We explore the prospects of a monist account of explanation for both non-causal explanations in science and pure mathematics. Our starting point is the counterfactual theory of explanation for explanations in science, as advocated in the recent literature on explanation. We argue that, despite the obvious differences between mathematical and scientific explanation, the CTE can be extended to cover both non-causal explanations in science and mathematical explanations. In particular, a successful application of the CTE to mathematical explanations requires us to (...) rely on counterpossibles. We conclude that the CTE is a promising candidate for a monist account of explanation in both science and mathematics. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Conditional Non-Contradiction (CNC), conditionals of the form “If p, q” and “If p, not q” cannot both be true, unless p is inconsistent. This principle is widely regarded as an adequacy constraint on any semantics that attributes truth conditions to conditionals. Gibbard has presented an example of a pair of conditionals that, in the context he describes, appear to violate CNC. He concluded from this that conditionals lack truth conditions. We argue that this conclusion is (...) rash by proposing a new diagnosis of what is going on in Gibbard’s argument. We also provide empirical evidence in support of our proposal. (shrink)

Reasoning with conditionals is central to everyday life, yet there is long-standing disagreement about the meaning of the conditional. One example is the puzzle of so-called missing-link conditionals such as "if raccoons have no wings, they cannot breathe under water." Their oddity may be taken to show that conditionals require a connection between antecedent ("raccoons have no wings") and consequent ("they cannot breathe under water"), yet most accounts of conditionals attribute the oddity to natural language pragmatics. We present an experimental (...) study disentangling the pragmatic requirement of discourse coherence from a stronger notion of connection: probabilistic relevance. Results indicate that mere discourse coherence is not enough to make conditionals assertable. (shrink)

In _Suppose and Tell_, Williamson makes a new case for the material conditional account. He tries to explain away apparently countervailing data by arguing that these have been misinterpreted because researchers have overlooked the role of heuristics in the processing of conditionals. Cases involving the receipt of apparently conflicting conditionals play an important dialectical role in Williamson’s book: they are supposed to provide evidence for the material conditional account as well as for the defeasibility of a key procedure underlying our (...) everyday assessments of conditionals. We argue that they can serve neither of these purposes and that Williamson overestimates the reach of heuristics. We specifically challenge Williamson’s assumption that, in the kind of cases centrally at issue in his book, the recipient of conflicting conditionals will typically accept those at face value, even granting Williamson that conditionals can be freely passed among speakers under normal conditions of testimony. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse a finding by Riggs and colleagues that there is a close connection between people’s ability to reason with counterfactual conditionals and their capacity to attribute false beliefs to others. The result indicates that both processes may be governed by one cognitive mechanism, though false belief attribution seems to be slightly more cognitively demanding. Given that the common denominator for both processes is suggested to be a form of the Ramsey test, I investigate whether Stalnaker’s semantic (...) theory of conditionals, which was inspired by the Ramsey test, may provide the basis for a psychologically plausible model of belief ascription. The analysis I propose will shed some new light on the developmental discrepancy between counterfactual reasoning and false belief ascription. (shrink)

Decision theorists tend to treat indicative conditionals with reservation, because they can easily lead a deliberating agent astray. However, many indicatives can be very helpful in contexts of deliberation, so denying them all a role in such contexts seems to be overkill. We show that a recently revived inferential view on conditionals provides a straightforward explanation of why some indicatives are unassertable in contexts of deliberation and hints at a way of telling "deliberationally useless" and "deliberationally useful" conditionals apart.

