Kotarbiński’s Semantic Reism

Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886–1981) was a prominent member of the Lvov‑Warsaw School. He is most famous as the founder of praxiology, but his contribution to ontology and semantics was significant as well. Kotarbiński introduced the doctrine of reism (in Elementy [Elements], in 1929). Ontological reism is a radical form of nominalism; it claims that there are no other objects than things or concrete individuals. Semantic reism claims that meaningful statements have to contain only concrete terms (names of things). Other terms are apparent or “onomatoids”, and they should be eliminable from meaningful statements. In his doctrine, Kotarbiński appealed to Leśniewski’s Ontology (calculus of names). He also advocated a version of the classical correspondence theory of truth (without assuming the existence of facts, states of affairs, and sets). He combined this view with his reism, which accepts physicalism (all psychic beings are physical objects). This position differed from the Vienna Circle, where the correspondence theorists (Moritz Schlick) were phenomenalists and the physicalists (Otto Neurath) supported the coherence theory.