AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Izydora Dąmbska and Maria Kokoszyńska may be listed among the most accomplished philosophers of twentieth century philosophy. Despite this, their work has been largely underappreciated, especially by truth-theorists working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. I seek to rectify this injustice by showing how their ideas represent an important innovation in truth-theory. Izydora Dąmbska has argued that the concept of truth does not boil down to a choice between different theories of truth, i.e., correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic. Her reason for holding this position is that linguistic concepts, such as truth, cannot escape the confines of language. For Dąmbska, the concept of truth cannot be primitive since it is inextricable from language. We must, she says, return to the “epistemological issue of the definition of truth” (2015, p. 146). Maria Kokoszyńska’s two-fold attack against truth relativism, which is an amplification and formalisation of Twardowski’s argument in “On So-Called Relative Truth” (1901), serves as an epistemological foundation for a theory of truth. Using Kokoszyńska’s argument from illusion and argument for a principle of charity, I show how Dąmbska and Kokoszyńska’s work suggest a way forward for functionalism about truth.