This article compares the potential of classical and connectionist computational concepts for explanations of innate infant knowledge and of its development. It focuses on issues relating to: the perceptual process; the control and form(s) of perceptual-behavioural coordination; the role of environmental structure in the organization of action; and the construction of novel forms of activity. There is significant compatibility between connectionist and classical views of computation, though classical concepts are, at present, better able to provide a comprehensive computational view of (...) the infant. However, Varela's “enaction” perspective poses a significant challenge for both approaches. (shrink)

Traditional cognitivism treats a situated agent's point of view in terms of deficit egocentrism. Can Ballard et al.'s framework remedy this characterization? And will its fusion of computational and enactivist explanations change assumptions about what cognition is? “Yes” is suggested by considering human infants' developing spatial knowledge, but further questions are raised by analysis of their robot counterparts.

Neonatologia to dosyć młoda specjalizacja w medycynie, która w ostatnim dziesięcioleciu poczyniła ogromne postępy, głównie dzięki możliwościom technicznym i leczniczym. Zwiększyły one szanse utrzymania przy życiu coraz bardziej niedojrzałych noworodków, nawet tych ważących 500 g. Szybko jednak przyszedł moment refleksji, gdy pojawiły się pierwsze wyniki badań wskazujących, że jest to grupa dzieci ze zwiększonym ryzykiem nieprawidłowego rozwoju psychoruchowego. Fakty te postawiły przed lekarzami nowe wyzwania i poszukiwania odpowiedzi na wiele nurtujących ich pytań: czy podtrzymywanie życia w imię jego świętości albo (...) dlatego że jest technicznie możliwe jest uzasadnione? Czy raz rozpoczęte leczenie należy zawsze kontynuować? W pracy autorka podejmuje próbę odpowiedzi na te pytania z perspektywy neonatologa z wieloletnim doświadczeniem zawodowym. Omawia sytuacje noworodków znajdujących się na granicy życia i śmierci, wskazując gdzie są granice medycznej interwencji i co je wyznacza. Na koniec przedstawia etapy procesu podejmowania ostatecznej decyzji zwracając uwagę na trudności i podając praktyczne wskazówki postępowania. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to analyze the current trends of the development of Polish philosophy. It does not give a detailed description or systematization of Polish philosophy. The attention is focused on some vital issues: individuals, groupings, topics that determine its character and contribute to its native character and universal dimension. Polish culture follows an alternate pattern of development. Periods of idealistic vows, heroic deeds and great literature were followed by the time of “minimalism” restricted to the world of (...) facts and practicalities. At the times of cultural maximalism, philosophy accompanied literature (art) and tended to take the form of a world outlook, while in minimalistic phase it searched for connections with science and transformed into meta-science.The author believes that the period of scientific philosophy (the Lvov—Warsaw School of Philosophy) is over so it can be presumed that the future will belong to world outlook philosophy. (shrink)

Jerzy Braun formulated the principles of unionism in forty five points constituting a concise, twenty-four-page manifesto entitled “Unionism. Basic Principles”. The text was published anonymously by a conspiratorial publishing in 1943. After over fifty years, on the initiative of All-Poland Club of Lithuania’s Lovers, it was reprinted—this time with the author’s name and lengthy explanations.My main objective is the analysis and interpretation of Braun’s text.Unionism, according to Braun, does not mean separatism, it is a principle and attitude based on integrating (...) values that deserves definite ethics according to which activity directly derives from “voluntary accepted commitments”. Braun neither questions nor overestimates fight. Unionism means dialogue, agreement, but also this type of rivalry that remains in contradiction to a well-known saying “homo homini lupus est”. Unionism perceived as universalism, allows, according to the words of a romantic poet, “to differ beautifully”.The first part of the unionist principles comprises philosophical considerations inspired with the thought of Józef M. Hoene-Wroński. They constitute an introduction to more specific problems concerning the social and political life in the future Poland. Braun paid a lot of attention to “ideocratic” system in which emphasis moves from “persons, dynasties, reason of state to ideas”. He stressed the importance of economic and cultural dynamism, though economic achievement, in his opinion, should only serve the development of culture. The final parts of the unionist program present the necessity to unify the world in which Poland will find her proper position. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to analyze the current trends of the development of Polish philosophy. It does not give a detailed description or systematization of Polish philosophy. The attention is focused on some vital issues: individuals, groupings, topics that determine its character and contribute to its native character and universal dimension. Polish culture follows an alternate pattern of development. Periods of idealistic vows, heroic deeds and great literature were followed by the time of “minimalism” restricted to the world of (...) facts and practicalities. At the times of cultural maximalism, philosophy accompanied literature and tended to take the form of a world outlook, while in minimalistic phase it searched for connections with science and transformed into meta-science.The author believes that the period of scientific philosophy is over so it can be presumed that the future will belong to world outlook philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to characterize the knowledge about the joy in children with mild intellectual disability. The premises relating to mental functioning of these children suggest that this knowledge is poorer and less complex than the knowledge of their peers in the intellectual norm. The study used the authoring tool to measure children’s knowledge of emotions including the joy. This tool takes into account the cognitive representation of the basic emotions available in three codes: image, verbal, semantic (...) and interconnection between the codes - perception, symbolization and conceptualization which perform the functions of perception, expression and understanding. The study included children with the intellectual norm and children with mild intellectual disability. The obtained results mainly indicate the differences in how the happiness is understood by particular groups, to the detriment of children with disability. The character of the results is largely determined by the level of organization of knowledge about the joy and accompanying mental operations. The results will be discussed, among others, in the context of the adjustment of the programs of lasting increase of happiness for people with intellectual disability. (shrink)

