We prove a theorem stating that any semantics can be encoded as a compositional semanties, which means that, essentially, the standard definition of compositionality is formally vacuous. We then show that when compositional semantics is required to be systematic (that is, the meaning function cannot be arbitrary, but must belong to some class), it is possible to distinguish between compositional and noncompositional semantics. As a result, we believe that the paper clarifies the concept of compositionality and opens the possibility of (...) making systematic formal comparisons of different systems of grammar. (shrink)

The paper argues that the final value of an object-i.e., its value for its own sake-need not be intrinsic. Extrinsic final value, which accrues to things in virtue of their relational rather than internal features, cannot be traced back to the intrinsic value of states that involve these things together with their relations. On the contrary, such states, insofar as they are valuable at all, derive their value from the things involved. The endeavour to reduce thing-values to state-values is largely (...) motivated by a mistaken belief that appropriate responses to value must consist in preferring and/or promoting. A pluralist approach to value analysis obviates the need for reduction: the final value of a thing or person can be given an independent interpretation in terms of the appropriate thing- or person-oriented responses: admiration, love, respect, protection, care, cherishing, etc. (shrink)

The paper presents main conceptual distinctions underlying much of modern philosophical thinking about value. The introductory Section 1 is followed in Section 2 by an outline of the contrast between non-relational value and relational value. In Section 3, the focus is on the distinction between final and non-final value as well as on different kinds of final value. In Section 4, we consider value relations, such as being better/worse/equally good/on a par. Recent discussions suggest that we might need to considerably (...) extend traditional taxonomies of value relations. (shrink)

The authors of this paper earlier argued that concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value , which is not reducible to the value of states of affairs that concern the object in question.Our arguments have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a (...) yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive , it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

The paper reports the results of a comparative analysis of the two groups students coming from temporarily disconnected families due to foreign work parents and teenagers with the same social environment, but without the experience of separation time. The subject of the analysis was: the cohesion of a family from the perspective of the evaluated adolescent and three factors of psychological loneliness: social loneliness, emotional loneliness and existential loneliness. The Loneliness Scale was used based on an original concept of multidimensional (...) sense of loneliness. The questionnaire for the survey of family cohesion were used too. The age, gender, family structure and the family lifestyle were controlled. Obtained results revealed significantly lower cohesion and significantly higher existential loneliness in group of teenagers from temporarily disconnected families. Not confirmed the supposition that made in earlier studies of temporarily disconnected families due to economic migration, that these teenagers suffer from a sense of emotional loneliness There has also confirmed the belief that the level of family cohesion and a sense of loneliness in adolescents is associated with atypical organization of family life associated with the duration of migration of parent/parents, frequency of contact with family members working abroad: mothers, fathers or broth parents, the duration of stays at home. (shrink)

Confirmant notamment les analyses de Pascale Casanova dans La République des lettres , Zofia Bobowicz, traductrice et actuellement conseillère éditoriale aux éditions Noir et Blanc, explique dans cet entretien les difficultés de réception rencontrées par la littérature de l'Europe centrale en France, alors qu'il en va tout autrement dans d'autres pays. Connaissant depuis un quart de siècle l'univers éditorial français de l'intérieur, Zofia Bobowicz souligne le rôle joué par la critique littéraire et la conjoncture politique ou culturelle du (...) moment dans la diffusion de cette littérature, et, par voie de conséquence, dans sa traduction.Confirming such analyzes Pascale Casanova in The Republic of Letters , Zofia Bobowicz, translator and editorial consultant currently published by Black and White, explains in this interview the difficulties encountered by receiving the literature of Central Europe France, while it is quite different in other countries. Knowing the past quarter century French publishing world from the inside, Zofia Bobowicz emphasizes the role played by literary criticism and the political and cultural moment in the dissemination of this literature, and, consequently, in its translation. (shrink)

We prove that the Gödel incompleteness theorem holds for a weak arithmetic T = IΔ0 + Ω2 in the form where Cons H (T) is an arithmetic formula expressing the consistency of T with respect to the Herbrand notion of provability.

