Bogusław Wolniewicz created an original formal system based on his considerations on the ontology and semantics embedded in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. His system – called by Wolniewicz ‘ontology of situations’ – can be complemented by a philosophical interpretation. In this article I identify the implicit and intuitive underpinnings of the system, its formal content and its philosophical implications. I also indicate a few applications of the system to axiology and logical hermeneutics.

The aim of the paper is to present the theory of meaning formulated by Roman Ingarden in the Controversy over the Existence of the World, The Literary Work of Art, and in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. When this has been done here, I test Ingarden’s theory by applying it to selected problems of contemporary philosophy of language. These problems include the semantics of empty names, the controversy between Millianism and descriptivism over the nature of proper names, the problem of substitutability in intensional contexts, meaning holism, compositionality, and the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. My analysis of these problems within the framework of Ingarden’s theory and my presentation of their solutions as delivered by G. Frege, K. Ajdukiewicz, W.V. Quine and D. Davidson shed interesting light on this extremely complex and ‘fine‑grained’ theory based on Ingarden’s original ontology. Although Ingarden’s theory does not fall within the dominant current of language philosophy, it offers a solution to the problem of empty names, the relation of proper names to definite descriptions, and substitutability. The theory is not holistic nor does it blur the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Unfortunately, Ingarden’s theory is not compositional and reifies meanings, which may be seen as a serious objection to it. Therefore, the assessment of this theory cannot be unequivocal.

Bogusław Wolniewicz’s book Things and facts, although it is essentially devoted to the interpretation of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, also has a substantive layer in which Wolniewicz raises very important problems in the fields of methodology, semiotics and metaphysics, such as: (a) the problem of clarity of philosophical texts and its relation to simplicity and brevity, as well as to thoroughness and suggestiveness; (b) the problem of semantic correlation types; (c) the problem of analysis, interpretation and definition; (d) the problems of modality, negative facts, absolute monism and coherentionism; (e) the problem of abstraction and moral-praxeological antinomy. The author of the paper reconstructs Wolniewicz’s views on these matters.