It appears that we know surprisingly little about how judges frame linguistically the rationale behind their decisions and how such texts are structured. Using the concept of rhetorical moves, this paper adopts a genre-based approach to examine the rhetorical structure of legal justifications provided in the decisions of the Polish Constitutional Court. The goal of the study is to verify the claim that the way justifications are drafted is becoming more and more uniform and conventional. The results show that there (...) is a common core of rhetorical structure realized by means of recurrent functional segments of text. This paper proposes a prototypical move structure of a Constitutional Tribunal justification and it argues that that the way justifications are drafted are subject to very concrete, even if not explicitly stated constraints. (shrink)

There are many different ways in which modern Corpus Linguistics can be used to enrich and broaden our understanding of legal discourse. Based on the central principle of co-occurrence and co-selection in language construction, this paper reviews current applications of Corpus Linguistics in the area of legal discourse focusing on issues ranging from phraseology, variation in legal discourse, legal translation, register and genre perspectives on legal discourse, legal discourse in forensic contexts to evaluative language in judicial settings. It revisits the (...) notion of ‘corpus’ and it highlights the relevance of various types of legal corpora and computer tools in legal linguistic research. (shrink)

While the question of whether selected-effects accounts of function or causal-role accounts of function provide the ‘true' functional analysis has given way to a general pluralistic consensus, Philip Kitcher has suggested that different functional accounts allow for unification. I argue that Kitcher's attempt to unify the two functional analyses fails because he adopts the environment-centered perspective on selection as a premise. The premise is undermined by the role niche construction is likely to play in the context of evolution. Moreover, I (...) raise the tentative suggestion that niche construction may threaten the applicability, or at least the relevance, of selected-effects ascriptions. *Received October 2009; revised May 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Institut für Philosophie Fakultät für Philosophie und Bildungswissenschaft, Universität Wien, Universitätsstraße 7 1010 Wien, Austria; e-mail: Adela.Roszkowski@univie.ac.at. (shrink)

In this paper, we present two experimental studies on reference of complex demonstratives. The results of our experiments challenge the dominant view in philosophy of language, according to which demonstrative reference is determined by the speaker's intentions. The first experiment shows that in a context where there are two candidates for the referent—one determined by the speaker’s intention, the other by some “external” factors—people prefer to identify the referent of a demonstrative with the latter object. The external factors for which (...) this prediction has been confirmed include the speaker’s demonstration and the descriptive content of a demonstrative. The second experiment shows that while this preference can be explained in terms of the speakers’ having different sorts of referential intentions, the relevant kind of intentions are fully opaque to the subjects. At the end of our paper, we point to some alternative accounts of demonstrative reference, including a pluralistic and hybrid approach, which can accommodate our experimental results. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 51-67.

This paper investigates the role of (DIS)RESPECT a value premise in two landmark civil rights cases given by the United States Supreme Court. It adopts a corpus-assisted approach whereby a keyword analysis and the analysis of key semantic domains are used to identify potential values relied upon by judges in their justifications. The two categories of NO RESPECT and RESPECTED have been selected and examined as one domain of (DIS)RESPECT. (DIS)RESPECT turns out to be the only value marked by strong (...) evaluative polarity and it is found in the majority, as well as in dissenting opinions. The analysis shows how the notion of (DIS)RESPECT has been integrated into the arguments of judges and it highlights the central importance of values and the related evaluative language for legal argumentation. (shrink)

Traditional martial arts continue to be interesting and inspiring to many people around the globe. Some of their contemporary adaptations attract enthusiasts for whom they are especially important. In this article, the author bases his observations on his own long-term participation. The analysis takes into account the influence of the perspectives of Jigoro Kano and several other creators of modern varieties of Japanese budo. It can be concluded that regular, even daily, practice—cultivating martial arts and internalizing its values—co-creates the lifestyle (...) of instructors and advanced students. (shrink)

