Inferentialism is a philosophical approach premised on the claim that an item of language acquires meaning in virtue of being embedded in an intricate set of social practices normatively governed by inferential rules. Inferentialism found its paradigmatic formulation in Robert Brandom's landmark book Making it Explicit, and over the last two decades it has established itself as one of the leading research programs in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic. While Brandom's version of inferentialism has received wide (...) attention in the philosophical literature, thinkers friendly to inferentialism have proposed and developed new lines of inquiry that merit wider recognition and critical appraisal. From Rules to Meaning brings together new essays that systematically develop, compare, assess and critically react to some of the most pertinent recent trends in inferentialism. The book's four thematic sections seek to apply inferentialism to a number of core issues, including the nature of meaning and content, reconstructing semantics, rule-oriented models and explanations of social practices and inferentialism's historical influence and dialogue with other philosophical traditions. With contributions from a number of distinguished philosophers--including Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin--this volume is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the foundations of logic and language. (shrink)

Macroeconomic dynamics and the at-risk-of-poverty population in Slovakia This paper deals with analysis and presentation of the core findings under the EU SILC 2009 project. Particularly we are oriented on study of the socially vulnerable groups of population identified according their income situation. As a sorting criterion for this purpose we use the standard methodology set by OECD and Eurostat. It means the 60% of the national median equivalized disposable income is applied for this criterion as the poverty threshold. The (...) national income variable is firstly calculated as a total income for each surveyed household and dived by the equivalized size of household. By this procedure the households of various structures are transformed onto generally accepted scale. The special attention of our study is oriented on the cluster of population living on income below the poverty threshold. For this population we calculate so called social deficit. Through this value we show the volume of financial means needed to upgrade the living standard of the population living bellow poverty threshold at least to the poverty threshold level.Special section of the paper is devoted to study of relation among the core macroeconomic indicators and level and size of the at-risk-of-poverty population during the period of last economic development, including both economic growth and economic recession. According our tentative findings we did not find the significant impact of economic growth on the status of socially vulnerable population. This finding however should be studied in broader context, with longer time series of relevant data and with broader set of explanatory variables. (shrink)

In contemporary global knowledge based society there are scorching needs for new knowledge and unprecedented vision of future development. Author is focuses attention to new possibilities of fostering creative abilities and gaining new socio-economic knowledge by the assistance of ICT, Internet and mainly by using products and services of computational intelligence. His method used is prevailingly new knowledge creation by experimentation in virtual laboratories. In using conventional methods, he combines inductive and deductive methods as set up for developing mental models (...) from up to down and bottom to up. Because in socio-economic branches it is very difficult and even almost wholly impossible to do experiments in objective reality the experimentation by the assistance of computational intelligence is promising advance in gaining new socioeconomic knowledge in contemporary complex world. Using such new approaches, methods and tools is the main scientific aim of the author. He uses convictive demonstration of successful using these unprecedented possibilities in gaining deeper knowledge about complex evolutionary phenomena. The distinction of such knowledge is against conventional one is consisting in very deep understanding of complex socio-economic dynamics. Using meant knowledge acquisition approaches is promising in quality and in abiding knowledge and skill of single individuals but the extraordinary progress of creative knowledge based society fostered by using them in advanced webs is useful for whole society. (shrink)

In economics there are several complex learning themes and tasks connected with them difficult for deeper understanding of the learning subject. These are the reasons originating serious learning problems for students in the form of Virtual Environment because deeper understanding requires high level mathematical skills. Actually the most important feature for discerning this part of economics is the set of qualitative shapes emerging in discrete dynamic systems when they are undergoing iterations and/or experimentation with parameters and initial coordinates of variables. (...) Among such shapes there are: - trajectories in evolving time; - trajectories in R2 of two variables; - cobweb portraits; - one control parameter bifurcation with first and/or with second variables; - two control parameters bifurcation in R2 ; - cycles; - basin of attraction of two variables; - one Lyapunov’s exponent against some of control parameters; - Lyapunov’s exponents with two control parameters in R2; - absorbing area with possibility to create critical curves and/or attractors. The hope is that products of computational intelligence may help them solve such problems. Naturally, the meant complex economic problems and tasks have discrete, qualitative and nonlinear nature resulting in increased level of difficulties. So with the term used in the head of this paper one has to understand narrowly: “qualitative nonlinear computational economics”. For better understanding the very nature of the problem we are using as appropriate example actual simulation of the model of new ICT products monopolies in virtual laboratory built in the routines setting dominantly in the software iDMC. (shrink)

