Truth and Time

Abstract

Polish philosophers such as Twardowski, Kotarbiński, Łukasiewicz and Leśniewski had been concerned with the concept of truth long before the famous Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen was published. Each of them made an important contribution to the discussion of the concept of truth relativised to time. Twardowski’s paper concerning so called relative truths appeared in 1900. In 1913 Kotarbiński published one of his most impressive philosophical articles ‘The Problem of the Existence of the Future’. In the same year two of Leśniewski’s papers appeared: the polemical essay ‘Is all truth only true eternally or is it also true without a beginning?’, and ‘A Critique of the Logical Principle of Excluded Middle’. Łukasiewicz was occupied with the concept of truth while he was examining many-valued logics. The first of Łukasiewicz’s notes on truth which are important for us may be found in his study On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle and in his short article ‘On the Law of the Excluded Middle’ which appeared in 1910. Next came the papers ‘On three valued logic’ (1920), ‘On Determinism’—an address delivered in 1922 — and ‘Philosophische Bemerkungen zur mehrwetigen Systemen des Aussagenkalküls’ (1930). I do not intend to give a detailed historical account of the discussion of the concept of truth in the Lvov-Warsaw School before Tarski. I would like rather to give a coherent interpretation of some ideas which may be found in the works mentioned above.

During the preparation of this paper the author was supported by the KBN grant: GR 511.