In this paper, we complement proximate or ‘how’ explanations for the origins of language, broadening our perspective to include fitness-consequences explanations, i.e. ultimate, or ‘why’ explanations. We identify the platform of trust as a fundamental prerequisite for the development of a language-like system of symbolic communication. The platform of trust is a social niche in which cheap but honest communication with non-kin is possible, because messages tend to be trusted as a default. We briefly consider the place of the platform (...) of trust on the road map as laid out in the Mirror System Hypothesis. We then turn to recent research on turn-taking in primates, which has been proposed as a precursor of the cooperative structuring of conversation in humans. We suggest, instead, that human turn-taking, in its full richness that makes it an interesting explanatory target, may only appear in a communicative system that is already founded on a community-wide, cooperative platform of trust. (shrink)

The set of design features developed by Charles Hockett in the 1950s and 1960s remains probably the most influential means of juxtaposing animal communication with human language. However, the general theoretical perspective of Hockett is largely incompatible with that of modern language evolution research. Consequently, we argue that his classificatory system—while useful for some descriptive purposes—is of very limited use as a theoretical framework for evolutionary linguistics. We see this incompatibility as related to the ontology of language, i.e. deriving from (...) Hockett’s interest in language as a product rather than a suite of sensorimotor, cognitive and social abilities that enable the use but also acquisition of language by biological creatures. After a reconstruction of Hockett’s views on design features, we raise two criticisms: focus on the means at the expense of content and focus on the code itself rather than the cognitive abilities of its users. Finally, referring to empirical data, we illustrate some of the problems resulting from Hockett’s approach by addressing three specific points—namely arbitrariness and semanticity, cultural transmission, and displacement—and show how the change of perspective allows to overcome those difficulties. (shrink)

We applaud Heintz & Scott-Phillips's guiding metaphor of “unleashing leashed expression,” and we value the unified explanation for the emergence of not only language, but also other forms of unleashed expression, such as multimodal communication. We are more critical of the authors' discussion of the selection pressures acting towards unleashed expression, which are proposed to hinge on partner choice ecology.

Although pantomimic scenarios recur in the most important historical as well as current accounts of language origins, a serious problem is the lack of a commonly accepted definition of “pantomime”. We scrutinise several areas of study, from theatre studies to semiotics to primatology, pointing to the differences in use that may give rise to misunderstandings, and working towards a set of definitional criteria of “pantomime” specifically useful for language evolution research. We arrive at a definition of pantomime as a communication (...) mode that is mimetic; non-conventional and motivated; multimodal ; improvised; using the whole body rather than exclusively manual; holistic; communicatively complex and self-sufficient; semantically complex; displaced, open-ended and universal. So conceived, “pantomime” is a near synonym of “bodily-mimetic communication” as envisaged by Donald and Zlatev. On a wider plane, our work may help organise some of the terminology and discussion in language evolution, e.g. by drawing a clear distinction between gestural and pantomimic scenarios or by specifying the relation between pantomimic and multimodal scenarios. (shrink)

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of (...) interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual and multimodal. Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional profiles of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenario. (shrink)

Gestural and pantomimic accounts of language origins propose that language did not develop directly from ape vocalisations, but rather that its emergence was preceded by an intervening stage of bodily-visual communication, during which our ancestors communicated with their hands, arms, and the entire body. Gestural and pantomimic scenarios are again becoming popular in language evolution research, but this line of thought has a long and interesting history that gained special prominence in the Enlightenment, often considered the golden age of glottogony. (...) We highlight several themes key to this line of reflection, such as the idea of innate communication that consists of visual bodily signs and non-linguistic vocalisations; the division of labour between these two semiotic resources ; or the developmental trajectory of this bi-modal system of communication determined by its transmission through generations of users and the intervention of social factors. We confront these ideas with problems discussed in current language evolution research, focusing on polysemioticity, sign function, conventionality and modality transition. (shrink)

Politeness in conversation is a fascinating aspect of human interaction that directly interfaces language use and human social behavior more generally. We show how game theory, as a higher-order theory of behavior, can provide the tools to understand and model polite behavior. The recently proposed responsibility exchange theory :313–344, 2019) describes how the polite communications of thanking and apologizing impact two different types of an agent’s social image: warmth and competence. Here, we extend this approach in several ways, most importantly (...) by adding a cultural-evolutionary dynamics that makes it possible to investigate the evolutionary stability of politeness strategies. Our analysis shows that in a society of agents who value status-related traits over reciprocity-related traits, both the less and the more polite strategies are maintained in cycles of cultural-evolutionary change. (shrink)

