Lesniewski's Early Liar, Tarski and Natural Language

This paper is a contribution to the reconstruction of Tarski's semantic background in the light of the ideas of his master, Stanisław Leśniewski. Although in his 1933 monograph Tarski credits Leśniewski with crucial negative results on the semantics of natural language, the conceptual relationship between the two logicians has never been investigated in a thorough manner. This paper shows that it was not Tarski, but Leśniewski who first avowed the impossibility of giving a satisfactory theory of truth for ordinary language, and the necessity of sanitation of the latter for scientific purposes. In an early article (1913) Leśniewski gave an interesting solution to the Liar Paradox, which, although different from Tarski's in detail, is nevertheless important to Tarski's semantic background. To illustrate this I give an analysis of Leśniewski's solution and of some related aspects of Leśniewski's later thought. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.