Two objects of valuation are said to be incommensurable if neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. This negative, coarse-grained characterization fails to capture the nuanced structure of incommensurability. We argue that our evaluative resources are far richer than orthodoxy recognizes. We model value comparisons with the corresponding class of permissible preference orderings. Then, making use of our model, we introduce a potentially infinite set of degrees of approximation to better, worse, and equally good, which we (...) interpret as degrees of commensurability.One payoff is the solution our approach provides to a paradox in population ethics, generated by Parfit's “Continuum Argument”. Parfit imagines a sequence of populations, starting with one consisting of excellent lives and, by a sequence of apparent improvements, reaching a much larger population of lives barely worth living. What he dubs “the Repugnant Conclusion” is that the final population is better than the first. Developing Parfit's response, we argue that some of the populations in the sequence are merely almost better than their immediate predecessors. Almost better is not transitive (unlike better). We offer analogies to other ‘spectrum arguments’, Condorcet's paradox, and to developments in formal epistemology. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to reconstruct the Stanisław Lem’s views on the relationship between science and faith presented in his The star diaries. The author discusses three stories: The twenty­‑second voyage, The twenty­‑first voyage, and The twentieth voyage. The following questions are considered during the analysis of these novels: Does theology (as depicted by Lem), despite having no competence in the area, attempt to solve scientific problems? Does Lem suggest that Christian claims are potentially falsifiable? Can science lay the (...) foundations of theodicy? The answers to these questions appear helpful in explicating three models of the relationship between science and faith embedded in Lem’s stories: conflict regarding content, conflict regarding form, and cooperation. (shrink)

The ‘buck-passing’ account equates the value of an object with the existence of reasons to favour it. As we argued in an earlier paper, this analysis faces the ‘wrong kind of reasons’ problem: there may be reasons for pro-attitudes towards worthless objects, in particular if it is the pro-attitudes, rather than their objects, that are valuable. Jonas Olson has recently suggested how to resolve this difficulty: a reason to favour an object is of the right kind only if its formulation (...) does not involve any reference to the attitudes for which it provides a reason. We argue that despite its merits, Olson's solution is unsatisfactory. We go on to suggest that the buck-passing account might be acceptable even if the problem in question turns out to be insoluble. (shrink)

One might think that money pumps directed at agents with cyclic preferences can be avoided by foresight. This view was challenged two decades ago by the discovery of a money pump with foresight, which works against agents who use backward induction. But backward induction implausibly assumes that the agent would act rationally and retain her trust in her future rationality even at choice nodes that could only be reached if she were to act irrationally. This worry does not apply to (...) BI-terminating decision problems, where at each choice node backward induction prescribes a move that terminates further action. For BI-terminating decision problems, it is enough to assume that rationality and trust in rationality are retained at choice nodes reachable by rational moves. The old money pump with foresight was not BI-terminating. In this paper, we present a new money pump with foresight, one that is both BI-terminating and considerably simpler. (shrink)

The paper’s target is the historically influential betting interpretation of subjective probabilities due to Ramsey and de Finetti. While there are several classical and well-known objections to this interpretation, the paper focuses on just one fundamental problem: There is a sense in which degrees of belief cannot be interpreted as betting rates. The reasons differ in different cases, but there’s one crucial feature that all these cases have in common: The agent’s degree of belief in a proposition A does not (...) coincide with her degree of belief in a conditional that A would be the case if she were to bet on A, where the belief in this conditional itself is conditioned on the supposition that the agent will have an opportunity to make such a bet. Even though the two degrees of belief sometimes can coincide (they will coincide in those cases when the bet has no expected causal bearings on the proposition A and the opportunity to bet have no evidential bearings on that proposition), it is the latter belief rather than the former that guides the agent’s rational betting behaviour. The reason is that this latter belief takes into consideration potential interferences that bet opportunities and betting itself might create with regard to the proposition to be betted on. It is because of this interference problem that the agent’s degree of belief in A cannot be interpreted as her betting rate for A. (shrink)

