In my paper I present David Hume's philosophy from the perspective of Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs. I argue that by interpreting impressions and ideas as iconic signs it is possible to avoid many inconsistencies in Hume's philosophy. Apart from that it makes possible to avoid Hume's scepticism about the existence of the external world by introducing Peirce's concept of the dynamic and immediate object. What is more, the generative structure of signs helps us to deal with the "gmissing (...) shade of blue" problem. (shrink)

Wittgenstein introduced his claim about colour incompatibility originally in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , where he stated that there could be only one colour in one place and time. It is commonly believed that Wittgenstein abandoned his conception of logical atomism when he realized the consequences of this claim. The aim of this article is to provide an interpretation of the colour incompatibility claim in terms of Wittgenstein’s phenomenology. I will focus on two works of great significance for the claim: Some (...) Remarks on Logical Form and Philosophical Remarks . These two works were written between 1929 and 1930, which is the beginning of the “middle period” in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. I will focus not only on Wittgenstein’s formulation of the colour incompatibility claim, but also on how this claim was justified. The explanation of Wittgenstein’s justification of this claim will help to understand his phenomenology and theory of philosophical grammar. (shrink)

The debates about qualia are common in contemporary analytical philosophy, especially in the area of philosophy of mind or epistemology. Notwithstanding the significance of this notion in present-day investigations, there still appears to be a lack of agreement over how to understand the term “quale”. Due to this fact, our goal is to shed light on the concept of quale as it entered the modern history of philosophy. Strictly speaking, our concern shall be devoted to the American pragmatist philosophy of (...) C. S. Peirce and C. I. Lewis. Therefore, we intend to outline the understanding of quale within Peirce's theory of categories at the beginning, and afterwards we shall present Lewis' remarks on quale in the context of his theory of the given. This approach will not only provide the grounds for relating Peirce's and Lewis' views with each other, but also it will let us interpret Lewis' notion of quale within the pragmatic framework. (shrink)

Many psychological studies have shown that human‐generated sequences are hardly ever random in the strict mathematical sense. However, what remains an open question is the degree to which this (in)ability varies between people and is affected by contextual factors. Herein, we investigated this problem. In two studies, we used a modern, robust measure of randomness based on algorithmic information theory to assess human‐generated series. In Study 1 (), in a factorial design with task description as a between‐subjects variable, we tested (...) the effects of context and mental fatigue on human‐generated randomness. In Study 2 (), in online research, in experimental design, we further investigated the effect of mental fatigue on the randomness of human‐generated series and the relationship between the need for cognition (NFC) and the ability to produce random‐like series. Results of Study 1 show that the activation of the ability to produce random‐like series depends on the relevance of the contextual cues (), whether they activate known representations of a random series generator and consequently help to avoid the production of trivial sequences. Our findings from both studies on the effect of mental fatigue (Study 1 – ; Study 2 – ) and cognitive motivation () demonstrate that regardless of the context or task's novelty people quickly lose interest in the random series generation. Therefore, their performance decreases over time. However, people high in the NFC can maintain the cognitive motivation for a longer period and consequently on average generate more random series. In general, our results suggest that when contextual cues and intrinsic constraints are in optimal interaction people can temporarily escape the structured and trivial patterns and produce more random‐like sequences. (shrink)

Dharmakīrti argues that there is no pramāṇa (valid means of cognition or source of knowledge) for a thesis that is a self-contradiction (svavacanavirodha). That is, self-contradictions such as ‘everything said is false’ and ‘my mother is barren’ cannot be known to be true or false. The contemporary scholar Tillemans challenges Dharmakīrti by arguing that we can know that self-contradictions are false by means of a formal logical inference. The aims of the paper are to answer Tillemans’ challenge from what we (...) take to be Dharmakīrti’s or Dharmakīrtian (someone who is like Dharmakīrti) perspective and to demonstrate the unique features of Dharmakīrti’s view of inference. By so doing, we show that the epistemology in relation to the formal conception of logic that underlies Tillemans’ challenge is problematic from Dharmakīrti’s or Dharmakīrtian perspective. The paper, thus, presents Dharmakīrti’s view of inference and logical reasoning as well as a Dharmakīrtian challenge to the formal conception of logic that is the dominant contemporary conception. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:According to the mainstream bioethical stance, death constitutes the termination of an organism. This essay argues that such an understanding of death is inappropriate in the usual context of determining death, since it also has a social bearing. There are two reasons to justify this argument. First, the mainstream bioethical definition generates an organismal superposition challenge, according to which a given patient in a single physiological state might be both alive and dead, like Schrödinger's cat. Therefore, there is no clear (...) answer as to whether organ retrieval from a brain-dead patient is an act of killing or not. Second, when combined with the dead donor rule, the mainstream position in the definition of death might lead to ethically unacceptable verdicts, since there is a discrepancy between terminating an organism and depriving someone of moral status. (shrink)