This article introduces a special issue on mechanisms in language evolution research. It describes processes relevant for the emergence of protolanguage and the transition thereof to modern language. Protolanguage is one of the key terms in the field of language evolution, used to designate a hypothesised intermediate stage in the emergence of language present in extinct hominins: qualitatively different from non-human primate communication in possessing some, but not all, of the features that characterise modern language. Much debate in language evolution (...) focuses on the exact delineation of these features, as well as the means whereby the transitions occurred: first from non-human primate communication systems to protolanguage, and then from protolanguage to modern language. In what follows, we first propose a comprehensive typology of protolanguage debates, taking into account the postulated structural organisation of protolanguage, its functions, and its communicative modality. This makes it possible to show how a specific focus on mechanisms and processes deemed relevant for the emergence of these features allows us to assess the explanatory scope of the existing theories of protolanguage. (shrink)

Research on language evolution is an established subject area yet permeated by terminological controversies about which topics should be considered pertinent to the field and which not. By consequence, scholars focusing on language evolution struggle in providing precise demarcations of the discipline, where even the very central notions of evolution and language are elusive. We aimed at providing a data-driven characterisation of language evolution as a field of research by relying on quantitative analysis of data drawn from 697 reviews on (...) 255 submissions from the Joint Conference on Language Evolution 2022 (Kanazawa, Japan). Our results delineate a field characterized by a core of main research topics such as iconicity, sign language, multimodality. Despite being explored within the framework of language evolution research, only very recently these topics became popular in linguistics. As a result, language evolution has the potential to emerge as a forefront of linguistic research, bringing innovation to the study of language. We also see the emergence of more recent topics like rhythm, music, and vocal learning. Furthermore, the community identifies cognitive science, primatology, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, and genetics as key areas, encouraging empirical rather than theoretical work. With new themes, models, and methodologies emerging, our results depict an intrinsically multidisciplinary and evolving research field, likely adapting as language itself. (shrink)

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys and chimpanzees and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m → LCA-c → protohumans → H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis of (...) the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language. (shrink)

Experimental Semiotics (ES) is the study of novel forms of communication that communicators develop in laboratory tasks whose designs prevent them from using language. Thus, ES relates to pragmatics in a “pure,” radical sense, capturing the process of creating the relation between signs and their interpreters as biological, psychological, and social agents. Since such a creation of meaning-making from scratch is of central importance to language evolution research, ES has become the most prolific experimental approach in this field of research. (...) In our paper, we report the results of a study on the scope of recent ES and evaluate the ways in which it is relevant to the study of language origins. We coded for multiple levels across 13 dimensions related to the properties of the emergent communication systems or properties of the study designs, such as type of goal (coordination versus referential), modality of communication, absence or presence of turn-taking, or the presence of vertical vs. horizontal transmission. We discuss our findings and our classification, focusing on the advantages and limitations of those trends in ES, and in particular their ecological validity in the context of bootstrapping communication and the evolution of language. (shrink)

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys and chimpanzees and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m → LCA-c → protohumans → H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis of (...) the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language. (shrink)

Several lines of research within developmental psychology, experimental semiotics and language origins studies have recently converged in their interest in pantomime as a system of bodily communication distinct from both language (spoken or signed) and nonlinguistic gesticulation. These approaches underscore the effectiveness of pantomime, which despite lack of semiotic conventions is capable of communicating complex meanings. However, very little research is available on the structural underpinnings of this effectiveness, that is, the specific properties of pantomime that determine its communicative success. (...) To help fill in this gap, we conducted an exploratory rating study aimed at identifying those properties of pantomime that facilitate its understanding. We analysed an existing corpus of 602 recordings of whole-body re-enactments of short transitive events, coding each of them for 6 properties, and found out that the presence of salient elements (conspicuous objects in a specific semantic space), image mapping (representing the physical orientation of the object), and gender markers (distinguishing between the represented characters) increased the guessability of pantomimes. (shrink)

There is proposed the analysis of conceptual foundations in researching of Poles’ national character on materials of Julian Leopold Ochorowicz (1850-1917) scientific heritage connected with philosophical and pedagogical implications of his ideas. Ochorowicz’s contribution to interdisciplinary approach on Poles’ national character is emphasizing. The heuristically potential of this approach is explicated using reconstruction and systemizing of his views, which had played a significant role in determining intentionality in discussions on the matter «What philosophy do Poles need?” for the successful self-statement (...) in their national being. Critically evaluating of this experience there is combined with verifying of his theoretical assumptions that should be actual also in Ukrainian social and cultural contexts. Ochorowicz belongs to the group of outstanding Polish scholars with wide scientific interests and original achievements. This article presents his research on history perceived as a collective psychological process. In Poland, Ochorowicz should be regarded as a precursor of psychohistory. An important role in his conception is played by the theory of the so-called residual symptoms, on the basis of which he developed the concept of Poles’ national character with its educational implications. The question about the rudiments of our national character sharpens in border situations, in which those traits, previously presented in a declarative form, are verified. The strength of a nation is encoded in the irreal sphere, i.e. in the sphere of values around which people group themselves. (shrink)

