The embodied approach of human cognition suggests that concepts are deeply dependent upon and constrained by an agent's physical body's characteristics, such as performed body movements. In this study, we attempted to broaden previous research on emotional priming, investigating the interaction of emotions and visual exploration. We used the joystick-based approach-avoidance task to influence the emotional states of participants, and subsequently, we presented pictures of news web pages on a computer screen and measured participant's eye movements. As a result, the (...) number of fixations on images increased, the total dwell time increased, and the average saccade length from outside of the images toward the images decreased after the bodily congruent priming phase. The combination of these effects suggests increased attention to web pages' image content after the participants performed bodily congruent actions in the priming phase. Thus, congruent bodily interaction with images in the priming phase fosters visual interaction in the subsequent exploration phase. (shrink)

Tendencies of approach and avoidance seem to be a universal characteristic of humans. Specifically, individuals are faster in avoiding than in approaching negative stimuli and they are faster in approaching than in avoiding positive stimuli. The existence of this automatic approach-avoidance bias has been demonstrated in many studies. Furthermore, this bias is thought to play a key role in psychiatric disorders like drug addiction and phobias. However, its mechanisms are far from clear. Theories of embodied cognition postulate that the nature (...) of gestures plays a key role in this process. To shed light on the role of the involved gesture we employed a 2 × 2 factorial design with two types of stimuli. Participants had either to approach positive and avoid negative stimuli or to avoid positive stimuli and approach negative stimuli. Further, they responded either with a joystick or a button press on a response pad. Participants reacted faster in congruent conditions, i.e., avoiding negative stimuli and approaching positive stimuli, than in incongruent conditions. This replicates the known approach and avoidance bias. However, direct analysis of the button press condition revealed no reaction time advantage for congruent trials compared to incongruent trials. In contrast, in the joystick condition participants were significantly faster performing congruent reactions than incongruent reactions. This interaction, a significant reaction time advantage, when the response is enacted by moving a joystick towards or away from the body provides evidence that approach-avoidance tendencies have a crucial bodily component. (shrink)

Початок повномасштабного російського вторгнення в 2022 році викликав значні зміни в українській національній ідентичності. Соціологічні опитування демонструють трансформацію цінностей та повсякденних практик українців. Вони почали частіше вживати українську мову, змінили історичні та конфесійні вподобання. Необхідним є отримання об’єктивного соціологічного знання стосовно причин та наслідків цих змін. Передумовою цього є дослідження існуючих робіт по даній тематиці. Метою статті є систематизація та критичне узагальнення наукових праць по тематиці української національної ідентичності у вітчизняній науці. Автор розглядає роботи по цій темі, написані дослідниками в (...) галузі різних наук: історії, філософії, політології, філології, соціології. Особливу увага приділяється огляду дисертацій. Узагальнюються основні ідеї праць, даються авторські висновки по можливості їх використання в майбутньому. Показується, що автори зачіпають широке коло питань, що стосуються національної ідентичності: її історична ґенеза, трансформації, фактори мови та історичної пам’яті, відображення ідентичності в мистецтві та медіа, вплив на неї глобалізації та російської агресії. Автор констатує, що дана проблематика поки що слабо розвинута в рамках соціологічної науки. У відкритому доступі відсутні значні теоретичні роботи, здебільшого соціологи займаються виключно емпіричними дослідженнями. Також відсутні теоретичні роботи, присвячені аналізу трансформацій національної ідентичності, що стались з початку повномасштабної російської агресії в лютому 2022 році. Це пояснюється недостатнім проміжком часу, що пройшов на даний момент. Також складності додає швидка зміна політичних та військових реалій. Враховуючи значну суспільну значимість, автор робить висновок про необхідність посилення соціологічного осмислення цієї тематики. (shrink)

Peter Achinstein has argued at length and on many occasions that the view according to which evidential support is defined in terms of probability-raising faces serious counterexamples and, hence, should be abandoned. Proponents of the positive probabilistic relevance view have remained unconvinced. The debate seems to be in a deadlock. This paper is an attempt to move the debate forward and revisit some of the central claims within this debate. My conclusion here will be that while Achinstein may be right (...) that his counterexamples undermine probabilistic relevance views of what it is for e to be evidence that h, there is still room for a defence of a related probabilistic view about an increase in being supported, according to which, if p > p, then h is more supported given e than it is without e. My argument relies crucially on an insight from recent work on the linguistics of gradable adjectives. (shrink)

In this article I focus on some unduly neglected common-sense considerations supporting the view that one's evidence is the propositions that one knows. I reply to two recent objections to these considerations.