According to the Principle of Conditional Non-Contradiction (CNC), unless p is impossible, conditionals “If p, then q” and “If p, then not q” are jointly inconsistent. Although intuitively appealing, CNC gives rise to serious problems that semantic theories of conditionals validating it have to face. Most notably, an example of violation of CNC, as presented by Allan Gibbard, may lead to the conclusion that conditionals do not express propositions at all. In the preset paper we propose a new analysis of (...) Gibbard's argument showing that the violation of CNC is only apparent. Subsequently, we suggest a new way of defining truth conditions for conditional sentences. (shrink)

InSuppose and Tell, Williamson makes a new and original attempt to defend the material conditional account of indicative conditionals. His overarching argument is that this account offers the best explanation of the data concerning how people evaluate and use such conditionals. We argue that Williamson overlooks several important alternative explanations, some of which appear to explain the relevant data at least as well as, or even better than, the material conditional account does. Along the way, we also show that Williamson (...) errs at important junctures about what exactly the relevant data are. (shrink)

At least many conditionals seem to convey the existence of a link between their antecedent and consequent. We draw on a recently proposed typology of conditionals to revive an old philosophical idea according to which the link is inferential in nature. We show that the proposal has explanatory force by presenting empirical results on two Dutch linguistic markers.

Zdania o przekonaniach nurtują filozofów od samego początku filozofii analitycznej. Wszystkie próby ujęcia języka naturalnego w ramy kompozycyjnej semantyki muszą się zmierzyć z generowanymi przez sprawozdania z przekonań łamigłówkami. Obecne w tradycji filozoficznej teorie nie tylko borykają się z różnymi problemami, ale ponadto nie uwzględniają psychologicznych aspektów przypisywania przekonań innym. W artykule formułuję postulaty, które psychologicznie adekwatna teoria powinna uwzględniać, a następnie przybliżam pojęcie ikoniczności, które stało się osią teorii zaproponowanej przez François Recanati’ego. Chociaż Recanati stara się brać pod uwagę (...) mechanizmy poznawcze odpowiedzialne za produkcję oraz interpretację języka, w świetle jego teorii sprawozdania z przekonań niesłusznie traktowane są na równi z innymi metareprezentacjami. Co więcej, Recanati nie zauważa związku pomiędzy zdolnością do przypisywania przekonań i rozumieniem kontrfaktycznych okresów warunkowych, w związku z czym w dalszej części artykułu proponuję taką modyfikację jego teorii, która będzie spełniać wspomniane postulaty. (shrink)

In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, and Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by a) a conversational implicature, b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or c) a conventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses and the accumulating evidence from other studies as (...) well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature. This finding indicates that the reason-relation reading is part of the semantic content of indicative conditionals, albeit not part of their primary truth-conditional content. (shrink)

Conditionals and conditional reasoning have been a long-standing focus of research across a number of disciplines, ranging from psychology through linguistics to philosophy. But almost no work has concerned itself with the question of how hearing or reading a conditional changes our beliefs. Given that we acquire much—perhaps most—of what we believe through the testimony of others, the simple matter of acquiring conditionals via others’ assertion of a conditional seems integral to any full understanding of the conditional and conditional reasoning. (...) In this paper we detail a number of basic intuitions about how beliefs might change in response to a conditional being uttered, and show how these are backed by behavioral data. In the remainder of the paper, we then show how these deceptively simple phenomena pose a fundamental challenge to present theoretical accounts of the conditional and conditional reasoning – a challenge which no account presently fully meets. (shrink)

The problem of universals is one of the oldest problems in philosophy. One of the oddities of Spinoza's view of universals is that he endorses both Realism and Nominalism. An analogous Realist account can be given for all thinking things: all ideas, really do have something in common, intrinsically, constitutively, and mind‐independently: namely, thought as a determinable, qualitative, essential substantial nature. Spinoza's accounts of the nature of the human mind and of human emotions both can be read as accounts of (...) such relative common properties. Spinoza's most detailed case study of a mind‐dependent universal whose idea is constructed through abstraction and comparison can be found in his account of the will. Spinoza also often implies that ideas of universals and abstractions have a lower epistemic value than thought that deals with particulars alone. (shrink)

