Reism or concretism is a philosophical theory of Tadeusz Kotarbiński

Tadeusz Kotarbinski

Tadeusz Kotarbiński , a pupil of Kazimierz Twardowski, was a Polish philosopher, logician, one of the most representative figures of the Lwów-Warsaw School, and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning as well as the Polish Academy of Sciences...

, based on the ontology

Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...

 of Stanislaw Lesniewski

Stanislaw Lesniewski

Stanisław Leśniewski was a Polish mathematician, philosopher and logician.Leśniewski went to a high school in Irkutsk...

, specifically, his "calculus of names".

In ontological sense, reism was condensed by Kotarbiński to the two postulates

• "every object is a body", i.e., all abstract concepts are be reduced to concrete objects.
• no object is a state or relation, or property.

In semantical sense, it is a theory of language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

which draws a distinction between "real" names, i.e., names associated with bodies and pseudo-names, onomatoids, which denote states, relations, properties, events, etc. It further elaborates on when a sentence is meaningful, when it has a literal, direct sense or when it is meaningful or has an indirect sense.

External links

• Tadeusz Kotarbinski, at the Polish Philosophy Page
• Kotarbinski from Reism to Pansomatism