
of induction and Tadeusz Kotarbinski, who is known for developing reism
In the 1930s Alfred Tarski initiated contacts with the Vienna circle Tarski, the most
prominent member of the Lvov–Warsaw School, has been ranked as one of the four
greatest logicians of all time, along with Aristotle, Gottlob Frege, and Kurt Gödel.
The school's work was interrupted by the outbreak of World War 2. Despite this, its
members went on to fundamentally influence modern science, notably mathematics
and logic, in the post-war period. Tarski's description of semantic truth, for instance,
has revolutionized logic and philosophy.

Coming to Metaphilosophy ,mostphilosophers of the LWS understood philosophy as a

collection of disciplines, including logic, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and
epistemology. All members of the LWS inherited from Twardowski his main
metaphilosophical claims concerning clarity, justification and the separation of
philosophy from world-views. It also meant a radical rejection of all kinds of
irrationalism. A view, called anti-irrationalism by Ajdukiewicz, demanded that every
rationally accepted proposition be intersubjectively communicable and testable.
Twardowski himself favoured descriptive psychology as basic, but many of his students
found logic to be the most important source of methodological criteria for philosophy.
Perhaps Łukasiewicz was the most radical in this respect. According to him, a reform of
philosophy was needed in order to avoid errors of the past. Philosophy should proceed as
logic does, axiomatically starting from clear concepts and evident principles. Other
philosophers of the LWS were more modest and did not demand that philosophy should
be axiomatized. However, logical analysis of philosophical discourse became the
standard method of analysis. Yet the task of philosophy is not limited to the analysis of
language. Thus, philosophy, according to methodological claims of the LWS, was
analytic but not purely linguistic. Philosophy is concerned with the world but it mainly
performs its task also by the analysis of language, which is used in speaking about reality.
This view about philosophy is to be contrasted with that of the Vienna Circle. In
particular, the LWS was not interested in a general metaphilosophical scheme that sharply
divided philosophy into good and bad, but rather with an analysis of concrete problems.
Thus, the LWS was united more by a common methodological attitude and very general
claims concerning rationality than by a commonly accepted philosophical theory.
However, some general views were shared by most (‘most’ is very important here)
members of the LWS. These include: anti-scepticism, anti-naturalism in humanities and
axiology, e.t.c..

Moving on to Logic which consists of Polish notation, the requirements of logical

systems and metalogical concepts, Lukasiewicz invented a parenthesis-free logical
notation. The idea consisted in writing logical constants before their arguments.
Łukasiewicz replaced the usual signs for logical operations by
letters: N (negation), K (conjunction), A (disjunction), C (implication) and E (equivalence).
Any well-formed formula (the present explanations are restricted to propositional
calculus) must begin with a capital letter (propositional variables are symbolized by
lower-case Latin letters) which is the main functor of the entire formula. The main
connective has as its arguments variables or formulas consisting of variables and
constants. The structure of a formula in Polish notation is uniquely determined by the
position of the letters. The main advantage of Polish notation is its economy, because it
avoids special punctuation devices such as brackets or dots.
The parenthesis-free symbolism was closely associated with some ideas of Polish
logicians concerning the good properties of formal systems. Of course, any correct
logical system should be consistent and, if possible, syntactically and semantically
complete. It should also be based on independent sets of primitive terms and axioms.
The Warsaw School of Logic strongly emphasized the last property, often considered
secondary. Thus, the dependence of primitive terms or axioms was regarded as an
essential defect. Moreover, some additional structural properties of logical systems
were recommended: (a) a system with fewer primitive concepts is better; (b) a system
with fewer axioms is better; (c) if we define the length of an axiom system as the
number of symbols occurring in all of its axioms, the shortest axiom system is the best;
(d) a system with fewer different symbols is better; (e) if we define an organic theorem
as one which has no other theorem inside it (for example, the formula CpCqq is not an
organic theorem), organic axioms are better than non-organic ones. Thus, the ideal
axiom system consists of a sole organic axiom of the shortest possible length, provided
that it is consistent. Requirements (a)-(f) apply particularly well to propositional calculus.
They became the guiding principles of many logical investigations in the Warsaw School
of Logic. Logicians of this school also made precise many important metalogical
concepts, including those of the logical matrix, consequence operation, deductive
system and model.
For investigations of classical propositional calculus, Lukasiewicz formulated several
axiomatic bases for the functionally complete propositional calculus that is PC in which
all 16 binary connectives can be defined.