The paper is an attempt to consider the issue that so far has not been discussed frequently in the Polish philological current. It focuses on the endings of 18 selected articles in the field of literary studies. Authors of textbooks on academic discourse argue that it is the ending that plays a fundamental role in the scientific discourse as a concluding, summarising, and potentially memorable part. This approach to a conclusion is often shared by scholars themselves, who choose different strategies (...) with regard to endings of their articles. When studying articles published in the period of 2015‒2019, we identified about 15 different ending strategies, e.g. an apologia for a literary work selected by an author, suggestions for further research possibilities, an attractive punch line, and an quotation from another paper. As the analysis reveals, the conclusion of an academic article is not only a place for introducing conventional rhetorical figures; it also becomes the researchers’ contribution to the understanding of the role ascribed by literary-studies scholars to their own scientific practice. (shrink)

The experimental philosophy of law is a recent movement that aims to inform traditional debates in jurisprudence by conducting empirical research. This paper introduces and provides a systematic overview of the main lines of research in this field. It also covers the most important debates in the literature regarding the implications of these findings for the philosophy and theory of law. It argues that three challenges arise when addressing (old) legal-philosophical questions in (new) experimental ways by drawing normative implications from (...) empirical data: such implications are value-driven, depend on explanations of empirical findings and vary across legal systems. (shrink)

This essay is about the role of visual surveillance technologies in the policing of the external borders of the European Union. Based on an analysis of documents published by EU institutions and independent organizations, I argue that these technological innovations fundamentally alter the nature of national borders. I discuss how new technologies of vision are deployed to transcend the physical limits of territories. In the last twenty years, EU member states and institutions have increasingly relied on various forms of remote (...) tracking, including the use of drones for the purposes of monitoring frontier zones. In combination with other facets of the EU border management regime, these technologies coalesce into a system of governance that has enabled intervention into neighboring territories and territorial waters of other states to track and target migrants for interception in the “prefrontier.” For jurisdictional reasons, this practice effectively precludes the enforcement of legal human rights obligations, which European states might otherwise have with regard to these persons. This article argues that this technologically mediated expansion of vision has become a key feature of post–cold war governance of borders in Europe. The concept of transterritory is proposed to capture its effects. (shrink)

Explicit and implicit values of polish grandmothers and their granddaughters The authors tried to determine if and to what extent maternal granddaughters share the explicit and implicit values of their grandmothers. 80 grandmothers-granddaughter dyads were surveyed using Schwartz' SVS and Mudyń's RN-02, an instrument assigned to identify "ontological orientations". The results indicate that: 1) grandmothers differ significantly from granddaughters in all ontological orientations, especially in Theoretical and Religious orientation, 2) they differ also in personal values, except for Universalism and Power, (...) 3) regression analysis revealed two decisive factors which determine convergence of ontological orientations and values in grandmother-granddaughter dyads, i.e. and level of education and attitudes toward religion. It may mean that these are the two important transmitters of world view as well as personal values. (shrink)

Many conditionals seem to convey the existence of a link between their antecedent and consequent. We draw on a recently proposed typology of conditionals to argue for an old philosophical idea according to which the link is inferential in nature. We show that the proposal has explanatory force by presenting empirical results on the evidential meaning of certain English and Dutch modal expressions.

The article proposes a new solution to the long-standing problem of the universality of essences in Spinoza's ontology. It argues that, according to Spinoza, particular things in nature possess unique essences, but that these essences coexist with more general, mind-dependent species-essences, constructed by finite minds on the basis of similarities that obtain among the properties of formally-real particulars. This account provides the best fit both with the textual evidence and with Spinoza's other metaphysical and epistemological commitments. The article offers new (...) readings of how Spinoza understands not just the nature of essence, but also the nature of being, reason, striving, definitions, and different kinds of knowledge. (shrink)

