Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum

Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (December 5, 1899April 1942) was a Polish logician and philosopher. She published some twenty research papers along with translations into Polish of three books by Bertrand Russell. The main focus of her writings was on foundational problems related to probability, induction and confirmation. She is noted especially for authoring the first printed discussion of the Raven Paradox which she credits to Carl Hempel and the probabilistic solution she outlined to it.

Biography Janina Hosiasson was born on 6 December 1899 in Warsaw, the daughter of the merchant Josef Hosiasson and his wife Sophia Feigenblat. By the late 1920s she was a respected philosopher of logic of the Lwów–Warsaw school who actively participated in the second Polish Philosophical Congress held in Warsaw in September 1927 and (like her husband-to-be) delivered papers at the First Congress of Mathematicians from Slavic Countries held in Warsaw and Poznań in September 1929. She was one of the speakers at the first Unity of Science Congress in Paris 1935. She is also known to have participated in the preliminary meeting for the same in Prague the previous year. She attended the second Unity of Science Congress held in Copenhagen in 1936 and had also (like Alfred Tarski) been scheduled to present her research at the fifth Unity of Science Congress at Harvard in September 1939.

On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland. On 6 September 1939, with Warsaw under artillery fire, the couple fled the city on foot. As Janina would report in letters to Otto Neurath and G.E. Moore, their progress east was slow and the road repeatedly strafed by the Luftwaffe. "Why do we prefer probabilities relative to many data?" Mind, Volume XL, Issue 157, (Jan, 1931), pp. 23–36 "Induction et Analogie: Comparison de leur fondement", Mind, Vol L, Issue 200, (Oct, 1941), pp. 351–365 "Theoretical Aspects of the Advancement of Knowledge", Synthese, Vol. 7, No. 4/5 (1948/49), pp. 253–261. A complete listing of Hosiasson's published works has made available by Marta Sznajder.