This book challenges the widespread view of Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic and predominantly religious position on mimesis. -/- Taking mimesis as a crucial conceptual point of reference in reading Kierkegaard, this book offers a nuanced understanding of the relation between aesthetics and religion in his thought. Kaftanski shows how Kierkegaard's dialectical-existential reading of mimesis interlaces aesthetic and religious themes, including the familiar core concepts of imitation, repetition, and admiration as well as the newly arisen notions of affectivity, contagion, and crowd behavior. Kierkegaard’s (...) enduring relevance to the malaises of our own day is firmly established by his classic concern for the meaning of human life informed by reflective meditation on the mimeticorigins of the contemporary age.​ -/- Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kierkegaard, Continental philosophy, the history of aesthetics, and critical and religious studies. (shrink)

Artykuł przedstawia stosunek Archimedesa z Syrakuz do problemu wielkości przekraczających możliwości wyrażania ich za pomocą danego systemu liczbowego. Analiza proponowanych przez matematyka z Syrakuz rozstrzygnięć poprzedzona została uwagami na temat problemów związanych z greckimi systemami notacji poprzedzającymi prace Archimedesa.

We propose a non-standard interpretation of Alternating-time Temporal Logic with imperfect information, for which no commonly accepted semantics has been proposed yet. Rather than changing the semantic structures, we generalize the usual interpretation of formulae in single states to sets of states. We also propose a new epistemic operator for ?practical? or ?constructive? knowledge, and we show that the new logic (which we call Constructive Strategic Logic) is strictly more expressive than most existing solutions, while it retains the same model (...) checking complexity. Finally, we study properties of constructive knowledge and other operators in this non-standard semantics. (shrink)

During the last half of the twentieth century, legal philosophy (or legal theory or jurisprudence) has grown significantly. It is no longer the domain of a few isolated scholars in law and philosophy. Hundreds of scholars from diverse fields attend international meetings on the subject. In some universities, large lecture courses of five hundred students or more study it. The primary aim of the Law and Philosophy Library is to present some of the best original work on legal philosophy from (...) both the Anglo-American and European traditions. Not only does it help make some of the best work avail able to an international audience, but it also encourages increased awareness of, and interaction between, the two major traditions. The primary focus is on full-length scholarly monographs, although some edited volumes of original papers are also included. The Library editors are assisted by an Editorial Advisory Board of internationally renowed scholars. Legal philosophy should not be considered a narrowly circumscribed field. (shrink)

Early twelfth-century logicians invoked past-tensed statements with future-oriented contents to undermine the assumption that every proposition ‘about the past’ is determinate. In the second half of the century, the notion of future-dependence was used to restrict the scope of necessity per accidens. At some point, this idea began to be applied in theology to solve puzzles surrounding predestination, prescience, prophecy, and faith. In the mid-1160s, Magister Udo quotes some thinkers who insisted that the principle of the necessity of the past (...) should exclude dicta that ‘relate to the future’, such as that he has been predestined. Peter of Poitiers adopted this ‘Ockhamist’ strategy around 1170. We find similar accounts in Simon of Tournai and Alan of Lille, who invoked it in other contexts as well. By the time of Praepositinus of Cremona, Hubert of Pirovano, and Stephen Langton, the restricted principle became something of a common view at Paris. (shrink)

Experiential Foundationalism, Linguistic Practice, and Historicity.

It is a historical truism that every thinker who made any impact on the field of philosophy also received his or her fair share of criticism, and it would therefore be surprising if Richard Rorty, at one time “the most quoted American philosopher,” did not. But to merely say that he did would be an understatement. For Rorty happened to belong to the exclusive club of thinkers whose reception consists mostly of attacks. To be fair, throughout his career, he held (...) academic positions at America’s... (shrink)