The article discusses the ecological aspects of John Milbank’s thought in the context of the growing climate crisis. For this purpose, the concept of integral ecology is interpreted in the spirit of Milbank’s integralism, which rejects the notion of “pure nature” as a manifestation of secularism and calls for theological grounding of the environmental discourse. This perspective allows us to see the limitations of the modern way of thinking, caught up in the metaphors of “conquest of nature” and “return to (...) nature.” As an alternative, the concept of “kenotic anthropocentrism” is proposed, which sees man as a rational, social, creative and religious animal, that somehow transcends his own nature, being called to union with God. On the one hand, such an approach proclaims the ontological superiority of man over other creatures, and on the other, it reminds us of his role as the guardian—and not the owner—of the Earth. Thus, it differs significantly from Clive Hamilton’s “modest anthropocentrism,” whose call to care for the environment is ultimately based on arbitrary freedom and the imperative of self-preservation. Milbank’s position is closer to Bruno Latour’s anthropocentrism emphasizing the role of man as a political representative of silent earthlings—rivers, mountains and animals. However, Milbank advocates a strong ontological hierarchy rejected by Latour, which makes him less sensitive to the material dimension of climate change. Moreover, Milbank’s militant anti-secularism may be an obstacle to a much needed broader discussion of the ecological crisis, even if his critique of modernity is hard to ignore. (shrink)

We define Kripke semantics for propositional intuitionistic logic with Suszko’s identity. We propose sequent calculus for ISCI along with cut-elimination theorem. We sketch a constructive interpretation of Suszko’s propositional identity connective.

The liar paradox is still an open philosophical problem. Most contemporary answers to the paradox target the logical principles underlying the reasoning from the liar sentence to the paradoxical conclusion that the liar sentence is both true and false. In contrast to these answers, Buddhist epistemology offers resources to devise a distinctively epistemological approach to the liar paradox. In this paper, I mobilise these resources and argue that the liar sentence is what Buddhist epistemologists call a contradiction with one’s own (...) words. I situate my argument in the works of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti and show how Buddhist epistemology answers the paradox. (shrink)

In the article the author rejects traditional, logical interpretation of the famous “Is-Ought Paragraph” from David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature. He argues that most of the interpreters failed to grasp the wide philosophical background of the IsOP, which is, generally speaking, a passionate discussion between ethical rationalists and ethical anti-rationalists in the 17th and 18th century British philosophy. The author shows that the Hume’s main aim in the IsOP is to strengthen his previous arguments against ethical rationalism and (...) to reinforce (and not subvert at all) the common-sense (vulgar) systems of morality, likewise he did in the first book of the Treatise… in case of the theory of knowledge. The author argues that there is no putative thesis of logic in the IsOP, which some scholars call “Hume’s Law”. (shrink)

It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealised listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealised listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealised listener should be able to recover it. Our aim here is to explore the range (...) of ways that such idealisation might be worked out, and then to argue that none of these results in a very plausible theory. We conclude by reflecting on what this negative result reveals about the nature of meaning and responsibility. (shrink)

Our main inspiration is the work in paper (Gitik and Shelah in Isr J Math 124(1):221–242, 2001). We will prove that for a partition \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{A}}$$\end{document} of the real line into meager sets and for any sequence \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{A}_n}$$\end{document} of subsets of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{A}}$$\end{document} one can find a sequence \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} (...) \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{B}_n}$$\end{document} such that \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{B}_{n}}$$\end{document}’s are pairwise disjoint and have the same “outer measure with respect to the ideal of meager sets”. We get also generalization of this result to a class of σ-ideals posessing Suslin property. However, in that case we use additional set-theoretical assumption about non-existing of quasi-measurable cardinal below continuum. (shrink)

The text introduces a translation of Ilyenkov’s famous text “On the State of Philosophy,” which was meant as a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU and expressed his exasperation with the development of Soviet philosophy. In our introduction, we describe the historical context of the emergence of the letter, including the main changes in Soviet philosophy in the 1960s (esp. rise in popularity of cybernetics), and the institutional details of Ilyenkov’s biography. We point to the contemporary relevance of (...) the letter by emphasizing how Ilyenkov’s dialectical account of science can enrich contemporary discussions in the sociology of science and STS. (shrink)

Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way (Madhyamaka) doctrine met with the objection that it is a mere verbal attack (vitaṇḍā) against other philosophical positions. As one of the Madhyamaka critics pointed out: because Nāgārjuna does not hold own position, he is not able to justify his criticism of the essence (svabhāva). The article is an answer to the question whether, in the context of Indian philosophy, it is possible to know things devoid of essences. Theory of knowledge of this kind, i.e. the concept (...) of omniscience (sarvajña) was presented in Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā sutra. Associations between Nāgārjuna’s texts and the sutra suggest that omniscience could be a substrate for epistemological position of the Middle Way. (shrink)

The article is an attempt of analysis and interpretation of the “Young Poland“ comedy written by Włodzimierz Perzyński in psychopathological or psychoanalytical perspective. The author draws reader’s attention to artistic achievements of Włodzimierz Perzyński who was a Polish novelist, comedy writer, columnist and poet, satirist and ironist and he died eighty years ago. The article is informally built out of two parts: Michel Foucault’s cultural criticism is a context of the first part, in the second one the author uses general (...) psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Karen Horney. A neurotic personality, neurotic disturbances in the relations between people and activities of individuals in the different social situations are an object of analysis and interpretation. The author discussing one of the most famous Perzyński’s comedies tries to show that the Polish writer’s plays are interesting and opening a lot of perspectives of interpretation. (shrink)

This paper’s primary purpose is to show that there is a peculiar alternative to scientism whose central thesis is not about sources of knowledge or the existence of various objects, but it aims at setting out a strategy to help decide which of the two mutually exclusive beliefs is the better one to adopt. Scientophilia, to coin a term, recommends preferring, without any discussion, a position consistent with the consensus of credible and reliable experts in a given domain. In case (...) there is no such agreement, mainly because peers disagree with each other, or experts are difficult to identify, it is recommended for a scientophile to suspend judgment. Scientophilia is not a position on science or human knowledge boundaries, but it deals with the practical side of belief change. Verdicts made by this approach are partially similar to those offered by mild scientism, as scientophilia puts scientific knowledge as one of the most reliable sources. However, it is also consistent with mild antiscientism, as in some particular cases (for example, Moorean truths), it assigns reliable expertise to non-scientific experts. Therefore it is a third way. (shrink)

Archive Materials of Mieczysław Wallis are in the collection of Combined Libraries of Philosophy and Sociology Faculties of the University of Warsaw, the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science and the Polish Philosophical Society. There are two files devoted to Henryk Elzenberg. They contain a rich historical material, not published before and not known to many people. It is a valuable source of knowledge in the field of the history of Polish philosophy. Wallis’s notes provide (...) a lot of unique informations both on Elzenberg’s private life and also his activity in the scientific community. Furthermore, they present his philosophical concepts, as well as his motions of life and adversities he had to cope with. M. Wallis’s memoirs are an unusual record of the friendship and scientific co-operation of the two scholars that lasted for a few decades. Wallis’s work creates also an intellectual testimony of the epoch, in which they both lived and worked. (shrink)

In this paper we are applying certain strategy described by Negri and Von Plato :418–435, 1998), allowing construction of sequent calculi for axiomatic theories, to Suszko’s Sentential calculus with identity. We describe two calculi obtained in this way, prove that the cut rule, as well as the other structural rules, are admissible in one of them, and we also present an example which suggests that the cut rule is not admissible in the other.

In this paper we are applying certain strategy described by Negri and Von Plato :418–435, 1998), allowing construction of sequent calculi for axiomatic theories, to Suszko’s Sentential calculus with identity. We describe two calculi obtained in this way, prove that the cut rule, as well as the other structural rules, are admissible in one of them, and we also present an example which suggests that the cut rule is not admissible in the other.

