When asked in 1962 on what he was working Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz replied: Several years ago Polish Scientific Publishers suggested that I pre pare a new edition of The Logical Foundations of Teaching, which I wrote 1 before 1939 as a contribution to The Encyclopaedia of Education. It was a small booklet covering elementary information about logical semantics and scientific methodology, information which in my opinion was necessary as a foundation of teaching and as an element of the education of any (...) teacher. When I recently set to preparing the new edition, I rewrote practically everything, and a booklet of some 100 pages swelled into a bulky volume almost five times bigger. The issues have remained practically the same, but they are now analysed much more thoroughly and the threshold of difficulty is much higher now. The main stress has been laid on the methods used in the empirical sciences, and within that field, on the theory of measurement and the methods of statistical inference. I am now working on the last chapter of the book, concerned with explanation procedures and theory construction in the empirical sciences. When that book, which I intend to entitle Pragmatic Logic, is com pleted I intend to prepare for the press Vol. 2 of my minor writings, 2 Language and Cognition, which will cover some of my post-war pa pers. (shrink)

Modern Polish philosophy has an impressive record as a powerful, innovating tradition, in many respects parallel to but independent of the development of analytical philosophy in Britain and America. Owing to an absence of adequate translations however, the work of its leading exponents has generally only been encountered second-hand. To remedy this, Quinton and Skolimowski have translated an introduction to philosophy written by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, probably the outstanding representative of the generation. Problems and Theories of Philosophy surveys concisely and, so (...) far as possible, systematically the main problems in epistemology and metaphysics and the most historically important of the solutions proposed to them. The book still reads freshly and displays many of the characteristic intellectual virtues of Polish philosophy: clarity and straightforwardness of presentation combined with a bracing rigour and precision. It is in no sense parochial to its Polish origins and can stand beside the classic English introductions to the subject as stimulating and lucid analysis of perennial philosophical problems and strategies. (shrink)

During the first semester of the academic year 1930/31 in the John Casimir University in Lvov Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz delivered a series of lectures on logical semantics. In eight of them, now published for the first time, he presents - in the very clear manner - his fractional method of identifying syntactic categories, and he shows how to use this method to eliminate the antynomies of classes, relations and properties. The Ajdukiewiczian method had been appreciated among logicians and it is considered (...) widely one of the starting points of so-called categorial grammars. (shrink)

So, e.g., this arrangement of terms "John loves Anne" is syntactically built up in a coherent way out of terms that make sense in the English language and is itself an expression that makes sense in the English language. On the other hand "Perhaps a horse if to shine however" is indeed an arrangement of words that make sense in the English language, but it lacks syntactical coherence and is not itself an expression that makes sense in the English language.