The paradox of Grelling and Nelson presented as a veridical observation concerning naming

Andrzej Grzegorczyk

pp. 183-190

in: Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, Jan Woleński (eds), The Lvov-Warsaw school and contemporary philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

Antipsychologism was adopted in semantical analysis at the turn of the 20th century. This might be seen as an advance in the development of European rationalism: it signified an isolation of semantic phenomena and helped analytic philosophers capture the specific structure of semantic relations; then-work was done by the end of the first half of our century. However, already at the beginning of the century some undesirable consequences of the antipsychologistic tendency became apparent. I dare to conjecture that it was because of the antipsychologistic paradigm that new semantical antinomies appeared: Antipsychologistic semantics could not find a solution for the new as well as for the old semantical paradoxes, demonstrating that antipsychologism is an idealistic simplification.