A new approach to semantics, based on ordered Banach spaces, is proposed. The Banach spaces semantics arises as a generalization of the four particular cases: the Giles' approach to belief structures, its generalization to the non-Boolean case, and fuzzy extensions of Boolean as well as of non-Boolean semantics.

The paper describes in detail the procedure of identification of the inner language and an inner logico of a physical theory. The procedure is a generalization of the original ideas of J. von Neuman and G. Birkhoff about quantum logic.

In the 1980s, computer-aided experimental research became standard in the majority of leading research laboratories. Unfortunately, this shift was not adequately reflected in the professional literature related to the philosophy and methodology of science. A new experimentalism did emerge, aimed at adequately describing experimental practice (to be discussed in the first part of this article); however, in its initial phase, it failed to consider the role of computers in experimental research (discussed in the second part). This oversight by the philosophers (...) of science, the proponents of the new experimentalism, is significant and calls for supplementation (addressed in the fourth part). By the turn of the 20 th and 21 st centuries, there were numerous philosophical analyses related to computer experiments, such as computer simulations. However, this article focuses only on classic experiments facilitated by various computer systems (e.g., LHC at CERN). In the final part of this article, I will present examples of aspects of experimental work that have not yet been analyzed and could potentially enhance new experimentalism with insights from computer-aided experiments. (shrink)

Livio Rossetti, Le dialogue socratique, Éditions Les Belles Lettres, Paris 2011, ss. 296.

We study the structure of analytic ideals of subsets of the natural numbers. For example, we prove that for an analytic ideal I, either the ideal {X (Ω × Ω: En X ({0, 1,…,n} × Ω } is Rudin-Keisler below I, or I is very simply induced by a lower semicontinuous submeasure. Also, we show that the class of ideals induced in this manner by lsc submeasures coincides with Polishable ideals as well as analytic P-ideals. We study this class of (...) ideals and characterize, for example, when the ideals in it are Fσ or when they carry a locally compact group topology. We apply these results to Borel partial orders to rederive a theorem of Todorcevic and to Borel equivalence relations to answer a question of Kechris and Louveau. As another application we give a characterization of σ-ideals of μ-zero sets for Maharam submeasures μ on the Cantor set which is to a large extent analogous to a characterization of the meager ideal due to Kechris and the author. (shrink)

Background: Biomedical research nowadays is increasingly carried out in multinational and multicenter settings. Due to disparate national regulations on various ethical aspects, such as informed consent, there is the risk of ethical compromises when involving human subjects in research. Although the Declaration of Helsinki is the point of reference for ethical conduct of research on humans, national normative requirements may diverge from its provisions. The aim of this research is to examine requirements on informed consent in biomedical research in Germany, (...) Poland, and Russia to determine how each national regulatory framework relates to the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki. Methods: For this analysis, we conducted a search of the legal databases “Gesetze im Internet” for Germany, “Internetowy System Aktow Prawnych” for Poland, and “ГAPAHT – Garant” for Russia. The search was complemented by a review of secondary literature contained in the databases Google Scholar, PubMed, Polish National Library, and eLibrary ru. We have identified 21 normative regulations containing provisions on informed consent in clinical research in all three countries. The content of these documents was systematically categorized and analyzed. Results: The normative framework in all three countries shows a strong commitment towards the core ethical principles of research envisaged in the Declaration of Helsinki. Nevertheless, provisions on informed consent vary between these three countries. The differences range from the method and language in which information should be provided, through the amount of information required to be disclosed, to the form of documenting consent or withdrawal. In the case of research on vulnerable groups, these differences are particularly visible. Conclusions: The identified differences can negatively impact the ethical conduct of international clinical studies. Attention needs to be paid that flexibilities within national regulations are not misused to undermine the protection of research subjects. Achieving global or regional legislative harmonization might prove impossible. Such lack of legal consensus reinforces the significance of the international ethical agreements. (shrink)

