Pragmatic Logic

Pragmatic Logic grew out of a small introductory booklet that Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz wrote before 1939 for an education encyclopaedia. When his publisher asked for a new edition, he rebuilt the text from the ground up, and a slim work of about a hundred pages became a volume nearly five times longer.

The book keeps the original aim of presenting the basics of logical semantics and scientific method as groundwork for teaching and for any teacher's education. Its subjects stay largely the same, but they are treated far more thoroughly and demand more from the reader. The emphasis falls on the methods of the empirical sciences, especially measurement theory and statistical inference, and the final chapter examines how explanations are formed and how scientific theories are built.

Ajdukiewicz, a Polish philosopher associated with the Lwów-Warsaw School, also planned a companion volume of his shorter writings, Language and Cognition, to collect his postwar papers after this work was finished.