The Interpersonal Addition Theorem, due to John Broome, states that, given certain seemingly innocuous assumptions, the overall utility of an uncertain prospect can be represented as the sum of its individual utilities. Given ‘Bernoulli's hypothesis’ according to which individual utility coincides with individual welfare, this result appears to be incompatible with the Priority View. On that view, due to Derek Parfit, the benefits to the worse off should count for more, in the overall evaluation, than the comparable benefits to the (...) better off. Pace Broome, the paper argues that prioritarians should meet this challenge not by denying Bernoulli's hypothesis, but by rejecting one of the basic assumptions behind the addition theorem: that a prospect is better overall if it is better for everyone. This conclusion follows if one interprets the priority weights that are imposed by prioritarians as relevant only to moral, but not to prudential, evaluations of prospects. (shrink)

Political liberalism offers perhaps the most developed and dominant account of justice and legitimacy in the face of disagreement among citizens. A prominent objection states that the view arbitrarily treats differently disagreement about the good, such as on what makes for a good life, and disagreement about justice. In the presence of reasonable disagreement about the good, political liberals argue that the state must be neutral, but they do not suggest a similar response given reasonable disagreement about what justice requires. (...) A leading political liberal, Jonathan Quong, has recently offered a rebuttal to this asymmetry objection. His reply rests on an innovative distinction between justificatory and foundational disagreement. Quong claims that disagreements about justice in a well ordered society are justificatory while disagreements about the good are foundational, and suggests that this fact blocks the asymmetry objection. We assess Quong's solution and argue that it fails to justify legitimate state action on matters of justice but not the good. We conclude that the asymmetry objection continues to undermine political liberalism. (shrink)

We prove that any 1-closed (see def 1.1) model of the Π 2 consequences of PA satisfies ¬Cons PA which gives a proof of the second Godel incompleteness theorem without the use of the Godel diagonal lemma. We prove a few other theorems by the same method.

What distinguishes preference utilitarianism from other utilitarian positions is the axiological component: the view concerning what is intrinsically valuable. According to PU, intrinsic value is based on preferences. Intrinsically valuable states are connected to our preferences being satisfied.

Suppose that A and B are two kinds of goods such that more of each is better than less. A is strongly superior to B if any amount of A is better than any amount of B. It is weakly superior to B if some amount of A is better than any amount of B. There are many examples of these relations in the literature, sometimes under the labels “higher goods” and “discontinuity.” The chapter gives a precise and generalized statement (...) of Strong and Weak Superiority and discusses different ways in which these relations can be relevant to the aggregation of welfare. It also proves a number of general results. One of the results gives rise to a dilemma: It can be used as an argument against the existence of value superiority or, alternatively, as an argument against the view that superiority entails a radical difference in value. (shrink)

The spectrum argument purports to show that the better-than relation is not transitive, and consequently that orthodox value theory is built on dubious foundations. The argument works by constructing a sequence of increasingly less painful but more drawn-out experiences, such that each experience in the spectrum is worse than the previous one, yet the final experience is better than the experience with which the spectrum began. Hence the betterness relation admits cycles, threatening either transitivity or asymmetry of the relation. This (...) paper examines recent attempts to block the spectrum argument, using the idea that it is a mistake to affirm that every experience in the spectrum is worse than its predecessor: an alternative hypothesis is that adjacent experiences may be incommensurable in value, or that due to vagueness in the underlying concepts, it is indeterminate which is better. While these attempts formally succeed as responses to the spectrum argument, they have additional, as yet unacknowledged costs that are significant. In order to effectively block the argument in its most typical form, in which the first element is radically inferior to the last, it is necessary to suppose that the incommensurability is particularly acute: what might be called radical incommensurability. We explain these costs, and draw some general lessons about the plausibility of the available options for those who wish to save orthodox axiology from the spectrum argument. (shrink)