There are several ontological and consequently also methodological mistakes in contemporary mainstream economics. Among them, the so-called ergodic axiom is play significant role. It is understandable that the real economy elaborated as formalized mental model looks like dynamic system on first sight. However, that is right only of dynamical systems in mathematical formalism. Economy that is in our understanding societal and/or collective economy is complex evolving organism. If we imagine such organism in the form of dynamical system that is as (...) clear mathematical formalism, we are losing their crucial authentic character. The significant irredeemable attribute of societal economy is lying in his complex evolving network process character created by large population of people with different decision-making and complex realizing among them. Going from these imaginations the two entities in a question that is dynamical system with their ergodicity and societal economic organism as complex evolving network are qualitative very different ones. That is the reason why we cannot accede with endeavours to draw on living economy straitjacket of ergodic axiom. To articulate that cause by other words ergodic dynamical systems are applicable for physical and partly for chemical entities and only scarcely are fit for living organisms. On the other hand however, as clear method the ergodic dynamical system have good applying for didactical approaches in economics where helping in better understanding some types of complexities in dynamics. The purpose of that essay is to discuss problems around usability of ergodic dynamical system theory and methods in economics in the age of advanced ICT knowledge based society. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to clarify Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions. We propose to discriminate between a scientific revolution, which is a sociological event of a change of attitude of the scientific community with respect to a particular theory, and an epistemic rupture, which is a linguistic fact consisting of a discontinuity in the linguistic framework in which this theory is formulated. We propose a classification of epistemic ruptures into four types. In the paper, each of these types (...) of epistemic ruptures is illustrated by examples from physics. The classification of epistemic ruptures can be used as a basis for a classification of scientific revolutions and thus for a refinement of our view of the progress of science. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse relations between China and Russia over the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the context of deepening Sino-Russian relations and the general rise of Eurasia. China and Russia are pivotal non-Western Eurasian powers in political, economic and military terms and the key motors of Eurasian multi-faceted integration. Both countries pursue their own interests and present their own projects and initiatives. Nevertheless, over the last few years, Sino-Russian cooperation has become strategic and is (...) starting to pursue a new model of globalisation and international order. In the article, I refer to this approach as the “New Eurasian Paradigm” (NEP). I follow Axel Honneth’s Hegelian-based theory of threefold-level recognition Hrubec (2011, p. 267). which I extend and employ at the interstate level to interpret the behaviour of China and Russia and their integration projects in terms of a struggle for political recognition as full, equal members of the global community determining global processes. Both countries thus aim to reform the global order and boost the integration of Eurasia in order to achieve successful development. These common interests are the main reasons behind their mutual strategic collaboration. (shrink)

Gombrich and the Problem of Relativity of Vision The essay argues that Ernst Gombrich's views are relevant to the critical examination of the notion of the relativity and historicity of vision which has been widely accepted as one of the central axioms shared by visual studies, art history and film studies.

Comparative research assessing metacognition in nonhuman animals contributes to the question of what form introspection could take in humans, non-humans, and other possibly conscious systems. We briefly review some major findings in comparative metacognition research, including some discoveries in areas looking at self-regulation and self-control. We discuss what data exist to address the three conditions for introspection defined by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) in their target article. We suggest that two of three conditions are met by existing data from (...) non-human primates, and that the third condition may be more difficult, but perhaps not impossible, to assess. We argue that a comparative and developmental approach to this question of how to define and measure introspection is a productive avenue to make progress in this area. (shrink)

We suggest that the phenomenon of uncertainty monitoring in nonhuman animals contributes richly to the conception of nonhuman animals' self-monitoring. We propose that uncertainty may play a role in the emergence of new forms of behavior that are adaptive. We recommend that Smith et al. determine the extent to which the uncertain response transfers immediately to other test paradigms.

Emotional reactions are rather flexible, due to the schema-like organization of complex socio-emotional situations. Some data on emotion development, and on certain pathological conditions such as alexithymia, give further support for the psychological constructivist view put forward by Lindquist et al. Narrative organization is a key component of this schematic organization. The self-related nature of narrative organization provides scaffolding to the contextual dependency of emotions.