Microbiota-gut-brain research is a fast-growing field of inquiry with important implications for how human brain function and behaviour are understood. Researchers manipulate gut microbes to reveal connections between intestinal microbiota and normal brain functions or pathological states. Many claims are made about causal relationships between gut microbiota and human behaviour. By uncovering these relationships, MGB research aims to offer new explanations of mental health and potential avenues of treatment. So far, limited evaluation has been made of MGB's methods and its (...) core experimental findings, many of which are extensively reiterated in copious reviews of the field. These factors, plus the self-help potential of MGB, have combined to encourage uncritical public uptake of MGB discoveries. Both social and professional media focus on the potential for dietary intervention in mental health, and causal relationships are assumed to be established. Our target article has two main aims. One is to examine critically the core practices and findings of experimental MGB research and to raise questions about them for brain and behavioural scientists who may not be familiar with the field. The other is to challenge the way in which MGB findings are presented. Our positive goal is to suggest how current problems and weaknesses may be addressed, in order for both scientific and public audiences to gain a clearer picture of MGB research and its strengths and limitations. (shrink)

This book is about beliefs, language, communication and cognition. It deals with the fundamental issue of the interpretation of the speaker's utterance expressing a belief and reporting on beliefs of other people in the form of oratio obliqua. The main aim of the book is to present a new account of the problem of interpreting utterances expressing beliefs and belief reports in terms of an approach called Default Semantics.

The purpose of the considerations is to present and systematise barriers to creating innovation in the Polish economy in 2012–2016. The desk research was based on the results of Community Innovation Surveys (CIS 2012 and CIS 2014), thematic studies of the Central Statistical Office and a report from the Infuture hatalska foresight institute. The use of statistical and comparative analysis in conjunction with the review of the literature on innovation barriers leads to the conclusion that Polish enterprises recognise the lack (...) of financial resources as a major barrier to creating innovation, while non-financial barriers are much less important. The marginal treatment of non-financial barriers is a reversal of attitudes and directions of activities that are undertaken in the field of creating innovation in highly developed countries. (shrink)

Dans toutes les dimensions de la communication verbale, le virtuel s'efface devant l'actuel, mais le sens "absent" ne cesse d'escorter le sens « present ». Il le sous-tend, l'informe et, quelquefois, pointe le bout de son nez. En s'inscrivant dans la perspective de la sémantique microstructurale, ce livre se propose de revisiter le virtuel linguistique pour saisir ses rapports avec le domaine de l'actuel, en envisageant la virtualité dans l'optique interprétative qui mobilise tout un éventail de mécanismes sémantico-discursifs de la (...) production du sens en contexte. (shrink)

Two questions have been discussed within the context of the action individuation debate. First, the question of action individuation proper - how many actions have been performed when one kills someone by shooting, for example. Second, the question of action externalization - what are the spatial and temporal boundaries of the killing and of the shooting. The internalists (Davidson, Hornsby) argue that the boundaries of actions do not reach beyond the skin of the individual. The externalists (e.g. Ginet) argue that (...) the boundaries of actions do extend beyond the individual. The main problem for the externalists is to explain why so conceived actions are actions. In the paper I evaluate Ginet’s response to this question but find it ultimately unsatisfactory. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to show how methods rooted in formal logic may be used to analyze socially important processes of persuasion. A formal approach to the theory of persuasion enables us to thoroughly research issues crucial in everyday life such as: how we argue, why we quarrel, where we are efficient in persuasion, when do we win a negotiation, how we influence others’ decisions, and the kinds of argumentative strategies that are apt to yield more accurate beliefs (...) for all parties involved.I concentrate on three aspects of persuasion practice: nature, success and cognitive value of argumentation process. From a logical perspective, I understand argumentation as reasoning which, after initiation through the opponent’s disagreement, is deployed by the proponent in order to persuade the audience to believe his thesis. Furthermore, I attempt to determine the ways in which we succeed in persuading others. Lastly, I try to specify when an argument is cognitively valuable and when it is reliable, in the sense that it helps us to track the truth. In order to analyze these matters, I investigate argumentation on two independent levels. The subjective level of people’s beliefs is the essential foundation of all persuasion -- every time we aim to make the audience believe our opinions and /or change their decisions. The second level is the objective field of truthfulness, where we consider whether a given argumentation will lead us to true or false conclusions. (shrink)

