The article reviews the book Zarys filozofii polityki [An Outline of the Political Philosophy], by Stanisław Kowalczyk.

The article reviews the book Zarys filozofii polityki [An Outline of the Political Philosophy], by Stanisław Kowalczyk.

To evoke the impression of movement in the “immobile” image is one of the central motivations of the visual art, and the activating effect of images has been discussed in art psychology already some hundred years ago. However, this topic has up to now been largely neglected by the researchers in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. This study investigates – from an interdisciplinary perspective – the formation of lateralised instances of motion when an observer perceives movement in an image. A first (...) step was to identify images that evoke a perception of movement in a certain direction and to give this a rating. Reaction times leading to the engagement of a joystick following the presentation of images are used to evidence the postulated movement occasioned by the perception of movement in an image. Where the required direction of joystick moves matched the expected perception of movement direction in the image, considerably shorter reaction times were recorded. The experiment was able to prove a “movement-image compatibility effect” in observers of images. Based on this, the paper revisits and brings up to date the theses on motor sensory response to images which were developed in art psychology at the beginning of the 20th century. It furthermore contributes an embodiment theory interpretation to the prevalent representational explanation of compatibility effects. (shrink)

The rapid development of empirical science and theoretical grounds related with them, results in many theories on the origin, evolution and nature of the world, sometimes interpreted as contradictory to the theological conception. Consequently, under the influence of these achievements, within theology itself, an opinion about autonomy of both domains and their complementarity seems to be more and more popular. Facing this relation, it is theology that should present the possibility of such understanding of the revealed truths that they could (...) coexist with scientific discoveries. Based directly on biblical texts, the sophiological vision of origin and nature of the world seems to be very interesting among other theological conceptions regarding this topic. The present article attempts to confront the sophiology’s presumptions on the eternal creative Wisdom with scientific thesis on the world’s nature, its development and on human existence in order to demonstrate the possibility of coexistence of these discourses with no contradiction. (shrink)

Sport plays today an eminent role in man's life and in societies. Various sciences have made it the subject-matter of their reflection, i.e. psychology, sociology, the natural and humanistic sciences, art, philosophy, and theology. The present work seeks to answer some fundamental questions connected with the phenomenon of sport: what is it for man? whether and when does it serve the social integration of a community? what are the premises and principles of the ethics of sportive activity? what is the (...) aesthetic dimension of sport? what are the relations between sport and religious faith? The philosophical profile is dominant in the book, taking into consideration various aspects of sport: anthropological, social, axiological, and theological. (shrink)

Memetics is a research approach which applies evolutionary ideas and terminology to cultural phenomena. The core idea of memetics is the existence of the units of cultural evolution which are attributed autonomous replicating goals. Of course, such a controversial concept has gained many devoted adherents as well as its determined opponents. The paper discusses the theoretical difficulties of memetics. The first part discusses the analogy of genes and memes. The theme of the second part is the ontology of a cultural (...) replicator. Finally, the third part presents the main issues related to manners of transmission and the adaptation of memes. In short, the aim of the paper is an evaluation of the explanatory potential of memetics. The explanatory potential of memetics will be evaluated in terms of its intrinsic consistency, the degree of its confirmation, the falsifiability of the theses which were elaborated on its basis and the heuristic value of this approach. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to assess the situation in terms of wage inequality and identify factors influencing changes in the levels, dynamics and relations of wages in voivodeships in Poland in 2012–2021. In Poland, during the analyzed period, an economic crisis occurred in 2012 as a consequence of the crisis of 2008–2009 and since 2020. Average monthly gross wages in Poland will be used for this purpose. Based on this data, deviations, relationships, and rates of change will be (...) calculated. To carry out the analysis and evaluation, I will use statistical data published in the Statistical Yearbooks of the Central Statistical Office in Warsaw for the years 2012–2021. In this article, the region will be identified with the voivodeship, according to the administrative division. (shrink)

I borrow part of the title of my paper from Susan Sontag. In 2003, a year before her death, Susan Sontag published an essay entitled Regarding the Pain of Others. There she takes up the subject of the moral significance of presenting the views of war, violent human death exposed to the lenses of cameras. Her approach to the contemporary issue of mediatisation through the image of the sight of human suffering provokes a question: Do we need teleethics today, the (...) ethics of remote moral relations? Using the method of comparative analysis in the area of cultural determinants of ethics, I draw attention to the contemporary challenges that the culture of late modernity imposes on the morality of everyday life. My thesis is this: The images of human suffering provided by the media reveal the imperfection of our morality. As moral subjects, we are not prepared to respond to the suffering of human beings absent from face-to-face relationships. So, we need teleethics. The paper is devoted to this issue. (shrink)

