[lit-ideas] Re: America's Greatest Word
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 11:07:14 +0000 (GMT)
--- On Mon, 31/1/11, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Donal wrote
On a quibble: Tarski was not a "Polish logician" so much as Polish and a
logician. He no more was a specifically Polish logician than he had a
specifically Polish cell-structure or DNA or was a specifically right-handed
logician. But we all knew this.
RP: I think it might be fair to call him a Polish logician in a non-trivial
sense (although I don't know if this is the sense JL has in mind). Tarski was a
member of the Lvov-Warsaw School (of philosophy), begun by Kazimierz
Twardowski, at the turn of the century in Lvov.
This is fair and draws attention to an important school of thought.
Nevertheless my quibble may be defended as based on the view that valid work in
logic cannot reflect national characteristics - a view that may be
reflected when 'Tarski once said “Religion [you can also say “ideology” — JW]
divides people, logic brings them together.”' We might say that the
universality of logic precludes it having specific local characteristics. But I
admit it is not quite as simple as that, even in the case of logic: if we
broaden 'national characteristics' to include certain cultural attitudes etc.
we might find certain 'national characteristics' more conducive to and
productive for work in developing logic, and even having an affect on how it is
developed. However, this would invite explanation and the explanation would
focus on what creates fertile ground for intellectual progress, and these
grounds would be of wider application than the specific instance they
explained.
This is illustrated by the factors used to explain the productivity of the LWS,
which include charismatic teachers, good organisation, a strong sense of
(moral) purpose and the value of what was being done, inter-disciplinary
openness and also intellectual rigour: the last perhaps best exemplified by the
"Polish notation" (which, as Robert relates it, could well be a running gag in
a Monty Python sketch, a la "The Spanish Inquisition").
So it still might be better to say it is only in a trivial sense that he was a
Polish logician as opposed to an English one, but it was significant that he
belonged to a specific Polish school of thought, the Lvov-Warsaw School (and
not, say, the Vienna Circle or the ordinary language Oxford School). After all,
the Lvov-Warsaw School could have included persons who were not Polish and had
its own roots in Brentano and other non-Polish sources.
It may be of interest that a highly productive school of thought may be founded
on a strictly false idea or set of ideas - indeed, in the history of ideas this
may be the rule rather than the exception. LWS may have had strictly false
working assumptions about the role and basis of logic but they were productive
of important work.
The Stanford entry reads, for example: "A view, called anti-irrationalism by
Ajdukiewicz, demanded that every rationally accepted proposition be
intersubjectively communicable and testable." This is surely problematic for
can this demand itself be tested, and, if not, it is therefore not itself a
"rationally accepted proposition". Ajdukiewicz's anti-irrationalism bears
comparison with the Vienna Circle's Verficationist Criterion of Meaning and
opens itself to similar objections; yet while problematic, questionable and
perhaps 'false' this "anti-irrationalism" may also have been a useful stance.
Given that the imminent arrival of the Polish Notation once caused Robert to
hide in the woods, I recall that members of LWS were slightly dumbfounded that
the Oxford School could write about logic in essay-style using miminal or no
notation but rather words, and that this could be a badge of honour. The
difference may reflect a difference in underlying view as to how 'analysis of
language' should be done: one view being that ordinary language itself is the
tool most apt for analysing language, the other being that logic is [in a way
the difference between the later and earlier Wittgenstein is a reflection of
this difference].
Donal
London
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