Philosophy for Children: In the Historical Perspective of the Progressive Nature of Human Consciousness. This paper will examine the importance of the Critical Thinking Movement and the Philosophy for Children Programme in a larger, more inclusive, and innovative perspective. The paper will explain why the CriticalThinking Movement appeared in our time and then offer a new interpretation of the importance of the Philosophy for Children Program – with both seen in a novel historical perspective as well as in the context (...) of the progressive nature of human consciousness. At this point, it is essential to stress the novel importance andindispensable role of Critical Thinking Programmes in light of the larger historical perspective afforded by both the Graves and McIntosh models of human progressive consciousness. Although all Critical Thinking Programmes play a crucial role in this process, the Philosophy for Children Programme (P4C) will be especially crucial and influential in this endeavour of lifting human consciousness and awareness. First of all, P4C Programme operates with Matthew Lipman’s three dimensional model of thinking, namely with three equal and balanced components of Critical, Creative, and Caring dimensions and not simply a linear, one dimensional focus and concentration on rational and logical reasoning. Humanity is destined and already advancing to the higher levels of Post-Modernist, Integral, and Post-Integral Consciousness. These more advanced levels require full competence in Critical Thinking or the adequate and skillful full employment of logical and rational reasoning but they demand, in addition, increased competence in Caring and Creative Thinking. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 24, Issue 2, pp 163 - 223 The paper demonstrates that when translating explicit anthropomorphisms in Scripture, medieval Karaites are neither particularly more nor less literal than their rabbinic counterparts. Indeed, they often propose translations similar to those of Targum Onqelos and Saʿadyah Gaon. Moreover, although their lines of argument are different, both Saʿadyah and the Karaites insist that human language is responsible for corporeal descriptions of God in the Bible, and they resort to the linguistic conventions (...) of figurative language and extension of meaning to justify these theologically disturbing expressions. The Karaites’ contribution consists of advancing and refining these linguistic justifications by introducing, for example, the concept of polysemy to account for certain kinds of problematic formulations. In addition, they are probably the first commentators in the history of Jewish Bible exegesis to cite the rabbinic dictum, “the Torah speaks in the language of man” to explain the presence of anthropomorphisms in Scripture. (shrink)

The Under— and Overestimation Effects in Comparative Judgments — Assimilation and Contrast Mechanisms The aim of the studies presented in this paper was to propose a new explanation of under— and overestimation effects in comparative judgments. The fundamental assumption of this new interpretation is that in comparative judgments the target is contrasted with the comparison standard when the compared objects seem generally dissimilar and assimilated to the standard when the objects seem generally similar. In a series of three studies students (...) were asked to compare the chances of certain events occurring to two objects. The direction of comparison was manipulated. Generally, when the more salient object was compared to the less salient object, irrespective of the valence of the events, the overestimation effects occurred only in case of frequent events and the underestimation effects only in case of rare events. The reversal of direction of comparisons yielded the clear reduction of comparative bias. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present study examined relationships between attention to negative words and daily rumination and daily adjustment in a sample of clinically depressed individuals. We recorded eye movements of 43 individuals diagnosed with major depression while they were freely viewing dysphoric, threat-related, neutral, and positive words. Then, each day for one week, participants provided measures of their daily rumination and psychological adjustment. Multilevel analyses found that attention to dysphoric and threat-related words was positively related to daily rumination and attention to threat-related (...) words was negatively related to daily adjustment. These findings suggest that the impaired ability to disengage from negative words is positively related to rumination in daily life and is negatively related to well-being, as defined in terms of Beck’s Triad. (shrink)

In the present study, clinically depressed and non-depressed adults described the events that happened to them each day for two weeks, and these descriptions were content analys...

The dispute between individualism and anti-individualism is about the individuation of psychological states, and individualism, on some accounts, is committed to the claim that psychological subjects together with their environments do not constitute integrated computational systems. Hence on this view the computational states that explain psychological states in computational accounts of mind will not involve the subject''s natural and social environment. Moreover, the explanation of a system''s interaction with the environment is, on this view, not the primary goal of computational (...) theorizing. Recent work in computational developmental psychology (by A. Karmiloff-Smith and J. Rutkowska) as well as artificial agents or embedded artificial systems (by L.P. Kaelbling, among others) casts doubt on these claims. In these computational models, the environment does not just trigger and sustain input for computational operations, but some computational operations actually involve environmental structures. (shrink)

Etyka jako obszar i kontekst standaryzacji działalności organizacji pozarz¸adowych Andrzej Klimczuk In Katarzyna Sztop-Rutkowska (ed.), Poradnik Standardów Normatywnych Dla Organizacji Pozarz¸Adowych Z Powiatu Oleckiego. Fundacja Rozwoju Ziemi Oleckiej. pp. 74--92 (2012) .