The aim of this paper is to present two arguments against the dialectical interpretation of Nagarjuna's philosophy. This interpretation understands Nagarjuna's philosophy as a method of deconstruction, abstracting from Nagarjuna's own standpoint. The first argument refers to the metaphysical presuppositions of this method. The second argument refers to the positive statements asserted by Nagarjuna and focuses mainly on those concerning Buddhist practice. Furthermore, the conception of 'skilful means' and 'the two truths' will be discussed. The conclusion of this paper is (...) that Nagarjuna's philosophy is based upon determining the conditions of the possibility of the Buddhist practice rather than on a dialectic without any metaphysical assumptions. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to compare the role played by logical analysis in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Russell’s On Denoting. Whereas in Russell’s work it is an important element of his argument in support of description theory, in his pupil’s it does not function this way. Russell, while analysing various propositions, including descriptions translates them into formal language, indicating that those propositions, despite the appearances, in fact do not denote. Logical analysis shall be a tool decisive in favour (...) of Russell’s thesis. Wittgenstein similarly analyses some troublesome propositions and claims that they are meaningless. The difference is that Russell’s final conclusion is derived from logical analysis, whereas Wittgenstein’s from pure speculation. In Tractatus logico-philosophicus logical analysis is not a method thanks to which the author gets certain result, just as it was the case with his teacher and his On Denoting. In Wittgenstein’s early philosophy logical analysis concerns just a few technical problems connected only to some ideas from Principia mathematica, and not to the main subject of his work, which is the analysis of philosophical theses. (shrink)

This paper aims to present how logic may undermine a parliamentary assault on democratic institutions based on the analysis conducted with reference to the so-called Polish constitutional crisis. I analyse whether a law can be reviewed on the basis of this law itself. The Polish Constitutional Tribunal faced such a problem while passing the verdict of 9th March, 2016, regarding the constitutionality of the amendment to the Statute on the Constitutional Tribunal from 22nd December, 2015. This problem, called a ‘verdict (...) paradox’, was claimed to be a type of the Liar paradox. I argue that, contrary to the common view, the problem of the verdict paradox is not based on the Liar paradox; for this purpose, a logical analysis is applied to four variants of a reasoning with regard to the constitutionality of the said amendment. The distinction between two levels of analysis concerning emerging reasonings, namely an abstract level and a concrete level placed in the context of the legal system, is also introduced. This paper demonstrates that although only two variants of the reasoning concerning a law’s judicial review based on the law itself involve logical contradiction, the possibility of employing reasonings from other variants must be excluded, albeit due to alternative reasons. Therefore, the Constitutional Tribunal’s decision to avoid the verdict paradox by passing over the reviewed provisions in the review process was correct and might be perceived as an example of how logic and reason can defend the institutional guarantees of political freedom. (shrink)

In one of his papers, Moti Mizrahi argues that arguments from an expert opinion are weak arguments. His thesis may seem controversial due to the consensus on this topic in the field of informal logic. I argue that its controversy is framework-dependent, and if translated into a different framework, it appears to be a correct, however trivial, claim. I will use a framework based on Douglas Walton’s argumentation scheme theory and his conception of examination dialogue to demonstrate that it is (...) so. It appears that Mizrahi’s idiosyncratic framework provides an excessively restrictive conception of an argument from expert opinion than Walton’s scheme does. There is no quarrel between both frameworks, as they yield analogous, almost identical, outcomes of argument evaluation. The actual and crucial disagreement is on the topic of argument classification. Mizrahi’s conception of arguments from an expert opinion imposes exact conditions that such argument must fulfil: an expert’s opinion o truth-value must be unknown; o must be unsupported by any evidence; an expert’s peers neither accept o nor reject it. These exclude, by definition, every possible strong, in Walton’s terms, variant of such an argument. Therefore, if rephrased with the notions of the examination dialogue framework, Mizrahi’s thesis sounds as follows: weak arguments from expert opinion are weak arguments. (shrink)

The paper discusses the relation of philosophy and meta-philosophy. With the use of Jerzy Perzanowski’s notion of characteristics of science and Jan Woleński’s meta-methodological typology, the author aims at presenting meta-philosophy as part of philosophy itself. Seen along such lines, meta-philosophy is part of methodology of philosophy which relates classical problems of epistemology to philosophy, just as philosophy of science does it for science. The author argues that the problems of meta-philosophy are in fact philosophical problems and sketches possible meta-philosophical (...) positions analogous to the standpoints in methodology already given. Obviously, this way of presenting meta-philosophy is only one of its possible programs. Yet, the benefit of it is an already given conceptual framework taken from philosophy of science. (shrink)