Brain activity determines which relations between objects in the environment are perceived as differences and similarities in colour, smell, sound, etc. According to selectionism, brain activity does not create those relations; it only selects which of them are perceptually available to the subject on a given occasion. In effect, selectionism entails that perceptual experience is diaphanous, i.e. that sameness and difference in the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by sameness and difference in the perceived items. It has been argued (...) that diaphaneity is undermined by phenomenological considerations and empirical evidence. This paper considers five prominent arguments of this sort and shows that none of them succeeds. (shrink)

Moral options are permissions to do less than best, impartially speaking. In this paper, we investigate the challenge of reconciling moral options with the ideal of justifiability to each individual. We examine ex-post and ex-ante views of moral options and show how they might conflict with this ideal in single-choice and sequential-choice cases, respectively. We consider some ways of avoiding this conflict in sequential-choice cases, showing that they face significant problems.

According to unconscious perception hypothesis (UP), mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously. The proponents of UP often support it with empirical evidence for a more specific hypothesis, according to which colours can be seen unconsciously (UPC). However, UPC is a general claim that admits of many interpretations. The main aim of this paper is to determine which of them is the most plausible. To this end, I investigate how adopting various conceptions of (...) colour and perceptual phenomenal character affects UPC’s resilience to objections. This brings me to the conclusion that the most plausible reading of UPC is the one according to which the phenomenal character of colour perception (i) is constituted by colours qua primitive mind-independent qualities of the environment and (ii) is not essentially tied to consciousness. My conclusion not only identifies the most plausible interpretation of UPC, but also highlights and supports an unorthodox version of the relational theory of perception, which is a perfectly viable yet so far overlooked stance in the debate about unconscious perception. (shrink)

Predictive Processing (PP) framework construes perception and action (and perhaps other cognitive phenomena) as a matter of minimizing prediction error, i.e. the mismatch between the sensory input and sensory predictions generated by a hierarchically organized statistical model. There is a question of how PP fits into the debate between traditional, neurocentric and representation-heavy approaches in cognitive science and those approaches that see cognition as embodied, environmentally embedded, extended and (largely) representation-free. In the present paper, I aim to investigate and clarify (...) the cognitivist or ‘conservative’ reading of PP. I argue that the conservative commitments of PP can be divided into three distinct categories: (1) representationalism, (2) inferentialism, and (3) internalism. I show how these commitments and their relations should be understood and argue for an interpretation of each that is both non-trivial and largely ecumenical towards the 4E literature. Conservative PP is as progressive as conservatism gets. (shrink)

Bilinear Logic of Lambek amounts to Noncommutative MALL of Abrusci. Lambek proves the cut–elimination theorem for a one-sided sequent system for this logic. Here we prove an analogous result for the nonassociative version of this logic. Like Lambek, we consider a left-sided system, but the result also holds for its right-sided version, by a natural symmetry. The treatment of nonassociative sequent systems involves some subtleties, not appearing in associative logics. We also prove the PTime complexity of the multiplicative fragment of (...) NBL. (shrink)

Malgorzata Fidelis in her bookWomen, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Polandsets out to examine gender policies during Stalinism and their transformation under the subsequent ‘Polish road to socialism’. She shows that the relative political liberalisation in the late 1950s was also accompanied by the abandonment of policies favouring women and the return to conservative prewar gender hierarchies. The essay finds that the book is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the vicissitudes of gender struggle during Communism in Poland. It (...) also makes a contribution to the understanding of how the principles declared by the Communist Party were modified in response not only to economic necessities but also to local cultures and popular struggles. In this way it sheds light on the process of the legitimation of the Communist regime in Poland and beyond by accommodating demands from below. (shrink)

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition , brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in (...) the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system. (shrink)

Paweł Gładziejewski, Is empathy is mental simulation? Remarks on the representative approach based on the concept of mirror neurons., Diametros 27 This paper draws on the theoretical achievements of analytic philosophy of mind and the empirical results of psychology and cognitive neuroscience in order to understand the nature of empathy and the sub-personal mechanisms upon which it is based. The paper distinguishes two types of empathy, which are often not sufficiently clearly distinguished in the literature, empathy as a kind (...) of social perception and empathy as compassion. The argument attempts show to that neither of these can be identified with a mental simulation process understood as a sub-personal process. Nevertheless mental simulation may play a limited explanatory role with respect to these two types of empathy. (shrink)