Some people live to work, others work to live, while still others prefer to live lives of leisure. Since the Puritans, American culture and literature have been dominated by individuals who have valued hard work. However, shortly after its founding, America managed to produce the leisurely Rip Van Winkle, who, over time, has been followed by kindred spirits such as, for instance, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Twain’s Huck Finn, Melville’s Bartleby, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, the Hippies, and Christopher (...) McCandless. With the rise of the Indie Film movement of the 1990s, so came the rise of the slacker film. Films such as Slacker, Singles, Wayne’s World, Reality Bites, Clerks, Kicking and Screaming, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, The Big Lebowski, and Office Space filled theatres over the decade with characters who take an unorthodox view of work and stress the importance of leisure in life. This essay discusses two slacker films, Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Kevin Smith’s Clerks, which defined the slacker phenomenon in the 1990s and constituted two important landmarks in American independent film. While many of us may find the slacker pathetic and annoying, this essay argues that there is much value to be found in this healthy counterculture. By offering their perspectives on issues such as the Puritan work ethic, work-incited self-importance, leisure versus idleness and human relationships, Linklater and Smith join the preceding generations of slackers, providing a much needed balance to the American obsession with work and success. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the issue of truth-telling in non-fictional narratives of (in)justice. Based on examples of rape narratives, domestic abuse narratives, human trafficking narratives and asylum seeker narratives, I examine the various difficulties in telling the truth in such stories, particularly those related to various culturally conditioned ideas of how the world works, which at the same time form the basis of, among other things, legal discourse and officials’ decision-making processes. I will also demonstrate that such culturally conditioned ideas, (...) which are the basis of official discourse, can be considered within the category of both the social imaginary of the just world in the Taylorian sense of the term, and the social master narrative, which in the case of stories of (in)justice is often based on the just world hypothesis. (shrink)

We effectively construct the finitely generated free equivalential algebras corresponding to the equivalential fragment of intuitionistic propositional logic.

The characteristic asymmetry in intentionality attributions that is known as the Knobe effect can be explained by conjoining an orthodox theory of intentional action with a normative account of intentional omission. On the latter view: omissions presuppose some normative context; there are good reasons why the intentionality of omissions requires agents' knowledge rather than intention. The asymmetry in intentionality attributions in Knobe's cases can be seen to be derivative from an asymmetry in intentional omissions. The omissions account further explains the (...) Butler problem and some related puzzles. It also safeguards the simple view of intentional action from the asymmetry challenge. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to explore the interrelation between persuasion tactics and properties of speech acts. We investigate two types of arguments ad: ad hominem and ad baculum. We show that with both of these tactics, the structures that play a key role are not inferential, but rather ethotic, i.e., related to the speaker’s character and trust. We use the concepts of illocutionary force and constitutive conditions related to the character or status of the speaker in order to (...) explain the dynamics of these two techniques. In keeping with the research focus of the Polish School of Argumentation, we examine how the pragmatic and rhetorical aspects of the force of ad hominem and ad baculum arguments exploit trust in the speaker’s status to influence the audience’s cognition. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest wykazanie, że filozofia może sięgać po ustalenia neuronauki, w tym psychologii, w zakresie poczucia winy i wstydu, w czym mają pomóc postawione w artykule pytania i poruszane zagadnienia. Autorka przywołała dane na temat neuronalnych korelatów poczucia winy i wstydu i neuropsychologiczne interpretacje niektórych z nich. Szczególną uwagę zwróciła na kwestie związane z oceną moralną i moralnymi sankcjami.

We show that the variety of equivalential algebras with regularization gives the algebraic semantics for the -fragment of intuitionistic propositional logic. We also prove that this fragment is hereditarily structurally complete.

The dissertation develops a conception of action based on the concept of practical task-responsibility rather than on the concept of intention. It answers two problems. First, it grounds the distinction between an action and a mere happening, thus meeting Wittgenstein's challenge to explain what is the difference between an agent's raising her arm and her arm rising? Second, it grounds the distinction between acting for a reason and acting while merely having a reason, thus meeting Davidson's challenge to give an (...) account of the explanatory force of reasons. ;One source of resistance to an account of action in terms of normative expectations rather than in terms of intentions comes from explanatory individualism. The explanatory individualist argues that it is ultimately the intentional attitudes of the agent rather than normative expectations of other people that are relevant to the way in which we explain one another's actions, and that they ought to figure in the account of the nature of action. I defend explanatory nonindividualism, according to which we sometimes act on our own intentions and desires but sometimes on the normative expectations and desires of others . Explanatory nonindividualism is fortified by a selectional account of the explanatory force of reasons. I demonstrate that Davidson's challenge can be met by identifying reasons with selectional criteria rather than with causes. ;In response to Wittgenstein's challenge, I propose that we understand what it is to be an action not in terms of a performance being intentional under a description, but in terms of it being reasonable to expect a performance of the agent under some description. Only one concept of reasonableness is necessary to make the distinction between actions and mere happenings, and I explicate that concept. In addition to accounting for actions that are intentional under some description, the account also captures cases that are not so straightforwardly captured by that criterion . Moreover, cases of so-called basic wayward causal chains are excluded from qualifying as actions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a model that allows the representation and analysis of circularity in ethotic structures, i.e. in communication structures related to the speaker’s character and in particular, his credibility. The paper studies three types of cycles: in self-referential sentences, embedded testimony and ethotic begging the question. It is shown that standard models allow the reconstruction of the circularities only if those circular utterances are interpreted as ethotic arguments. Their alternative, assertive interpretation requires enriching the (...) existing models with a purely ethotic component related to the credibility of the performer of any (not necessarily argumentative) speech act. (shrink)