The problem of idealization in empirical sciences is very rarely taken up in works concerned with the methodology of those sciences. It seems to be common knowledge that in advanced natural sciences references are made to concepts such as “perfectly rigid body,” “material point,” “perfect gas,” etc., but it remains a fact that the most important methodological concepts, concepts which have determined the present-day form of the philosophy of science, have been advanced without regard to the peculiarities of the procedure (...) mentioned above. And yet a moment's consideration suffices to raise doubts as to Carnap's physicalism and/or Popper's falsificationism if we just realize the trivial and commonly known truth that empirical sciences resort to idealizationism. For how are we to imagine a reduction of idealizational concepts to observation terms? And how are we to imagine that theorems which include idealizational concepts imply observation statements which refute, or at least are at variance with, those theorems? But it is a fact that such doubts have neither been raised by the authors of the conceptions mentioned above, nor have they been raised against them. (shrink)

Singer claims that there are two ways of challenging the fact that brain-dead patients, from whom organs are usually retrieved, are in fact biologically alive. By means of the first, the so called dead donor rule may be abandoned, opening the way to lethal organ donation. In the second, it might be posited that terms such as “life” and “death” do not have any primary biological meaning and are applicable to persons instead of organisms. This second possibility permits one to (...) acknowledge that brain-dead patients are deceased because they are irreversibly unconscious. In the commentary which follows, I will argue that Singer’s second option is preferable since it provides a higher amount of organs available for transplant, and is better suited to the meaning of “death” which occurs in ordinary language. I will also defend such a concept of death against the objections raised by Michael Nair-Collins in the article Can the brain-dead be harmed or wronged? On the moral status of brain death and its implications for organ transplantation. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is a presentation of the H. Elzenberg's philosophical theory of the ethical ideal. I pay special attention to the most interesting, from the ethical point of view, parts of his concept. Elzen-berg proposed the ethical ideal, the so called ‘homo ethicus’. I present two ways of its realisation: melioristic and soteristic. My aim is also to prove that Elzenberg’s theory demonstrates that some features of ethical activity distinguish a human being from the background of (...) the natural world and make them exceptional. These attributes include: the realisation of the perfect values such as the good and the beauty, having an ethical will, self-sacrifice, aspiring to perfection and moral salvation. (shrink)

The purpose of the text is to engage in a well thought critique of the Enlightenment project carried out by Nicholas Maxwell and to reflect upon the proposal of its reconstruction. Maxwell’s intellectual position is not at all obvious: he is neither a radical rationalist, nor a defender of scientific rationality, nor a postmodern and social constructivist. Postmodernists and social constructivists opposed the very idea of reason and rational inquiry, and have been thoroughly critical of what knowledge-inquiry represents. Indeed, such (...) criticisms could not be further from Maxwell’s position. According to Maxwell, what is wrong with knowledge-inquiry is not its embodiment of reason but, to the contrary, its gross and damaging irrationality. From Maxwell’s point of view we suffer not that much from the excess of rationality, but its deficit. Maxwell does not share open criticism of anti-Enlightenment thinkers from Nietzsche to Foucault, but more so he escapes the beliefs of a scientifically focused group of philosophers who see the main force of emancipation of humanity in a narrowly understood science followed by physics, the methodology of verification, and naturalism as a basic ideology. The author of the text thus poses the question: what can save our culture if it is neither sciencenor the rejection of science? Does the replacement of the category of knowledgeinquiry with wisdom-inquiry—which Maxwell converts us to—bring us any closer to a solution in our consideration of knowledge and life, science and politics, facts and values, nature and society? In Western culture wisdom has always been an object of desire, and it was so, inter alia, because unlike knowledge it has never been precisely defined and further specified. Philosophers developed a warm feeling towards wisdom and sought for wisdom, but had they lived by wisdom? Finally, the author challenges the most difficult question: can we rationally excuse our hopes for wisdom and hope that it may one day be embodied in the work of institutions and the actions of individuals? (shrink)

The twenty-first century will witness an unprecedented decline in the diversity of the world’s languages. While most philosophers will likely agree that this decline is lamentable, the question of what exactly is lost with a language has not been systematically explored in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address this lacuna by arguing that language loss constitutes a problematic form of illocutionary silencing. When a language disappears, past and present speakers lose the ability to realize a range of speech (...) acts that can only be realized in that language. With that ability, speakers lose something in which they have a fundamental interest: their standing as fully empowered members of a linguistic community. (shrink)

Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by King (2001) and Elbourne (2005). Wolter (2006), however, has shown that complex demonstratives admit non-deictic interpretations only (...) when a precise set of structural constrains are met. In this paper, I argue that Wolter’s results, properly understood, upend the philosophical status quo. They fatally undermine the ambiguity theory and demand a fundamental rethinking of the hidden argument approach. (shrink)

Two examples of Galois connections and their dual forms are considered. One of them is applied to formulate a criterion when a given subset of a complete lattice forms a complete lattice. The second, closely related to the first, is used to prove in a short way the Knaster-Tarski’s fixed point theorem.