This paper centers around the notion that internal, mental representations are grounded in structural similarity, i.e., that they are so-called S-representations. We show how S-representations may be causally relevant and argue that they are distinct from mere detectors. First, using the neomechanist theory of explanation and the interventionist account of causal relevance, we provide a precise interpretation of the claim that in S-representations, structural similarity serves as a “fuel of success”, i.e., a relation that is exploitable for the representation using (...) system. Then, we discuss crucial differences between S-representations and indicators or detectors, showing that—contrary to claims made in the literature—there is an important theoretical distinction to be drawn between the two. (shrink)

Perceptual experience usually comes with “phenomenal force”, a strong sense that it reflects reality as it is. Some philosophers have argued that it is in virtue of possessing phenomenal force that perceptual experiences are able to non‐inferentially justify beliefs. In this article, I introduce an alternative, inferentialist take on the epistemic role of phenomenal force. Drawing on Bayesian modeling in cognitive science, I argue that the sense of reality that accompanies conscious vision can be viewed as epistemically appraisable in light (...) of its rational etiology. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the notion of internal representation has - at least according to some - a fundamental role to play in the sciences of the mind, not only has its explanatory utility been under attack for a while now, but it also remains unclear what criteria should an explanation of a given cognitive phenomenon meet to count as a representational explanation in the first place. The aim of this article is to propose a solution to this latter problem. (...) I will assume that representational explanations should be construed as a form of mechanistic explanations and proceed by proposing a general sketch of a functional architecture of a representational cognitive mechanism. According to the view on offer here, representational mechanisms are mechanisms that meet four conditions: the structural resemblance condition, the action-guidance condition, the decouplability condition, and the error-detection condition. (shrink)

Personites are like continuant people but shorter-lived. Johnston argues that personites do not exist since otherwise personites would have the same moral status as persons, which is untenable. I argue that Johnston’s arguments fail. To do that I propose an alternative way to understand intrinsicness and I clarify the meaning of reductionism about persons. I also argue that a plausible ethical theory is possible even if personites have the same moral status as persons. My arguments draw on Johnston’s earlier debate (...) with Parfit about personal identity and the place of ordinary concerns in a naturalistic world. I also describe an important but metaphysics-free problem that arises from Johnston’s discussion. (shrink)

The paper discusses the thesis of virtual realism presented by David Chalmers in his paper “The Virtual and the Real” (2017). Here, I suggest an even stronger version of the claim that I call “virtual physicalism”. According to this view, virtual objects are not only real but physical as they are identical to the physical states of computers that run VR software. I suggest that virtual objects should have a similar ontological status to toys—they should be treated as models or (...) simplifications of ordinary objects. Just like toys, virtual objects can sometimes be good enough to be used instead of their ordinary counterparts. In these cases, virtual objects start to be treated as instantiations of the same kind. In the last part of the paper, I use Johan Huizinga’s notion of a “magic circle” to suggest how different objects could be successfully “virtualized”, that is, moved into a digital realm while remaining objects of the same kind as their non-virtual counterparts. I suggest this will happen once virtual reality becomes permanent and causally connected with non-virtual reality. I finish the paper by looking at examples of natural kind objects and individuals, which seem to be the hardest cases for successful virtualization. (shrink)

Thought style and thought collective are two well-known concepts from Ludwik Fleck’s theory of science, which he originally formulated in Polish and German. This paper contends that these two concepts cannot be fully understood without a third—Stimmung/nastrój, which is one of the musical metaphors that play an important role in Fleck’s thinking. Because it is most often translated into English as “mood”, Fleck’s musical metaphors are mostly lost in translation, appearing as mere rhetoric. Only if and when we understand Stimmung/nastrój (...) in the musical meaning of attunement, we can fully understand thought collectives, for which Stimmung/nastrój is sine qua non, and thought style, which appears if and when a collective turns out to be an enduring and not a momentary one. (shrink)

The article reviews the book Konstytucja wolności [The Constitution of Liberty], by Friedrich August von Hayek.