Novel precision oncology trial designs, such as basket and umbrella trials, are designed to test new anticancer agents in more effective and affordable ways. However, they present some ethical concerns referred to scientific validity, risk-benefit balance and informed consent. Our aim is to discuss these issues in basket and umbrella trials, giving examples of two ongoing cancer trials: NCI-MATCH (National Cancer Institute – Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice) and Lung-MAP (Lung Cancer Master Protocol) study. We discuss three ethical requirements for (...) clinical trials which may be challenged in basket and umbrella trial designs. Firstly, we consider scientific validity. Thanks to the new trial designs, patients with rare malignancies have the opportunity to be enrolled and benefit from the trial, but due to insufficient accrual, the trial may generate clinically insignificant findings. Inadequate sample size in study arms and the use of surrogate endpoints may result in a drug approval without confirmed efficacy. Moreover, complexity, limited quality and availability of tumor samples may not only introduce bias and result in unreliable and unrepresentative findings, but also can potentially harm patients and assign them to an inappropriate therapy arm. Secondly, we refer to benefits and risks. Novel clinical trials can gain important knowledge on the variety of tumors, which can be used in future trials to develop effective therapies. However, they offer limited direct benefits to patients. All potential participants must wait about 2 weeks for the results of the genetic screening, which may be stressful and produce anxiety. The enrollment of patients whose tumors harbor multiple mutations in treatments matching a single mutation may be controversial. As to informed consent – the third requirement we discuss, the excessive use of phrases like “personalized medicine”, “tailored therapy” or “precision oncology” might be misleading and cause personal convictions that the study protocol is designed to fulfill the individual health-related needs of participants. We suggest that further approaches should be implemented to enhance scientific validity, reduce misunderstandings and risks, thus maximizing the benefits to society and to trial participants. (shrink)

The emotion of disgust is suggested to be an adaptation that evolved to keep us away from sources of infection. Therefore, individuals from populations with greater pathogen stress should have a greater disgust sensitivity. However, current evidence for a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and the intensity of infectious diseases in the environment is limited. We tested whether disgust and contamination sensitivity changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Disgust was assessed in 984 women in 2017 and 633 women in (...) 2020 by a set of photographs depicting sources of infection and Pathogen and Moral of Three-Domain Disgust Scale. Further, contamination sensitivity among participants in two waves was measured by Contamination Obsessions and Washing Compulsions Subscale of Padua Inventory. State anxiety was measured with the Polish adaptation of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory only during the second wave of data collection. Women from the COVID-19 pandemic group assessed the photographs depicting sources of infection as more disgusting, scoring higher on Padua Inventory, but lower on Moral Disgust Domain as compared to women from before the pandemic. In addition, anxiety levels during pandemic positively correlated with scores from Pathogen Disgust Domain, Padua Inventory, and the ratings of the photographs. The participants of the study scored higher in state anxiety than the norms determined for the Polish population. Summarizing, we present evidence for differences in individual levels of disgust sensitivity in relation to pathogen stress, supporting the idea that disgust evolved to serve as protection from pathogens. (shrink)

Along with the rapid growth that the field of assisted reproduction has experienced over the last few years, numerous ethical issues have arisen and need to be discussed thoroughly. One of them is the limitation of access to assisted reproduction techniques. Because no one should be discriminated against, it is essential to substantiate every single refusal of access carefully. The criterion of welfare of the child is used most frequently. In this paper, we propose a thought experiment aiming at contributing (...) to the discussion by demonstrating that this criterion, even in its strictest form, can easily allow access to assisted reproduction for legal persons as well. (shrink)

The article proposes a new solution to the long-standing problem of the universality of essences in Spinoza's ontology. It argues that, according to Spinoza, particular things in nature possess unique essences, but that these essences coexist with more general, mind-dependent species-essences, constructed by finite minds on the basis of similarities that obtain among the properties of formally-real particulars. This account provides the best fit both with the textual evidence and with Spinoza's other metaphysical and epistemological commitments. The article offers new (...) readings of how Spinoza understands not just the nature of essence, but also the nature of being, reason, striving, definitions, and different kinds of knowledge. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 2 Seiten: 196-233.

