Psychological Sentences and Reism in Tadeusz Kotarbiński

Abstract

Kotarbinski’s analysis of psychological sentences constitutes one of the main elements of his scientific programme known as reism in a semantic version. The program aimed to eliminate all expressions and grammatical forms that reify relations, properties, events and contents of mental acts from natural language. In order to eliminate the contents of mental acts and alleged intentional objects from semantics and ontology, Kotarbiński invented an original paraphrase of utterances of psychological sentences reducing them to pairs of logically independent utterances. In this paper, I briefly present Frege’s and Russell’s solutions of the problem of intentional contexts comprising psychological sentences; I  also indicate the philosophical inspirations of Kotarbiński’s reism. The analysis of psychological sentences proposed by Kotarbiński not only solves the semantic problem of the lack of extensional substitutivity in psychological sentences, but also sheds additional light on his reistic ontology. In the end, I briefly compare Kotarbiński’s solution of psychological sentences with Donald Davidson’s apparently similar paratactic analysis and indicate that the differences between the two are the consequence of different versions of monism and different approaches to the problem of truth.