Peter Achinstein has argued at length and on many occasions that the view according to which evidential support is defined in terms of probability-raising faces serious counterexamples and, hence, should be abandoned. Proponents of the positive probabilistic relevance view have remained unconvinced. The debate seems to be in a deadlock. This paper is an attempt to move the debate forward and revisit some of the central claims within this debate. My conclusion here will be that while Achinstein may be right (...) that his counterexamples undermine probabilistic relevance views of what it is for e to be evidence that h, there is still room for a defence of a related probabilistic view about an increase in being supported, according to which, if p > p, then h is more supported given e than it is without e. My argument relies crucially on an insight from recent work on the linguistics of gradable adjectives. (shrink)

This paper explores one way in which the view that emotions can be epistemically justified stands in tension with two common views in epistemology; namely, that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, and that propositional justification is entirely determined by the (inferential) support relations between one's evidence and a given proposition. A tentative solution to the tension is provided.

This paper elaborates a new solution to the lottery paradox, according to which the paradox arises only when we lump together two distinct states of being confident that p under one general label of ‘belief that p’. The two-state conjecture is defended on the basis of some recent work on gradable adjectives. The conjecture is supported by independent considerations from the impossibility of constructing the lottery paradox both for risk-tolerating states such as being afraid, hoping or hypothesizing, and for risk-averse, (...) certainty-like states. The new proposal is compared to views within the increasingly popular debate opposing dualists to reductionists with respect to the relation between belief and degrees of belief. (shrink)

The paper reviews three most widely discussed philosophical attempts of defining the notion of semantic content of information: Bar-Hillel's and Carnap's, Dretske's and Floridi's. Each of these theories is limited to a very narrow range of infor-mation phenomena. The study aimed at analysing these limits and their philosophical background.

According to recently popular pragmatist views it may be rational for one to believe p when one’s evidence doesn’t favour p over not-p. This may happen according to pragmatists in situations where one can gain something practically important out of believing p. In this paper I argue that given some independently plausible assumptions about the argumentative nature of philosophy and the irrelevance of bribes for good arguments, pragmatism leads to a contradiction.

In a recent publication Travis Timmerman has claimed that sometimes it is morally permissible to not prevent something bad from happening, even if it is in one’s power to do so without sacrificing anything nearly as important.1 To defend his point, he has proposed a thought experiment and based his claims on putative common-sense morality intuitions. To aid in the subsequent discussion, Timmerman’s case is reproduced as follows.

O presente artigo tem como pretensão oferecer um olhar outro acerca da depressão. Nossa análise sobre tal fenômeno encontra na filosofia, sobretudo, de Byung-Chul Han, uma possibilidade interessante de ir além das explicações psiquiátricas. Entretanto, são nelas que esse texto inicia sua discussão: a hipótese serotoninérgica da depressão é apresentada, mas também, problematizada, pois, muito embora a psiquiatria encontre nela ainda hoje a sua tese nuclear acerca do comportamento depressivo, é mostrado aqui que, além de ser uma teoria ausente de (...) comprovação científica, também carece de consistência para explicar o avanço da depressão ao redor do mundo. É diante da impossibilidade de pensar a depressão biologicamente que, no segundo momento deste artigo, há um esforço para analisar os modos de estruturação social contemporâneos, baseados na positivação da sociedade e na busca desenfreada por desempenho, e buscar nos mesmos, fatores desencadeantes do comportamento depressivo. A última parte do texto se concentra em apresentar um panorama filosófico centrado nas perspectivas de Han acerca da depressão. Através da exposição do mito de Eros e Psique, o artigo encerra sua análise mostrando a influência que o desaparecimento do Outro e a pressão por desempenho exerce na formação de uma sociedade de pessoas depressivas. (shrink)

According to the good reasoning view of normative reasons, p is a reason to F, just in case p is a premise of a good pattern of reasoning. This article presents two counterexamples to the most promising version of the good reasoning view.

According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

Studies presenting memory-facilitating effect of emotions typically focused on affective dimensions of arousal and valence. Little is known, however, about the extent to which stimulus-driven basic emotions could have distinct effects on memory. In the present paper we sought to examine the modulatory effect of disgust, fear and sadness on intentional remembering and forgetting using widely used item-method directed forgetting paradigm. Eighteen women underwent fMRI scanning during encoding phase in which they were asked either to remember (R) or to forget (...) (F) pictures. In the test phase all previously used stimuli were re-presented together with the same number of new pictures and participants had to categorize them as old or new, irrespective of the F/R instruction. On the behavioral level we found a typical directed forgetting effect, i.e. higher recognition rates for to-be-remembered (TBR) items than to-be-forgotten (TBF) ones for both neutral and emotional categories. Emotional stimuli had higher recognition rate than neutral ones, while among emotional those eliciting disgust produced highest recognition, but at the same time induced more false alarms. Therefore when false alarm corrected recognition was examined the directed forgetting effect was equally strong irrespective of emotion. Additionally, even though subjects rated disgusting pictures as more arousing and negative than other picture categories, logistic regression on the item level showed that the effect of disgust on recognition memory was stronger than the effect of arousal or valence. On the neural level, ROI analyses (with valence and arousal covariates) revealed that correctly recognized disgusting stimuli evoked the highest activity in the left amygdala compared to all other categories. This structure was also more activated for remembered vs. forgotten stimuli, but only in case of disgust or fear eliciting pictures. Our findings, despite several limitations, suggest that disgust have a special salience in memory relative to other negative emotions, which cannot be put down to differences in arousal or valence. The current results thereby support the suggestion that a purely dimensional model of emotional influences on cognition might not be adequate to account for observed effects. (shrink)