By spelling out the affective dimension of admiration, this paper challenges the view of admiration as a trustworthy means of detecting morally desirable qualities in exemplars. Such a view of admiration, foundational for the current debate on exemplars in moral education, holds that admiration is a self-motivating emotion essentially oriented toward the good and the excellent. I demonstrate that this view ignores the affective aspects of admiration explored widely in the history of philosophy on which the debate on moral exemplars (...) substantially draws. Focusing on Spinoza, Smith, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, I bring to light their largely skeptical views of the moral value of admiration. These thinkers indicate that admiration can be influenced by, and is often conflated with, other emotions, and can arise in us through behavioral mimicry; moreover, admiration is often oriented toward the mediocre and corrupt, is contagious, self-referential, collective, and has limited motivational power. Their remarks on the affective dimension of admiration call into question admiration’s applicability and usefulness in moral exemplarity. (shrink)

In [2], Bar-Hillel, Gaifman, and Shamir prove that the simple phrase structure grammars (SPGs) defined by Chomsky are equivalent in a certain sense to Bar-Hillel's bidirectional categorial grammars (BCGs). On the other hand, Cohen [3] proves the equivalence of the latter ones to what the calls free categorial grammars (FCGs). They are closely related to Lambek's syntactic calculus which, in turn, is based on the idea due to Ajdukiewicz [1]. For the reasons which will be discussed in the last section, (...) Cohen's proof seems to be at least incomplete. This paper yields a direct proof of the equivalence ofFCGs andSPGs. (shrink)

Warsaw Wild Captive Pisula Stryjek rats - Establishing a breeding colony of Norway Rat in captivity It is believed that the history of laboratory rat dates back to 1820-ies, which is about 300 generations. This relatively short evolutionary distance, drastically different environment and selective breeding could have caused differences in behaviour between the laboratory rat and his wild counterpart - Norway rat. The vast majority of research concerning differences between wild and laboratory rats was conducted over 30 years ago. The (...) knowledge acquired as a result of that research seems far from being complete. Over a quarter of a century could have deepened the described differences. Nowadays the change in experimental approach, in favour of low stress conditions, can give a new insight into this problem. This article describes process of establishing a laboratory line of wild Norway rat, which will take part in a broad series of comparative studies. 16 wild rats were trapped in 5 distant parts of Warsaw. Most of wild rats successfully adapted to captive conditions, mating successfully and producing litters, which have survived to adolescence. (shrink)

Author: Torzewski Wojciech Title: HERMENEUTICS AND THE QUESTION OF REASON (Hermeneutyka a kwestia rozumu) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2010, vol:.11, number: 2010/2, pages: 29-40 Keywords: HERMENEUTICS, RATIONALITY, INTERPRETATION Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:This article is an expression and an attempt to justify the belief that hermeneutic philosophy is an interpretation of the rationality’s concept. Although hermeneutics itself is a critique of a certain form of rationalism, and therefore falls under (...) charges “irrationality”, the concept of reason is an essential component of its identity as a philosophy. (shrink)

From a physical point of view, the no-boundary Hartle-Hawking model put forward in 1983 was an attempt to demonstrate that the incorporation of quantum effects into the general theory of relativity would solve the problem of singularities that make the theory of relativity incomplete. This was achieved by imposing the so called “no-boundary conditions” whereby the Universe could emerge with non-zero probability from a non-existing state. Stephen Hawking quickly turned this result into a metaphysical claim that physical laws explained away (...) the necessity of the Divine intervention at the origin of the Universe. This paper offers an inquiry into the line of arguments presented by Hawking and Mlodinow in their book The Grand Design and supported with the claim that the yet unknown versionof the superstring theory, the M-theory, is an ultimate theory of the Universe. The upshot of the paper is that although the argument in the Grand Design relies on the newer achievements of physics embedded in the controversial multi-verse setting, it does not escape the question of the origin of the most general laws of physics that bring the Universe into existence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues for a unique role of imagination and mental images in the moral education of students. Imagination is rendered here as a capacity oriented toward realizable and salient goals; mental images are understood as particular future-oriented self-representations (FOSRs) devised by and held in imagination. FOSRs have four moral attributes: they are 1) expressive of us as moral agents, 2) shape our moral identity, 3) serve as moral pointers, and 4) help devise mitigating strategies. FOSRs can be created (...) and utilized in educational settings to further the goals of moral education by i) fostering sensitivity to moral situations among students, ii) motivating learners to act morally, iii) facilitating environments supportive of moral practice and moral habituation, and iv) helping strengthen cross-situational consistency of moral action. The four moral attributes of future-oriented self-representations (FOSRs) (1–4) that are to be engaged in moral education to further its goals (i–iv) are correlated with four elements of moral education, namely: a) moral awareness; b) moral competency; c) moral motivation; and d) moral capacity. To argue for the special role of imagination and mental images in moral education this paper integrates philosophical research and conceptual and empirical studies in psychology and education on the morality of imagination and mental images. (shrink)