Women's Power To Be Loud: The Authority of the Discourse and Authority of the Text in Mary Dorcey's Irish Lesbian Poetic Manifesto "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" The following article aims to examine Mary Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear," included in the 1991 volume Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers. Apart from being a well-known and critically acclaimed Irish poet and fiction writer, the author of the poem has been, from its beginnings, (...) actively involved in lesbian rights movement. Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" is to be construed from a perspective of lesbian and feminist discourse, as well as a cultural, sociological and political context in which it was created. While analyzing the poem, the emphasis is being paid to the intertwining of various ideological and subversive assumptions, their competing for importance and asserting authority over one another, in line with, and sometimes, against the grain of the textual framework. In other words, Dorcey's poem introduces a multilayered framework that draws heavily on various sources: the popular culture idiom, religious discourse, the text even employs, in some parts, crime and legal jargon, but, above all, it relies upon sensuous lesbian experience where desire and respect for the other woman opens the emancipating space allowing for redefining of one's personal and textual location. As a result of such a multifarious interaction, unrepresented and unacknowledged Irish women's standpoints may come to the surface and become articulated, disrupting their enforced muteness that the controlling heteronormative discourse has attempted to ensure. In Dorcey's poem, the operating metaphor of women's silence, conceived of, at first, as the need to conceal one's sexual identity in fear of social ostracism and contempt of the "neighbours," is further equated with the noiseless, solitary and violent death of the anonymous woman, the finding of whose body was reported on the news. In both cases, the unwanted Irish women's voices of either agony, during the unregistered by anybody misogynist bloodshed that took place inside the flat, or the forbidden sounds of lesbian sexual excitement, need to be censored and stifled, not to disrupt an idealized image of the well-established family and heteronormative patterns. In the light of the aforementioned parallel, empowered by the shared bodily and emotional closeness with her female lover, and already bitterly aware that silence in discourse is synonymous with textual, or even, actual death, the speaker in "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" comes to claim her own agency and makes her voice heard by others and taken into account. (shrink)

According to explanatory individualism, every action must be explained in terms of an agent's desire. According to explanatory nonindividualism, we sometimes act on our desires, but it is also possible for us to act on others' desires without acting on desires of our own. While explanatory nonindividualism has guided the thinking of many social scientists, it is considered to be incoherent by most philosophers of mind who insist that actions must be explained ultimately in terms of some desire of the (...) agent. In the first part of the paper, I show that some powerful arguments designed to demonstrate the incoherence of explanatory nonindividualism fail. In the second part of the paper, I offer a nonindividualist explanation of the apparent obviousness of belief-desire psychology. I argue that there are two levels of the intelligibility of our actions. On the more fundamental (explanatory) level, the question "Why did the agent do something?" admits a variety of folk-psychological categories. But there is another (formation-of-self) level, at which the same question admits only of answers that ultimately appeal only to the agent's own desires. Explanatory individualism results from the confusion of the two levels. (shrink)

We construct the finitely generated free algebras and determine the free spectra of varieties of linear equivalential algebras and linear equivalential algebras of finite height corresponding. respectively, to the equivalential fragments of intermediate Gödel-Dummett logic and intermediate finite-valued logics of Gödel. Thus we compute the number of purely equivalential propositional formulas in these logics in n variables for an arbitrary n ∈ N.

All the authors who have contributed to Looking Back to See the Future have taken up the challenge to inter-disciplinarily investigate the ambiguous concepts of sins, vices and virtues. Their illuminating chapters test the definitions and applications of these religio-cultural categories in the contexts of the distant past as well as our contemporary, globalised, consumerist present; but they all do it for the sake of catching a glimpse of their and our future. By looking into religious and philosophical treatises, paraliterary (...) and literary texts as well as everyday practices, the authors prove that the interpretations of what constitutes sin, vice and virtue are becoming more and more difficult in the twenty-first century. (shrink)