Prawda absolutna a prawda w języku

Abstract

In his famous article O tak zwanych prawdach względnych, Kazimierz Twardowski argued that the propositions were either true or false, whereas those relatively true could only be the utterances of sentences expressing propositions. In the paper, I distinguish two other possible types of the relativity of truth and argue that Twardowski’s notion of proposition implies some consequences regarding the nature of truth and meaning. In order to justify these contentions I distinguish between Aristotelian classical conception of truth and the later theory of truth meant as correspondence. As Twardowski implicitly accepted the classical conception of truth and Gottlob Frege rejected the correspondence theory, they managed to avoid another relativization, viz. the relativization of true propositions (true thoughts) to the criteria of correspondence. Then, I argue that the fact that Twardowski’s propositions and Frege’s thoughts were absolutely true independently of the context of utterances was the consequence of their assumptions about meaning (sense). In the last part of the paper, I analyze the third relativity, viz. the relativity of truth to language, and I argue that the truth of Twardowski’s propositions and the truth of Frege’s thoughts are in some sense language independent due to the same assumptions about meaning. If these assumptions were rejected the truth of propositions would be language relative. I exemplify this contention referring to Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s directival theory of meaning and Alfred Tarski’s semantic definition of truth, but this type of relativization of truth is fully acceptable.