The late 1940s were a complicated time in Poland, and, unsurprisingly, philosophers were affected by that as well. From 1945, with rising pressure, every academic and cultural endeavor had to conform to the socialist ideology and further its causes.

Janina Hosiasson did not live to experience that, but some of her peers did. What is a philosopher to do in this new environment, if her whole work up to date was concerned with such non-Marxist topics as the logical analysis of scientific inference, or, worse, of the concept of truth? (How could one suggest that W(snow) is true iff snow is actually white, when the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was called “Truth” and the correspondence theory did not apply there?)

Adapt, is the answer. If you wanted to be an active academic – teaching, publishing, speaking – you had to play by the new rules. But there were ways to dress up your work to fit the requirements. You could still study, say, Russell, as long as you remembered to criticize him on the correct grounds.

The other day, I ran into the following mention in a 1953 letter exchange between two philosophy professors, Wallis and Elzenberg:

Here there is nothing particularly new. The talk of Mrs. Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa was meant to show that the bourgeois science cannot deal with the issue of the justification of induction. During the discussion it turned out that the materialistic methodology faces the exact same difficulties.

(Letter of M. Wallis to H. Elzenberg, 13.10.1953, digital archive of the Philosophy Institute in Warsaw, item no. AMW=16-1-068, translation mine)

Maria Lutman-Kokoszyńska was a member of the Lvov-Warsaw school and a close collaborator of Tarski on the concept of truth. Before the war, she regularly visited Cambridge and Vienna, and attended the major international conferences organized by the logical empiricists. In the Stalinist era she probably had to tone down – at least in official appearances – her involvement in a philosophical movement almost all of whose representatives were now in the United States, slaving away for capitalism. What better way to appear wholesome than to call the shortcomings of scientific methodology – the impossibility of justifying induction – simply the shortcomings of the old, evil bourgeois science?

Others played along, it seems, while also giving themselves the pleasure of showing in the discussion that the king, too, was naked: Marxist methodology does not have the answer either.

Nothing new here, writes Wallis. Just the everyday grind of trying to keep both your career and your intellectual integrity.