Psychedelic substances elicit powerful, uncanny conscious experiences that are thought to possess therapeutic value. In those who undergo them, these altered states of consciousness often induce shifts in metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental structure of reality. The contents of those beliefs range from contentious to bizarre, especially when considered from the point of view of naturalism. Can chemically induced, radically altered states of consciousness provide reasons for or play some positive epistemic role with respect to metaphysical beliefs? In this paper, (...) I discuss a view that has been underexplored in recent literature. I argue that psychedelic states can be rationally integrated into one’s epistemic life. Consequently, updating one’s metaphysical beliefs based on altered states of consciousness does not have to constitute an instance of epistemic irrationality. (shrink)

Unfounded—conspiracy and health—beliefs about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic worldwide. Here, we examined cross-nationally the structure and correlates of these beliefs with an 8-item scale, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained a two-factor model of unfounded (conspiracy and health) beliefs with good internal structure (average CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.04), but a high correlation between the two factors (average latent factor correlation = 0.57). This model was replicable across 50 countries (total N = 13,579), (...) as evidenced by metric invariance between countries (CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.06, SRMS = 0.07) as well as scalar invariance across genders (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03) and educational levels (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03). Also, lower levels of education, more fear of COVID-19, and more cynicism were weakly associated with stronger conspiracy and health beliefs. The study contributes to knowledge about the structure of unfounded beliefs, and reveals the potential relevance of affective (i.e., fear of COVID-19) and cognitive (i.e., cynicism) factors along with demographics, in endorsing such beliefs. In summary, we obtained cross-cultural evidence for the distinctiveness of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs about COVID-19 in terms of their structure and correlates. (shrink)

Earlier research by the author brought about findings suggesting that people in a special way process words related to demands of a problem they previously solved, even when they do not consciously notice this relationship. The findings concerned interference in the task in which the words appeared, a shift in affective responses to them that depended on sex of the participants, and impaired memory of the words. The aim of this study was to replicate these effects and to find out (...) whether they are related to working memory span of the participants, taken as a measure of the individual’s ability to control attention. Participants in the experimental group solved a divergent problem, then performed an ostensibly unrelated speeded affective classification task concerning each of a series of nouns, and then performed an unexpected cued recall task for the nouns. Afterwards, a task measuring WM span was administered. In the control group there was no problem-solving phase. Response latencies for words immediately following problem-related words in the classification task were longer in the experimental than in the control group, but there was no relationship between this effect and WM span. Solving the problem, in interaction with sex of the participants and, independently, with their WM span, influenced affective responses to problem-related words. Recall of these words, however, was not impaired in the experimental group. (shrink)

Saying is experiencing: Affective consequences of complaining and affirmation In four experiments mood was measured before and after complaining or affirmation. Participants complained or affirmed either themselves or listened to such communications of another person. Mood decreased after complaining and increased after affirmation — a "saying is experiencing" effect. This effect was found also in the cognitive load condition suggesting that automatic mood contagion underlies the SIE effect rather than mechanisms based on self-perception or self-awareness. Appropriateness of a topic for (...) complaining appeared a boundary condition of the SIE effect: When a topic was considered by participants the most appropriate for complaining, the act of showing dissatisfaction with the topic led to mood improvement. (shrink)

Debunking arguments aim to undermine common sense beliefs by showing that they are not explanatorily or causally linked to the entities they are purportedly about. Rarely are facts about the aetiology of common sense beliefs invoked for the opposite aim, that is, to support the reality of entities that furnish our manifest image of the world. Here I undertake this sort of un-debunking project. My focus is on the metaphysics of ordinary physical objects. I use the view of perception as (...) approximate Bayesian inference to show how representations of ordinary objects can be extracted from sensory input in a rational and truth-tracking manner. Drawing an analogy between perception construed as Bayesian hypothesis testing and scientific inquiry, I sketch out how some of the intuitions that traditionally inspired arguments for scientific realism also find application with regards to proverbial tables and chairs. (shrink)

In this paper, I use the predictive processing theory of perception to tackle the question of how perceptual states can be rationally involved in cognition by justifying other mental states. I put forward two claims regarding the epistemological implications of PP. First, perceptual states can confer justification on other mental states because the perceptual states are themselves rationally acquired. Second, despite being inferentially justified rather than epistemically basic, perceptual states can still be epistemically responsive to the mind-independent world. My main (...) goal is to elucidate the epistemology of perception already implicit in PP. But I also hope to show how it is possible to peacefully combine central tenets of foundationalist and coherentist accounts of the rational powers of perception while avoiding the well-recognized pitfalls of either. (shrink)