In this article I challenge the claim that nuclearity is a central principle in the organization of texts. I propose the Framework for the Relational Analysis of Texts which accounts for the paratactic and hypotactic realization of coherence relations. Within this framework, the taxis of coherence relations is co-textually dictated. I consider the writer choices in the distribution of discoursal salience and the intertextual and intercultural variation of these choices. It is suggested that divergence between approaches that perceive text as (...) exhibiting both hypotactic and paratactic organization and those that see nuclearity as a basic characteristic of text structure arises from differences in the linguistic corpora examined during the construction of respective theoretical frameworks. (shrink)

The dead are among us. We are reminded of their names through the books we read, the hoovers we buy, the sandwiches we consume, the tarmac we travel on, the wellingtons we wear, or, frequently, the buildings we visit. Even if we settled on the criteria for being worthy of commemoration, what should we do about the fact that there seem to be so many people who would likely meet them? Commemoration is a form of attention giving, and attention is (...) a scarce resource. It is scarce even if it could be permissibly commanded at will. It is even more scarce when commanding attention may violate someone's freedom to decide for themselves where to bestow it. I will argue that when it comes to public commemorative attention, there are duties that fall on us all to remember the now dead victims of injustice. I will also offer reasons for why such duties would normally mean that we need to prioritize the remembrance of the victims of injustice ahead of remembrance that might be owed to those who had expectations of being remembered or even took steps by donations to secure such remembrance. (shrink)

The dead are among us. We are reminded of their names through the books we read, the hoovers we buy, the sandwiches we consume, the tarmac we travel on, the wellingtons we wear, or, frequently, the buildings we visit. Even if we settled on the criteria for being worthy of commemoration, what should we do about the fact that there seem to be so many people who would likely meet them? Commemoration is a form of attention giving, and attention is (...) a scarce resource. It is scarce even if it could be permissibly commanded at will. It is even more scarce when commanding attention may violate someone's freedom to decide for themselves where to bestow it. I will argue that when it comes to public commemorative attention, there are duties that fall on us all to remember the now dead victims of injustice. I will also offer reasons for why such duties would normally mean that we need to prioritize the remembrance of the victims of injustice ahead of remembrance that might be owed to those who had expectations of being remembered or even took steps by donations to secure such remembrance. (shrink)

For the given logical calculus we investigate the proportion of the number of true formulas of a certain length n to the number of all formulas of such length. We are especially interested in asymptotic behavior of this fraction when n tends to infinity. If the limit exists it is represented by a real number between 0 and 1 which we may call the density of truth for the investigated logic. In this paper we apply this approach to the intuitionistic (...) logic of one variable with implication and negation. The result is obtained by reducing the problem to the same one of Dummett's intermediate linear logic of one variable (see [2]). Actually, this paper shows the exact density of intuitionistic logic and demonstrates that it covers a substantial part (more than 93%) of classical prepositional calculus. Despite using strictly mathematical means to solve all discussed problems, this paper in fact, may have a philosophical impact on understanding how much the phenomenon of truth is sporadic or frequent in random mathematics sentences. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem for theories of epistemic democracy. In a decision on a complex issue which can be decomposed into several parts, a collective can use different voting procedures: Either its members vote on each sub-question and the answers that gain majority support are used as premises for the conclusion on the main issue, or the vote is conducted on the main issue itself. The two procedures can lead to different results. We investigate which of these procedures is (...) better as a truth-tracker, assuming that there exists a true answer to be reached. On the basis of the Condorcet jury theorem, we show that the pbp is universally superior if the objective is to reach truth for the right reasons. If one instead is after truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which the cbp is more reliable, even though, for the most part, the pbp still is to be preferred. (shrink)