One of Lukasiewicz major achievements was the discovery of many-valued logic .He
observed that no functor of classical propositional calculus could be read as “it is possible
that” and provided that the formula Mp (it is possible that p) is extensional (i.e., that its
value depends solely on the value of p). The difficulty can be solved if we admit a third
value. Sentences about future contingent states of affairs are natural candidates for having
the third value (½). Three problems arose after discovering many-valued logic. The first
concerned its axiomatization and metalogical properties, the second its philosophical
foundations and intuitive interpretation, and the third its applications. Due to the work of
Łukasiewicz himself, Wajsberg and Słupecki, the first group of questions can be defined

Leśniewski intended to a formulate the full logical system that would serve as the basis
for the whole of science, and in particular for mathematics. This system consists of three
parts (a) protothetic (a generalized propositional calculus); (b) ontology (a logic of
terms); (c) mereology (a theory of parts and wholes). Protothetic is a calculus in which
quantifiers bind propositional variables and variables referr to arbitrary functors
constructible over the usual functors: that is, functors of propositional variables, functors
of functors, etc. In general, if we start with the category of sentences alone, protothetical
quantifiers bind variables of all further definable
As for semantic and truth, due to semantic paradoxes, Hilbert’s formalistic metamathematics and
the syntacticism of the Vienna Circle, the concept of truth was expelled from the domain of logic. It
was Tarski who changed this attitude. He was inspired by the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy, as
well as the non-constructive style of working on the foundations of mathematics that was prevailed
in Poland.

Tarski’s theory of truth (the semantic conception of truth) has two aspects: philosophical and formal.
Philosophically, it is a version of Aristotle’s idea that truth consists in saying that what is, is and what
is not, is not (it is related to the idea of correspondence). However, the main problem was formal.
Tarski had to offer a construction free of semantic paradoxes, in particular the Liar. He achieved this
goal by postulating that the concept of truth must be defined for a definite, well-constructed
formalized language L. However, the definition itself should be formulated in the
metalanguage ML. The definition is to be formally correct, that is, it cannot lead to contradictions
and has to satisfy the usual conditions of correctness (non-circularity, etc.). It should also be
materially adequate. According to Tarski, the basic intuition is captured by the T-scheme: s is true if
and only if P, where the letter s represents the name of a sentence and P is a translation of this
sentence into the metalanguage ML. Now the condition of material adequacy (the Convention T)
says that a truth definition TD is materially adequate if and only if all equivalences (that is, for all
sentences in L) stemming from the T-scheme by appropriate replacements are provable from the
definition.
Kotarbiński developed a general doctrine, called reism. It has two aspects, ontological and semantic.
Hence, we can speak about semantic reism and ontological reism, although this distinction was
clarified by Kotarbiński later. In general, reism goes against the acceptance of the existence of
general (abstract) objects, that is, facts, properties, states of affairs, relations, etc. The main
ontological thesis of reism is as follows (it is subdivided into two subtheses): (R1) any object is a
material, spatio-temporal, concrete thing; (R2) no object is a state of affairs, property of relation
(according to Kotarbiński, these three categories exhaust the domain of alleged abstract objects).
Now (R1), that is, the positive thesis of reism has a rich content. Firstly, it marks a formal feature of
existing objects, namely their concrete character.