The aim of the paper is to reconsider Habermas’ discourse approach in terms of its usefulness in the realm of public healthcare where, on a microscale, intersubjective communicative situations arise between defined participants, i.e., patients and healthcare providers, patients’ family members, and further eligible contributors to patient-related decision making. A need for more “communicative interaction,” and explicative and practical discourse, is illustrated by two empirical examples of medical decision making which reveal both communicative and discursive deficits. To empower and enable (...) the patient as a rational and autonomous speaker and discourse participant, a Habermasian emancipatory argument and ‘the power of the better argument’ is recalled. The possibility of equal communicative and discursive rights in the light of real inequalities is discussed in the context of a ‘competence gap’ between participants. Further sections focus on the importance of informed consent on the side of the patient and the communicative competences as an important factor of healthcare system. (shrink)

The book discusses a democratic legitimation for modern law. Debates on Europeanisation are taken into account. Ronald Dworkin's, Neil MacCormick's and Jürgen Habermas's standpoints on relations between the law and the public sphere are investigated. Concepts of self-reflexive polity, self-constitutionalisation, constitutional patriotism are analysed.

The article explores the idea that according to Spinoza finite thought and substantial thought represent reality in different ways. It challenges “acosmic” readings of Spinoza's metaphysics, put forth by readers like Hegel, according to which only an infinite, undifferentiated substance genuinely exists, and all representations of finite things are illusory. Such representations essentially involve negation with respect to a more general kind. The article shows that several common responses to the charge of acosmism fail. It then argues that we must (...) distinguish the well-founded ideality of representations of finite things from mere illusoriness, insofar as for Spinoza we can have true knowledge of what is known only abstractly. Finite things can be seen as well-founded beings of reason. The article also proposes that within Spinoza's framework it is possible to represent a finite thing without drawing on representations of mind-dependent entities. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of work-life balance. Nowadays more and more benefits is being perceived that stem from implementation of the industrial culture based on balance between work and life. On the other hand there are various limitations which in some cases hinder. One of such barriers lays in the process of communication. Moreover, the article discuss the process of gaining competitive advantage on the ground of the idea of work-family balance. The idea seems to be positive (...) especially for the employees, organisation and even the whole society, since it can prevent the phenomenon of professional burnout. It also helps to maintain the most efficient and the best among the employees, who are intentionally aimed at achieving their goals in professional and personal life. The work- -family balance programmes can make a positive impact on the firm’s reputation and its perception by potential employees. The pregnant women and young parents are presented as a group most interested in those flexible solutions and the programmes prepared for them in LG Electronics, IBM, Decora SA, IKEA, BZ WBK, Volkswagen Motor Polska are examined. (shrink)

Success in economic life is a result of the interaction of many factors, which in different ways are developed from the individual characteristics of the person, a specific way of thinking and the ability to perceive oneself in the future. At the same time, more and more attention is focused on the influence of the entrepreneurial characteristics of individuals on their career development and career building process. The impact of personal experience on the perception of individual chances on the labour (...) market is also emphasized. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to identify the differences in enterprising attitudes of students of the humanities and students of economics, as well as compare the characteristics of entrepreneurial abilities between both student groups on the basis of empirical research conducted among students at the University of Lodz. (shrink)