As the title of the present publication suggests, the ten essays of this book try to approach an inconvenient trauma of global human reality and the uniformity of media and cyberspace in which human lives suffer harm, loss of inner identity and of broader meaning. Indeed, our postmodern and post-identity times are characterized by a flux of rapid social changes, uncertainty, vague and shaking moral values, by violence and frightening information with its contradictory truths and genuine ambiguity; finally by the (...) violence of unpredictable climate change resulting in various and frequent calamities and devastation of life. Doubt and time are the central concern of modern philosophy and remind us that violence is inherent in the human condition and that reflection on it, regardless of different cultural sensibilities, is ipso facto part of the mainstream of our individual and global concerns. These, and many other fascinating topics from Western and Chinese history, were explored and brought to light by a learned forum of distinguished scholars and experts whose contributions are contained in this publication. (shrink)

We start by introducing the idea of echo chambers. Echo chambers are social and epistemic structures in which opinions, leanings, or beliefs about certain topics are amplified and reinforced due to repeated interactions within a closed system; that is, within a system that has a rather homogeneous sample of sources or people, which all share the same attitudes towards the topics in question. Echo chambers are a particularly dangerous phenomena because they prevent the critical assessment of sources and contents, thus (...) leading the people living within them to deliberately ignore or exclude opposing views. In the second part of this paper, we argue that the reason for the appearance of echo chambers lies in the adoption of what we call ‘epistemic vices’. We examine which vices might be responsible for their emergence, and in doing so, we focus on a specific one; ‘epistemic violence’. In assessing and evaluating the role of this epistemic vice, we note that it can be triggered by epistemic contexts characterized by high stakes that may turn ordinary intellectual virtues (such as skepticism) into vices (such as denialism). In the third part of this contribution, we suggest a way to deal with echo chambers. The solution focuses on advocating a responsibilist pedagogy of virtues and vices that -we claim- might be capable of preventing their emergence. (shrink)

Author: Szutta Artur Title: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ’S CONCEPT OF THE ‘THIRD STATES’ (Stany trzecie w ujęciu Władysława Tatarkiewicza) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.13/14, number: 2011/2-3, pages: 617-627 Keywords: “THIRD STATES”, LEISURE, PHILOSOPHY, THEORY, INTELLECT, SENSE OF LIFE, WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ, JOSEPH PIEPER Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The article treats on the concept of “third states” (as opposed to the other two kinds of states: those of work and entertainment) introduced by (...) Władysław Tatarkiewicz in his treatise On Happiness. A thorough analysis of the passage on “third states” as well as of the very concept allows to see its relevance to the considerations on such important philosophical questions as those of the nature of doing philosophy, the meaning of life, intellectual intuition, theoria or contemplation. The paper consists of five parts. The first part is focused on Tatarkiewicz’s understanding of “third states” as well as on a phenomenological analysis of the concept itself. The second part is a kind of extension of the analysis enriched by Josef Pieper’s interpretation of the idea of leisure which I find very close to what Tatarkiewicz means by “third states”. In the light of the analysis the concept of the ‘third states’ turns out to be very inspiring and useful in dealing with a number of philosophical questions, which is shown in the fourth part of the paper. The final step consists of questioning the above conclusion by short outlining a possible naturalistic interpretation of the ‘third states’ in the light of which the picture of philosophy, human life or human cognition, based on the concept of the ‘third states’ might turn out to be a mere illusion. I do not give a final answer to this question but treat the conclusion of the paper as an invitation to a deeper consideration of the matter. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against recent versions of justification norms of action and practical deliberation . I demonstrate that these norms yield unacceptable results in deception cases. However, a further modification of justification norms in the light of these results appears to be ad hoc. Hence, I claim, we should reject justification norms of action and practical deliberation.

W artykule autor dowodzi, że u podstaw etyki Osho leżą indywidualizm i subiektywizm. Wraz z autonomicznym podmiotem, to znaczy człowiekiem postrzeganym jako twórca wartości, stanowią one najważniejsze źródła moralności tej koncepcji. Ponadto kluczową rolę odgrywają tutaj pojęta w sposób bliski Sartre’owi wolność, a także odpowiedzialność, świadomość i samorealizacja.