Artykuł jest próbą ukazania źródeł współczesnej kultury. Autor stawia w nim tezę, że u jej podstaw znajduje się dziś myślenie w gruncie rzeczy antyhumanistyczne – myślenie spod znaku „śmierci człowieka”, jego bytowej nieokreśloności, ale również spod znaku nowożytnego cogito, podmiotu zabsolutyzowanego, który staje się szczególnego rodzaju fundamentem, ostatecznym podłożem rzeczywistości. W pierwszej części autor przedstawia specyfikę nowożytnego rozumienia bytu ludzkiego, zgodnie z którą człowiek – jako podmiot myślący, poznający, samoświadomy, racjonalny – przypisuje sobie rolę nowożytnego suwerena, Demiurga, jedynego ustawodawcy i (...) architekta nowego, prawdziwie ludzkiego świata. W ten sposób – zgodnie ze znaczeniem słowa „podmiot” – człowiek staje się „ostatecznym podłożem” rzeczywistości. Dalej autor wykazuje, że absolutyzowanie podmiotu, przypisywanie mu coraz to większych kompetencji, doprowadza ostatecznie do jego podważenia i zanegowania. Odwołując się do koncepcji takich filozofów jak Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida twierdzi, że negacja kartezjańskiego cogito, „śmierć” pewnej określonej wizji człowieka jako podmiotu rodzi myślenie, zgodnie z którym człowiek staje się bytowo nieokreślony.Zarówno nowoczesne jak i ponowoczesne spojrzenie zostały w pewien sposób naznaczone myśleniem antyhumanistycznym. W jednym i drugim przypadku mamy bowiem do czynienia z nierealistycznym spojrzeniem na człowieka. Autor mówi o „antyhumanizmie pana i władcy” oraz „antyhumanizmie zluzowanego” i wskazuje, że właśnie one stanowią swego rodzaju podglebie współczesnego humanizmu. W punkcie ostatnim pokazano, że sposób rozumienia roli podmiotu na przestrzeni ostatnich kilku wieków, został zbudowany na niezwykle prostej opozycji – wszystko albo nic. Ponieważ nieprawdą jest, że podmiot jest dla siebie całkowicie racjonalny, przejrzysty, że jest autonomicznym panem samego siebie, musi zniknąć, trzeba o nim zapomnieć, stąd idea „śmierci człowieka”. W tym kontekście, odwołując się do intuicji francuskiej profesor filozofii Chantal Delsol, autor przedstawia próbę wyjścia z aporii między nowoczesnym podmiotem absolutnym, samowystarczalnym, a ponowoczesnym podmiotem, którego właściwie nie ma. Wskazuje na konieczność realistycznego spojrzenia na człowieka, gdyż tylko na takim spojrzeniu można zbudować prawdziwie humanistyczną kulturę. (shrink)

Artykuł traktuje o współczesnym zakwestionowaniu nowożytnej wizji człowieka jako podmiotu. Ukazuje, w jaki sposób takie myślenie stało się swego rodzaju ponowoczesną dominantą, a odnosząc się do kilku konkretnych koncepcji filozoficznych, tłumaczy jak należy rozumieć idę „śmierć człowieka” i jakie są jej konsekwencje. W pierwszej części autor ukazuje, że nowożytne kreowanie podmiotu na szczególnego rodzaju suwerena, władcę siebie i świata, w konsekwencji doprowadza do jego „śmierci”. „Śmierci”, która w pewien sposób została sprowokowana przez samych rzeczników podmiotowości, przez ich pomysł ubóstwienia podmiotu, (...) uczynienia go absolutnie niezależnym, autonomicznym, niczym nieskrępowanym.W drugiej części, odwołując się do takich filozofów jak Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, autor tłumaczy, z czym wiąże się ponowoczesna idea „śmierci człowieka”. Uzasadnia, że każdy z tych filozofów, porzucając metafizykę, kwestionując nowożytne rozumienie podmiotowości, proponuje wizję człowieka, który przestaje być „jakiś”, jakoś określony, stale obecny, zdefiniowany. Zgodnie z takim myśleniem człowiek staje się całkowicie nieokreślony. Na koniec, odwołując się do myślenia Michela Foucaulta, autor ukazuje istotne znamiona kultury, w której żyjemy, jako konsekwencje przyjęcia pewnych ponowoczesnych założeń w myśleniu o człowieku. Mówi więc o „kulturze niedialektycznej”, „kulturze dobrego funkcjonowania” oraz „kulturze oporu”. (shrink)