Secondly, it characterizes things as material and spatio-temporal entities, that is, as physical objects.
Leibniz conceived monads as spiritual concreta. For the later Brentano, every object is concrete, but
there are souls and bodies. Thus, Leibniz’s reism was monistic and spiritualistic, Brentano’s was
dualistic, and Kotarbiński’s monistic and materialistic. Although the terminology varies (one can
equivalently speak about reism, concretism or nominalism), two claims of any theory going against
general (abstract) objects should be very sharply distinguished. The first is formal-ontological and
points out the formal feature of existents, namely that they are individuals; but the second is
material-ontological or metaphysical and focuses on their nature as physical or psychical entities.
Semantic reism is parallel to the ontological aspect of this doctrine. The key idea consists in the
distinction of genuine names and apparent names (onomatoids). A name is genuine if and only if
refers to things, that is, to concrete physical things. By contrast, onomatoids are words that allegedly
refer to abstract entities, “allegedly” because their referents do not exist. At first glance, apparent
names are similar to empty terms. However, this resemblance is merely apparent, because empty
nouns are genuine names and can always be decomposed into non-empty genuine names (e.g.,
“round square”). This becomes evident when we try to formulate the conditions of meaningfulness
for sentences. In general, a sentence is meaningful if and only if it consists (except for logical
constants) only of genuine names or is reducible to such sentences. For example, the sentence “all
cats are animals” is reistically meaningful, but “properties are abstract objects” is not. Furthermore,
“a square triangle is rectangular” is good, but “sets exist outside of time and space” is not. The
sentence “whiteness is a property of snow” can be reduced to “snow is white”. This example shows
how to translate some sentences with apparent names into purely reistic statements.
Matters become clearer if one remembers that Leśniewski’s calculus of names is the underlying logic
of reism. The copula “is” in “snow is white” functions with its meaning defined by the axiom of LO
(see above). Thus, this sentence is true if its subject refers to an individual object. The traditional
interpretation of common nouns and adjectives, consistent with LO, as general terms referring to
many objects, saves their reistic character. Thus, one can say that the formal-ontological aspect of
reism is adequately displayed by LO. Of course, reism as a metaphysical doctrine is an addition to LO.

Kotarbiński recommended reism as a sound view. In particular, it defends philosophy and ordinary
thinking before hypostases, that is, accepting the existence of abstract objects on the basis of using
apparent names. Thus, reism defends us against idola fori in Bacon’s sense. Kotarbiński’s reism
is perhaps the most radical materialistic nominalism in the history of philosophy. Reism is
exceptional to the main tendency in the LWS in that it proposes a uniform language, proper
everywhere, including the humanities, sociology and psychology (Kotarbiński supplemented reism by
radical realism, that is, the view that there are no mental contents). In this respect, reism resembles
physicalism. The troubles of reism are typical those which are in the case of any reductive
materialism and nominalism, and concern the interpretation of mathematics, semantics, psychology,
the humanities and social sciences.
The significance of the Lvov school of logic was that it acted in a country which never belonged to
the philosophical superpowers. This circumstance is important for any assessment of the significance
of the LWS. One can measure it on a national or an international scale. The importance of the LWS
for Polish philosophical culture was enormous. Twardowski fully realized his task. He introduced
scientific philosophy in his sense into Poland and created a powerful philosophical school. It did very
much for the subsequent development of philosophy in the country. In particular, it popularized very
high standards of doing philosophy. This was important in the difficult times after 1945, when
Marxism started an ideological and political offensive against bourgeois philosophy. In fact, due to
the strong methodological tradition related to the LWS, Polish philosophy did not lose its academic
quality in 1945–1989.

As far as the matter concerns international importance, one thing is clear. The logical achievements
of the LWS became the most famous. Doubtless, the Warsaw school of logic contributed very much
to the development of logic in the 20 th century. Other contributions are known but rather marginally.
This is partially due to the fact that most philosophical writings of the LWS appeared in Polish.
However, this factor does not explain everything. Many writings of the LWS were originally
published in English, French or German. However, their influence was very moderate, considerably
lesser than that of similar writings of philosophers from the leading countries. This is a pity, because
radical conventionalism, reism or semantic epistemology are the real philosophical pearls. But
perhaps this is the fate of results achieved in cultural changes. THERE was also Radical
conventionalism which is an epistemological theory developed by Ajdukiewicz in the early 1930s. It
is based on a conception of language and meaning. The concept of meaning is taken as a primitive.
Now, the meaning of expressions in a language L induces the rules for accepting its sentences.
Ajdukiewicz lists three kinds of meaning-rules (or sense-rules): (a) axiomatic (they demand the
unconditional acceptance of sentences, for example, “A is A”; (b) deductive (they demand the
acceptance of a sentence relatively to the prior acceptance of other sentences, for example,
¬A follows from A → B and ¬B), (c) empirical (they demand the acceptance of a sentence in a
definite empirical situation, for example “it is raining” when it rains).
The special significance of meaning-rules and their relation to the meanings of expressions appears
when special languages are taken into account, namely closed and connected. A language L is open
if it can be extended to a new language L′ without changes in the meanings of other expressions;
otherwise L is closed. A language is disconnected if there is a non-empty subset X of L such that no
element of X is linked by the meaning-rules to other elements of L; otherwise, L is connected. It
follows from the above definitions that if L is closed and connected, it cannot be enriched without
changing the meanings of the original expressions.

