Criticism of classical pragmatism: the unknown origins of Czesław Znamierowski’s theory and philosophy of law
Criticism of classical pragmatism: the unknown origins of Czesław Znamierowski’s theory and philosophy of law

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the key ideas of Czesław Znamierowski’s 1911 doctoral dissertation on the concept of truth in pragmatism (Der Wahrheitsbegriff im Pragmatismus), thus far not discussed in the literature, and the impact it had on some of his later ideas in the philosophy and theory of law. His polemic against pragmatism reinforced his later views on science and logic, and in particular on the problem of the truth-value of sentences. This founding insight of Znamierowski’s anti-psychologism in the philosophy of law, namely the independence of logic from mental states, provides a deeper explanation of a dualism in his theory of the legal norm: the ascription of both truth-value and validity, mutually independent, to legal norms. When analysed with regard to Znamierowski’s epistemological oscillation between empiricism and apriorism, Wahrheitsbegriff may also enable a better understanding of the origins of his objectivist social ontology and of such legal-theoretical concepts as ‘construction norm’ and ‘thetic act’.

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