The topic of this paper I would like to divide into two other questions than that of its title. The first question is the historical one and sounds like this: Why had Tarski chosen physical objects as truth-bearers in his original work from 1933 about truth in formalized languages?1 This historical problem may be still of importance not only from a historical point of view. Tarski’s truth-definition is still seen as one of undeniable importance for any contemporary philosophical analysis of (...) truth. (shrink)

At a purely instrumental level, quantum theory is all about multiplication, addition and taking mod squares of complex numbers called probability amplitudes. The rules for combining amplitudes are deceptively simple. When two or more events are independent you multiply their respective probability amplitudes and when they are mutually exclusive you add them. Whenever you want to calculate probabilities you take mod squares of respective amplitudes. That’s it. If you are prepared to ignore the explanatory power of the theory (which you (...) should not) the rest is just a set of convenient mathematical tools developed for the purpose of book-keeping of amplitudes. Thus we tabulate amplitudes into state vectors and unitary matrices, and place them in Hilbert spaces. (shrink)

The text, starting from the classic picture taken from Polish literature on the barbaric destruction of higher culture, first shows the contemporary manifestations of an attack on one of the basic...

According to the knowledge view of evidence notoriously defended by Timothy Williamson (2000), for any subject, her evidence consists of all and only her propositional knowledge (E=K). Many have found (E=K) implausible. However, few have offered arguments against Williamson’s positive case for (E=K). In this paper, I propose an argument against Williamson’s positive case in favour of (E=K). Central to my argument is the possibility of the knowledge of necessary truths. I also draw some more general conclusions concerning theorizing about (...) evidence. (shrink)

Humans are often extraordinary at performing practical reasoning. There are cases where the human computer, slow as it is, is faster than any artificial intelligence system. Are we faster because of the way we perceive knowledge as opposed to the way we represent it? -/- The authors address this question by presenting neural network models that integrate the two most fundamental phenomena of cognition: our ability to learn from experience, and our ability to reason from what has been learned. This (...) book is the first to offer a self-contained presentation of neural network models for a number of computer science logics, including modal, temporal, and epistemic logics. By using a graphical presentation, it explains neural networks through a sound neural-symbolic integration methodology, and it focuses on the benefits of integrating effective robust learning with expressive reasoning capabilities. -/- The book will be invaluable reading for academic researchers, graduate students, and senior undergraduates in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive science and engineering. It will also be of interest to computational logicians, and professional specialists on applications of cognitive, hybrid and artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

The aim of the present article is to accomplish two things. The first is to show that given some further plausible assumptions, existing challenges to the indispensability of knowledge in causal explanation of action fail. The second is to elaborate an overlooked and distinct argument in favor of the causal efficacy of knowledge. In short, even if knowledge were dispensable in causal explanation of action, it is still indispensable in causal explanation of other mental attitudes and, in particular, some reactive (...) attitudes and factive emotions. Taking into account this sort of causal efficacy in determining which mental states are genuine mental states opens up new perspectives for defending the view that knowledge is the most general factive and genuine mental state. (shrink)

The idea of cognitive enhancement refers to multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach aimed at improving human mental processes. Cognitive enhancement is the amplification or extension of core mind capacities through improvement or augmentation of either internal or external information processing systems. This includes improvements of intelligence and attention, reinforcement of creativity and memory, or extension of perception range. The main feature of cognitive enhancement is voluntariness of use for overcoming natural mental limitations. This article is a synthesis of current trends in (...) cognitive enhancement from the perspective of transhumanism. The article presents various definitions of cognitive enhancement, methods of cognitive enhancement as well as challenges and questions concerning improving human mental processes. (shrink)

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage costs (...) elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quickly and why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a rather murky issue in current grammatical research. (shrink)

A common assumption in contemporary debates about normative reasons is that ‘subjective’ and ‘possessed’ are two names for the same sort of reason. This paper challenges that assumption. Given our cognitive limitations, it is unsurprising that normative reasons that derive from what we know and reasons that we are in a position to use in our deliberation are not always one and the same.

In recent years some archaeological commentators have suggested moving away from an exclusively anthropocentric view of social reality. These ideas endorse elevating objects to the same ontological level as humans – thus creating a symmetrical view of reality. However, this symmetry threatens to force us to abandon the human subject and theories of meaning. This article defends a different idea. It is argued here that an archaeology of the social, based on human intentionality, is possible, while maintaining an ontology that (...) does not involve dualistic conceptions of reality. Building upon the philosophical work of Vincent Descombes, it is contended that humans are intentional actors and society is predicated on triadic relations that involve humans, objects and meanings. These relations can only be understood holistically, given that these relations are merely parts of a meta-narrative. These meta-narratives contain specific historical and social settings, and it is only within these settings that social relations are intelligible. (shrink)