According to Ajdukiewicz, natural languages are open and disconnected. By contrast, scientific
languages are closed and disconnected. Let L be closed and connected. The set of meanings of L is
its conceptual apparatus. If A and A′ are two conceptual apparatuses, they are either identical or
mutually non-translatable. Since the acceptance and rejection of sentences is always related to a
language L, empirical data do no force us to accept or reject any sentences, because there always
remains the possibility of changing a given conceptual apparatus. This is a considerable radicalization
of the conventionalism of Poincaré. The difference is the following. For Poincaré, since theoretical
principles are conventions, we are free to modify them, but experiential reports are perfectly stable.
Ajdukiewicz extended conventionalism to all sentences, because any sentence, no matter whether
experiential or theoretical, depends on a conceptual apparatus. It is why Ajdukiewicz called this
conventionalism radical.

In the middle of the 1930s Ajdukiewicz changed his view. He came to the conclusion that closed and
connected languages are fictions. He was influenced by the semantic ideas of Tarski. Tarski also
argued that, contrary to Ajdukiewicz’s hopes, the invariance of meaning-rules over permutations of
expressions influences their meaning-relations. Gradually, Ajdukiewicz developed the program of
semantic epistemology, mainly directed toward the defence of realism against various forms of
idealism. In particular, he criticized Rickert’s transcendental idealism and Berkeley’s subjectivism. For
Rickert, reality is only a correlate of the Transcendental Subject. Now the Transcendental Subject can
be identified with the set T of true propositions obtainable on the basis of axiomatic and deductive
rules. However, due to incompleteness phenomena, T cannot be generated in this way. For
Ajdukiewicz, that was a justification that transcendental idealism fails. Ajdukiewicz compared the
language used by Berkeley to the language of syntax, because the former reduces
relations of the mind to its objects to relations between thoughts. On the other hand,
the ordinary way of speaking about objects employs semantic relations. Berkeley’s
claim esse = percipi is similar to an attempt to define semantics in a purely syntactic
language. However, due to Tarski’s results about the relation between syntax and
semantics, this is impossible. Finally, Ajdukiewicz argued that any idealistic language is
understandable only if it is associated with a realistic language. Hence, any attempt to
consider idealistic language as self-sufficient cannot be successful.

Another interesting field was the philosophy of science which was a favourite field of the LWS. Since
science is the most rational human activity, it was important to explain its rationality and unity. Since
most philosophers of the LWS rejected naturalism in the humanities and social sciences, the way
through the unity of language (as in the case of the Vienna Circle) was excluded. The answer was
simple: science qua science is rational and is unified by its logical structure and by definite logical
tools used in scientific justifications. Thus, the analysis of the inferential machinery of science is the
most fundamental task of philosophers science. Inductivism was a prevailing view about justification
in empirical science. Hosiasson formulated an axiomatic system of inductive logic, anticipating
Carnap’s later work. Other attempts to establish the foundations of inductive inference were
undertaken by Ajdukiewicz (via statistics, decision theory and game theory (he mainly investigated
the problem of the rationality of modes of fallible inference), Czeżowski (via probability logic in the
sense of Reichenbach) and Zawirski (via a combination of many-valued logic and probability theory).