Zrozumienie i zastosowanie zasad projektowania graficznego w plakacie naukowym może dostarczyć korzyści praktycznych, takich jak przyciągnięcie i utrzymanie uwagi odbiorców, a także korzyści merytorycznych, czyli pomocy w komunikowaniu treści. Te drugie opierają się między innymi na koncepcji wizualnej gramatyki (opisanej przez Kress i Van Leeuwen [2006] i zastosowanej do analizy plakatu naukowego przez D’Angelo [2010]), wedle której elementy wizualne przekazują znaczenie w sposób podobny do języka, i tak jak język posiadają swoją gramatykę: zasady ich zastosowania i prezentacji, które mają wpływ (...) na wyrażany przez nie sens. Poster pokazuje zastosowanie wizualnej gramatyki w plakacie naukowym na przykładzie jednego z elementów wizualnych plakatu, który często jest niedoceniany: pustej przestrzeni. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, ethical challenges related to robotics technologies have gained increasing interest among different research and non-academic communities, in particular through the field of roboethics. While the reasons to address roboethics are clear, why not to engage with ethics needs to be better understood. This paper focuses on a limited or lacking engagement with ethics that takes place within some parts of the robotics community and its implications for the conceptualisation of the human being. The underlying assumption (...) is that the term ‘ethical’ essentially means ‘human’. Thus, this paper discusses a working hypothesis according to which by avoiding to engage with roboethics, roboticists contribute to the tacit dehumanisation process emerging in and outside of robotics. An alternative approach includes ‘lived ethics’ which involves not only incorporating formal ethical approaches into the roboticists’ work but also ‘being’ ethical and actually engaging with ethical reflection and practice. (shrink)

The paper examines a relatively neglected element of Spinoza's theory of mind-body relations: the intentional relation between human minds and bodies, which for Spinoza constitutes their “union”. Prima facie textual evidence suggests, and many readers agree, that because for Spinoza human minds are essentially ideas of bodies, Spinoza is also committed to an ontological and explanatory dependence of certain properties of human minds on properties of bodies, and thus to a version of materialism. The paper argues that such dependence would (...) contradict Spinoza's key epistemological commitments, including the explanatory closure of mental and physical realms, and Spinoza’s claim that all knowledge is knowledge of a thing's causes. The paper argues that Spinoza's dual-reality theory of representation allows us to interpret the intentional relation between human minds and bodies in a way that does not commit Spinoza to a problematic dependence of minds on bodies. This is possible if we take Spinoza's references to properties of bodies in his account of the human mind as references to objectively real bodies, that is as references to the immanent representational content of human minds. (shrink)

Due to the growing importance of local pro-development attitudes and non-governmental organizations for development, it is important to look at their activities in different subregions. In this work the author presents the results of research carried out in the Leszno subregion on the presence of elements of social capital, the organizational and financial sustainability of NGOs, and their cooperation with public administration in the context of their impact on local development. In addition, through a comparative analysis of selected issues, it (...) recalls the good practices of NGOs in Switzerland which, because of the long tradition of their operation and the experience gained, can also be used in Polish settings. (shrink)

The article examines social and creative capitals and their interconnections. Some authors observe similarities in them as well as areas where they complement each other. Other authors argue that social and creative capitals are still mutually exclusive and cannot be compared. The article analyses various aspects of social and creative capital, searches for similarities and differences between them, and reviews measurement methodologies and issues related to the reliability of measurement indices and criteria. All this is analysed in the context of (...) the creative society. (shrink)

The paper explores situational and dispositional underpinnings of cooperative behavior. According to psychological research, cooperation is strongly related to affective states and personality dimensions. In an experimental study we examined the conditions under which people cooperate with each other. The dispositional traits of co-workers, the contribution to a collaborative effort, and a situational factor – ambient odor condition were taken into consideration. A one-way ANOVA revealed that compared to a malodorous condition, both the pleasant odor condition and the natural odor (...) condition showed higher rates of cooperation. Further analysis indicated that only malodors influenced affective states which in turn determined social decisions. Although we found effects for the participants’ agreeableness and the coworker’s contribution to a joint work, they appeared to play a less critical role than affective states induced by the experimental odor conditions tested here. (shrink)

The paper offers a new account of Spinoza's conception of “substance”, the fundamental building block of reality. It shows that it can be demonstrated apriori within Spinoza's metaphysical framework that (i) contrary to Idealist readings, for Spinoza there can be no substance that is not determined or modified by some other entity produced by substance; and that (ii) there can be no substance (and hence no being) that is not a thinking substance.