Poznański and Wundheiler's "The concept of truth in physics"

the lvov-warsaw school Contribution to encyclopedism

Artur Koterski

Thomas Uebel

pp. 291-307

in: Anna Broek, Friedrich Stadler, Jan Woleński (eds), The significance of the Lvov-Warsaw school in the European culture, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

This paper provides an introduction to the joint work of Edward Poznański and Aleksander Wundheiler translated in this volume as "The Concept of Truth in Physics'. The view they formulated in the early 1930s occupies a unique place in the heritage of the Lvov-Warsaw School—and not only on account of its non-Tarskian, operationalist conception of truth. Their image of science, focused on its fallibility, anti-foundationalism, the limitedness of empirical control, conventionalism, holism, and physicalism, exhibits a far-reaching conformity with Neurath's encyclopedism. This paper describes the background of the Poznański-Wundheiler collaboration and the history of the reception of their ideas and then discusses the viability of their concept of truth in comparison to Neurath's much-criticised rejection of the notion of truth altogether.

Cited authors

Wundheiler Aleksander

Poznański Edward