Łukasiewicz worked on problems of the methodology of the empirical sciences in 1902–1910. At

first, he tried to develop the inverse theory of induction (induction as inversed deduction) proposed
by Jevons and Sigwart. However, he abandoned this project very soon and adopted a radical
deductionist standpoint. For him, induction plays no significant role in science. Deduction remains
the only credible mode of reasoning in all spheres of science. As applied in empirical science, it leads
to negative results; that is, it can show that some hypotheses are false in the face of empirical data.
Łukasiewicz also offered a formal argument against induction derived from probability theory.
Assume that H is a universal hypothesis. Its a priori probability is equal (or close) to zero and no
further empirical data can increase it. These ideas contain the main points of Popper’s philosophy of
empirical science.
Tarski’s semantic ideas converted most members of the LWS to scientific realism. Formerly, under
the influence of conventionalism, instrumentalism concerning scientific theories had adherents
(Ajdukiewicz, Łukasiewicz). A radical form of anti-realism was developed by Poznański and
Wundheiler in the 1930s. They pointed out that verification in empirical science is cyclic and
principally anti-fundamentalistic. In particular, it is not possible to identify any data without a
reference to theories. Hence, truth in science cannot consist in a correspondence with facts.

Of many investigations concerning special problems, let me only mention Mehlberg’s version of the
causal theory of time and some works on the causality problem in quantum mechanics. He admitted
a universal time as a synthesis of physical (intersubjective) and psychical (subjective) time. The
causal theory does not lead to the anisotropy of time. It can be that universal time is symmetric, but
locally asymmetry is possible. Mehlberg and Zawirski defended a moderate causalism in quantum
mechanics. In particular, Zawirski argued that the unpredictability of the future (Heisenberg) does
not entail that the principle of causality fails.

However there was no official philosophy of logic and mathematics in the LWS. Most Polish logicians
treated logical studies as independent of philosophical commitments. Only Leśniewski had explicit
philosophical views which influenced the form of his systems. This does not mean that concrete
works were not influenced by philosophical ideas. Łukasiewicz’s many-valued logic and Tarski’s
theory of truth are perhaps model cases. The former had the problem of determinism as its
background and the second was strongly inspired by the Aristotelian tradition in thinking about
truth. It was also the case that Polish logicians had inclinations to empiricism as a general
epistemological attitude and this philosophy often resulted in sympathies to nominalism (Tarski),
constructivism (Mostowski) and scepticism concerning the sharp distinction between logical and
extralogical truth (Tarski). However, the technical side of logical problems decided about
investigations and sometimes forced changes in philosophical standpoints. The example of
Łukasiewicz is instructive once again. Although he at first thought of logic as a true or false
description of reality, he later adopted a more conventionalist and instrumentalistic standpoint. This
attitude allowed him to accommodate various ideas coming from rival foundational directions, that
is, logicism, formalism and intuitionism. In fact, Leśniewski and Tarski contributed to the theory of
logical types and combined it with the theory of syntactic categories; Tarski’s version in his work on
truth is particularly important. Tarski also showed new perspectives for logicism by defining logical
concepts as invariants under one-to-one transformations. He also contributed to general
metamathematics (the theory of consequence operation) and intuitionistic logic. However, a very
special feature of logical investigations performed in the LWS consisted in the free admission of all
fruitful mathematical methods, including non-constructive ones. This was the main point of the set
theoretical approach to the foundations of mathematics which replaced logicism.

The discovery of many-valued logic is commonly considered to be one of the major achievements of
Łukasiewicz. He did it in 1918, a little earlier than Post. However, although Post’s remarks were
parenthetical and extremely condensed, Łukasiewicz explained his intuitions and motivations
carefully and at length. He was guided by considerations about future contingents and the concept
of possibility.
Łukasiewicz observed that no functor of classical propositional calculus could be read as “it is
possible that” and provided that the formula Mp (it is possible that p) is extensional (i.e., that its
value depends solely on the value of p). The difficulty can be solved if we admit a third value.
Sentences about future contingent states of affairs are natural candidates for having the third value
(½). For example, the sentence “I will visit Warszawa next year”, is neither true nor false, it is merely
possible and has the value ½. Its negation has the same value. This idea led to three-valued logic.
The usual equalities for N, A, Kand C are supplemented by (I list only some cases) p = ½
= Np, K ½½ = ½, A½½ = ½. Easy calculations shows that ApNp and NKpNp have the value ½
for p = ½. This means that the laws of contradiction and excluded middle do not hold in three-valued
logic. Later, Łukasiewicz generalized it to logics with an arbitrary finite number of values and finally
to an countably infinite number of values.