§1. Introduction. Ideals and filters of subsets of natural numbers have been studied by set theorists and topologists for a long time. There is a vast literature concerning various kinds of ultrafilters. There is also a substantial interest in nicely definable ideals—these by old results of Sierpiński are very far from being maximal— and the structure of such ideals will concern us in this announcement. In addition to being interesting in their own right, Borel and analytic ideals occur naturally in (...) the investigations of compact subsets of the space of all Baire class 1 functions on a Polish space, see [12, 18]. Also, certain objects associated with such ideals are of considerable interest and were quite extensively studied by several authors. Let us list here three examples; in all three of them I stands for an analytic or Borel ideal.1. The partial order induced by I on P: X ≥I Y iff X \ Y ϵ I and the partial order.2. Boolean algebras of the form P/I and their automorphisms.3. The equivalence relation associated with I: XEI Y iff X Δ ϵ I.In Section 4, we will have an opportunity to state some consequences of our results for equivalence relations as in 3. (shrink)

Since 1989, clinical ethics consultation in form of hospital ethics committees was established in most of the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Up to now, the similarities and differences between HECs in Central and Eastern Europe and their counterparts in the U.S. and Western Europe have not been determined. Through search in literature databases, we have identified studies that document the implementation of clinical ethics consultation in Central and Eastern Europe. These studies have been analyzed under the following (...) aspects: mode of establishment of HECs, character of consultation they provide, and their composition. The results show that HECs in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe differ from their western-European or U.S. counterparts with regard to these three aspects. HECs were established because of centrally imposed legal regulations. Little initiatives in this area were taken by medical professionals interested in resolving emerging ethical issues. HECs in the transition countries concentrate mostly on review of research protocols or resolution of administrative conflicts in healthcare institutions. Moreover, integration of non-professional third parties in the workings of HECs is often neglected. We argue that these differences can be attributed to the historical background and the role of medicine in these countries under the communist regime. Political and organizational structures of healthcare as well as education of healthcare staff during this period influenced current functioning of clinical ethics consultation in the transition countries. (shrink)

We construct free algebras in the variety generated by the equivalential algebra with conjunction on dense elements and compute the formula for the free spectrum of this variety. Moreover, we describe the decomposition of free algebras into directly indecomposable factors.

The paper presents an analysis of the ethical, political and economic aspects of human work within two Polish historical periods – the years of the People’s Republic of Poland and after 1989. The starting point for the analysis was the assumption that every time period, each age, leaves a mark on man’s work. Analysis of the People's Republic of Poland period gives an opportunity to consider human work understood as a duty and right of every human guaranteed by the Constitution (...) of 1952. Questioning the principles ruling the labour market by the ideologists of the People’s Republic of Poland and, as a consequence, the politicization of labour, resulted in the collapse of the work ethic. Work, as it was at that time a commonly available good, lost its value, regarded as the source of life satisfaction, and thus became ridiculed. After 1989, in relation to the de-politicization of the Polish labour market, the employee became active in searching for a job. The phenomenon of unemployment resulted in competition on the labour market and the employer was thus given the opportunity to freely select a group of employees. As a result, the employer became a distributor of a ‘rare commodity.’ That, in turn, led to the situation where the approach of employers towards employees turned into the employer's diktat. It is the employer who determines the conditions of employment, standards of work and place of work. A lack of alternative that many employees face often makes them accept the dictated conditions of work. What is more, in Poland we deal with the insufficiently developed participation of employees in managing the enterprises, which is an effect of breaking off the bilateral dependency of employee and employer. (shrink)

We study the variety generated by the three-element equivalential algebra with conjunction on the dense elements. We prove the representation theorem which let us construct the free algebras in this variety.

We prove that for every family I of closed subsets of a Polish space each Σ 1 1 set can be covered by countably many members of I or else contains a nonempty Π 0 2 set which cannot be covered by countably many members of I. We prove an analogous result for κ-Souslin sets and show that if A ♯ exists for any $A \subset \omega^\omega$ , then the above result is true for Σ 1 2 sets. A theorem (...) of Martin is included stating that this result is also true for weakly homogeneously Souslin sets. As an application of our results we derive from them a general form of Hurewicz's theorem due to Kechris, Louveau, and Woodin and a theorem of Feng on the open covering axiom. Also some well-known theorems on finding "big" closed sets inside of "big" Σ 1 1 and Σ 1 2 sets are consequences of our results. (shrink)

We prove that every analytic set in ω ω × ω ω with σ-bounded sections has a not σ-bounded closed free set. We show that this result is sharp. There exists a closed set with bounded sections which has no dominating analytic free set, and there exists a closed set with non-dominating sections which does not have a not σ-bounded analytic free set. Under projective determinacy analytic can be replaced in the above results by projective.