Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886–1981) was a prominent member of the Lvov‑Warsaw School. He is most famous as the founder of praxiology, but his contribution to ontology and semantics was significant as well. Kotarbiński introduced the doctrine of reism (in Elementy [Elements], in 1929). Ontological reism is a radical form of nominalism; it claims that there are no other objects than things or concrete individuals. Semantic reism claims that meaningful statements have to contain only concrete terms (names of things). Other terms are (...) apparent or “onomatoids”, and they should be eliminable from meaningful statements. In his doctrine, Kotarbiński appealed to Leśniewski’s Ontology (calculus of names). He also advocated a version of the classical correspondence theory of truth (without assuming the existence of facts, states of affairs, and sets). He combined this view with his reism, which accepts physicalism (all psychic beings are physical objects). This position differed from the Vienna Circle, where the correspondence theorists (Moritz Schlick) were phenomenalists and the physicalists (Otto Neurath) supported the coherence theory. (shrink)

The paper deals with the concept of empty name in the theory of Tadeusz Kotarbiński - one of the representatives of Lvov-Warsaw School. The aim of the article is to reconstruct Kotarbinski's definition of empty names, his thesis concerning structure and connotation of empty names, his interpretation of categorical sentence with empty names and to point out problems which arise in consequence of these theories. Only same expressions regarded traditionally as empty names are empty names according to Kotarbinski, e.g. "son (...) of childless mother" or "centaur". Expressions like "Brotherhood of the sons of childless mother" - in opinion of Kotarbiński - aren't names at all, they are onomatoids. In Kotarbiński's syntactic-semantic definition of empty name several vicious circles can be found. His theories of empty names and their connotation are at odds with his thesis of reism. He doesn't make any distinction between different types of empty names, but he prompts to distinguish three types of such names: (1) names of objects the non-existence of which is known by experience and names of such non-existing objects, which could exist in the past, (2) names of incoherent objects and (3) names of objects, which can exist in future. The semantic definition of empty names consistent with reism is possible on condition that empty names are only the names of objects that will exist in future. (shrink)

Salmon and Soames argue against nominalism about numbers and sentence types. They employ (respectively) higher-order and first-order logic to model certain natural language inferences and claim that the natural language conclusions carry commitment to abstract objects, partially because their renderings in those formal systems seem to do that. I argue that this strategy fails because the nominalist can accept those natural language consequences, provide them with plausible and non-committing truth conditions and account for the inferences made without committing themselves to (...) abstract objects. I sketch a modal account of higher-order quantification, on which instead of ranging over sets, higher order quantifiers are used to make (logical) possibility claims about which predicate tokens can be introduced. This approach provides an alternative account of truth conditions for natural language sentences which seem to employ higher-order quantification, thus allowing the nominalist to evade Salmon’s argument. I also show how the nominalist can account for the occurrence of apparently singular abstract terms in certain true statements. I argue that the nominalist can achieve this by, first, dividing singular terms into real singular terms (referring to concrete objects) and only apparent singular terms (called onomatoids), introduced for the sake of brevity and simplicity, and then providing an account of nominalistically acceptable truth conditions of sentences containing onomatoids. I develop such an account in terms of modally interpreted abstraction principles and argue that applying this strategy to Soames’s argument allows the nominalists to defend themselves. (shrink)