Unfounded—conspiracy and health—beliefs about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic worldwide. Here, we examined cross-nationally the structure and correlates of these beliefs with an 8-item scale, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained a two-factor model of unfounded (conspiracy and health) beliefs with good internal structure (average CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.04), but a high correlation between the two factors (average latent factor correlation = 0.57). This model was replicable across 50 countries (total N = 13,579), (...) as evidenced by metric invariance between countries (CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.06, SRMS = 0.07) as well as scalar invariance across genders (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03) and educational levels (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03). Also, lower levels of education, more fear of COVID-19, and more cynicism were weakly associated with stronger conspiracy and health beliefs. The study contributes to knowledge about the structure of unfounded beliefs, and reveals the potential relevance of affective (i.e., fear of COVID-19) and cognitive (i.e., cynicism) factors along with demographics, in endorsing such beliefs. In summary, we obtained cross-cultural evidence for the distinctiveness of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs about COVID-19 in terms of their structure and correlates. (shrink)

In the article we made an attempt to estimate the impact of structural economic changes on inequalities of earnings in Poland. The processes of structural changes were represented by GDP per one employee. Inequalities of earnings were measured with Lorenz coefficient. Additionally we used a variable, representing the health human capital  infant death rate in a thousand living births. On the basis of 19802006 sample we proved Kuznets’ hypothesis about the parabolic impact of GDP per one employee on inequalities (...) of earnings. In the studied period economy was found on the left arm of the parabola. The increase of GDP level per one employee favoured the increase of inequalities. Our estimates resulted in the fact that inequalities of earnings can maximally increase by about 1.4 percentage point. We think that according to Kuznets’ hypothesis inequalities will start to fall when GDP per one employee exceeds 103,000 PLN worth. The studies confirm the negative impact of the human capital measure  infant birth rate on inequalities. We hope that this article enables to better understand market mechanisms influencing inequalities of earnings. (shrink)

In political economics coexist two thoughts of income (earnings) inequalities. First, motivating, which postulates bigger earnings inequalities and second, egalitarian, which postulates less earnings inequalities. In the earlier research we tried to reconcile these two thoughts. We confirmed the appearance of optimum, for economic growth, earnings inequalities (Gini index, 28%). From this perspective, both too little and too big earnings inequalities had equally a negative impact on growth. Now we’re putting one hypothesis that too little and too big inequalities cause (...) different waste of economic effectiveness. On one hand, when inequalities are less than the optimum ones, their increase causes considerable economic growth. Then the whole of society accept the increase of earnings inequalities. On the other hand, when inequalities are too big, their downfall gives less economic profits. Demands of poor people to reduce too big disparities in earnings can be corrected by the necessity of using differential work and level of education. The research was conducted for Poland for period 1970–2006 on the economic growth model. (shrink)

We introduce nebit, a classical bit with a signed probability distribution. We study its properties and basic transformations that can be applied to it. Then, we introduce a simple dynamical model – a classical random walk supplemented with nebits. We show that such a model exhibits some counterintuitive non-classical properties and that it can achieve or even exceed the speedup of Grover’s quantum search algorithm. The proposed classical dynamics never reveals negativity of nebits and thus we do not need any (...) operational interpretation of negative probabilities. We argue that nebits can be useful as a measure of non-classicality as well as a tool to find new quantum algorithms. (shrink)

Celem niniejszego artykułu jest wprowadzenie do tekstu Dominique’a Pestre’a, który został wygłoszony na konferencji „Parmi les hommes, les objets et les signes / Among humans, objects and signs. Hommage à Krzysztof Pomian”. Wydarzenie to zostało zorganizowane z okazji 85. rocznicy urodzin prof. Pomiana, jednego z najwybitniejszych żyjących polskich naukowców, od 1973 r. mieszkającego i pracującego głównie we Francji. Konferencja odbyła się w Paryżu w dniach 4–6 kwietnia 2019 r. Jej uczestnikami byli współpracownicy, uczniowie i przyjaciele Krzysztofa Pomiana z Polski, Francji, (...) Belgii, Holandii, Wielkiej Brytanii, Niemiec i Izraela. W artykule został krótko opisany każdy z trzech dni konferencji ze szczególnym podkreśleniem znaczenia prac Krzysztofa Pomiana w takich dziedzinach, jak historia kolekcji i muzeów, historiografia, historia Europy. Wystąpienie Dominique’a Pestre’a zostało umiejscowione w kontekście zainteresowań badawczych Krzysztofa Pomiana oraz rozwoju historii nauki we Francji od lat 80. do dzisiaj. Na koniec zwrócono uwagę na istotne znaczenie sieci relacji przyjacielskich i intelektualnych w rozwoju nauki. (shrink)