The article offers an analysis of the topic of negotiations, from the most concreto area to the most abstract, and then an analysis of the many meanings of the term profit, which in negotiations has three areas: mine, yours, or shared. Yet the estimation of profit requires a comparison with the idealsituation expectations or with other empirically available kinds of goods. In all these, it is possible to modify the vision of a situation through tinkering or even systemic deception via (...) the image of an anchor point, the extreme value. The concept of neuro-linguistic programming in particular includes a rich set of verbal manipulations, which may reflect the hidden intentions of a negotiating party. Even in an individual’s cognitive system, there exist tendencies for tinkering with the image of truth in order to protect the person’s good opinion of themselves. In the other part of the article, the authors discussed seven strategies of manipulation which are used in Polish business practice. (shrink)

Stojnić et al. (2013, 2017) argue that the reference of demonstratives is fixed without any contribution from the extra-linguistic context. On their `prominence/coherence' theory, the reference of a demonstrative expression depends only on its context-independent linguistic meaning. Here, we argue that Stojnić et al.’s striking claims can be maintained in only the thinnest technical sense. Instead of eliminating appeals to the extra-linguistic context, we show how the prominence/coherence theory merely suppresses them. Then we ask why one might be tempted to (...) try and offer such a view. Since we are rather sympathetic to the motivations we find, we close by sketching a more plausible alternative. (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)

The paper examines the evolution of Marek Siemek’s “dialogical principle.” The early version of this principle, sketched in the essay “Dialogue and Its Myth”, meets several criteria of the phenomenology of dialogue and even hermeneutics. However, Siemek has continued to change his concept of dialogue over the decades. In his recent book, Freedom, Reason, Intersubjectivity, he explores transcendental preconditions of free and reasonable activism, i.e., the Fichtean “limitative synthesis” of I and Non-I and its applications in social interrelations. He no (...) longer considers the empirical, anthropological, and phenomenological aspects of dialogics and mutual recognition. He also replaces mutuality with reciprocity, asymmetry with symmetry, and phenomenology with transcendentalism. (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 I justify the acceptability of ex vivo transplantation and I provide the ethical evaluation of trafficking in human organs from the Kantian perspective. Firstly, I refer to passages of Kant's works, where he explicitly states that depriving oneself of one’s body parts for other purposes than self-preservation is not permitted. I explain that the negative ethical evaluation of the disposal of the body parts was given various justifications by Kant. Subsequently, I provide partial criticism of this justification, (...) resulting in the recognition of the admissibility of ex vivo transplantation. Secondly, I analyse the Kantian slippery-slope argument which, as some philosophers believe, supports banning trade in human organs. It turns out, however, that this argument has wider application, namely it applies to all forms of the instrumental treatment of the human body. Using a previously introduced distinction between organs of the first and the second order, I show that the slippery-slope argument is inconclusive. However, I propose a reinterpretation of this reasoning, which results in using this argument as an additional reason to support prohibiting trade in human organs. (shrink)

FREGE AND ŁUKASIEWICZ ON LOGICAL VALUES Our article regards the connections between the views on semantics of Gottlob Frege and Jan Łukasiewicz. We are especially focused on the problem of logical values and their ontological interpetation. The paper is composed of three parts. In the first section we point out the general tendencies in the reception of Frege’s logical theory in the Lvov-Warsaw Philosophical School. The second section is dedicated to Frege’s semantics, especially his analysis of sense and meaning of (...) propositions. In the third section we reconstruct Łukasiewicz’s propositional semantics from the period when he was inspired by Frege’s semantics. We also critically examine the widespread opinion, according to which the ontological interpretation of logical values proposed by Łukasiewicz is entirely consistent with Frege’s concept. (shrink)

Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (in: Almog, Perry, Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by King (Complex Demonstratives: a Quantificational (...) Account, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001) and Elbourne (Situations and Individuals, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005). Wolter (That’s That; the Semantics and Pragmatics of Demonstrative Noun Phrases. Ph.D. thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2006), however, has shown that complex demonstratives admit non-deictic interpretations only when a precise set of structural constrains are met. In this paper, I argue that Wolter’s results, properly understood, upend the philosophical status quo. They fatally undermine the ambiguity theory and demand a fundamental rethinking of the hidden argument approach. (shrink)