Dąmbska’s presentation of Ajdukiewicz’s conception of language

Abstract

Izydora Dąmbska was one of the most outstanding representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School and a disciple of both the School’s founder Kazimierz Twardowski and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Interest in the School was the result of Twardowski’s program of scientific philosophy, which was adopted by the vast majority of his students. This program assumed that the basic condition for practicing philosophy in a scientific manner is the precise use of language by a philosopher. One of the scholars who devoted most attention to language was Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Dąmbska accepted that the philosophical program of the School was opposed to the trend shared by many contemporary schools at the time which belonged to the so called current of linguistic philosophy. According to this trend, language is the only object of philosophical investigation. The analysis of Ajdukiewicz’s concept of language is one of her most interesting achievements in the domain of philosophy of language. This concept, called by Dąmbska ‘the immanent concept of language’, is the basis of Ajdukiewicz’s well-known radical conventionalism.