Action logic of Pratt [21] can be presented as Full Lambek Calculus FL [14, 17] enriched with Kleene star *; it is equivalent to the equational theory of residuated Kleene algebras (lattices). Some results on axiom systems, complexity and models of this logic were obtained in [4, 3, 18]. Here we prove a stronger form of *-elimination for the logic of *-continuous action lattices and the –completeness of the equational theories of action lattices of subsets of a finite monoid and (...) action lattices of binary relations on a finite universe. We also discuss possible applications in linguistics. (shrink)

This article engages the considerations of imagination in Kierkegaard and Ricoeur to argue for a moral dimension of the imagination and its objects. Imaginary objects are taken to be mental representations in images and narratives of people or courses of action that are not real in the sense that they are not actual, or have not yet happened. Three claims are made in the article. First, by drawing on the category of possibility, a conceptual distinction is established between imagination and (...) fantasy, (1) I claim that imagination has a moral dimension because it is engaged in considering real-life possibilities. Second, (2) drawing on Kierkegaard and Ricoeur, it is argued that mental representations of selfhood in imagination have a moral dimension because they essentially allow people to understand the development of agency in human selfhood by means of representations of would-be selves and narrative figurations of the self. Third, (3) mental representations of human selves have a moral dimension because they form important points of reference for moral orientations in the field of human praxis (moral pointers). (shrink)

Propertarian justifications of intellectual property postulate the appropriation of various entities, often called patterns, designs, or technologies. These must be immaterial and should not be confused with material structures that embody them. Hence two classes of objects are distinguished. It is convenient to refer to them as types and tokens. The type must involve a condition defining which material structures should be considered its tokens. For an IP regime to be economically meaningful one must necessarily appropriate types in a way (...) which restricts access to wide classes of similar, non-identical material structures. Therefore, type conditions must be general. They must define, with a margin of tolerance, only certain aspects of the structure, leaving others unspecified. Consequently, the relationship between such types and tokens is of many-to-many variety. The recognition of these facts leads to four problems in justifying intellectual property on propertarian grounds. The first problem is to demonstrate possession of the type in the pre-legal situation. The second one is to explain, why boundaries of an appropriated type should be placed in a particular location. The third problem is to avoid claim deadlocks resulting from conflicts of rights generated by separate overlapping types. The fourth problem is to justify why ownership of the type should entail the control over other separate entities—that is tokens. In the propertarian framework grounded in the pre-legal state of nature, satisfactory solutions do not seem to have been proposed for any of these four problems. (shrink)

In [5] we study Nonassociative Lambek Calculus augmented with De Morgan negation, satisfying the double negation and contraposition laws. This logic, introduced by de Grooté and Lamarche [10], is called Classical Non-Associative Lambek Calculus. Here we study a weaker logic InNL, i.e. NL with two involutive negations. We present a one-sided sequent system for InNL, admitting cut elimination. We also prove that InNL is PTIME.

In this article the author argues that the 'Liar' Paradox sentence: "This sentence is false" is neither true nor false because it does not express any proposition or "Satz" in the sense of Bernard Bolzano. The difficulty left open is that by a similar line of reasoning also the sentence "This sentence is true" would not express any proposition, yet it is sometimes taken to be true (on the strength of a theorem by Loewe).

Response to spatial and nonspatial change in wild and Wistar rats The purpose of the experiment was to investigate the effects of domestication on exploration in rats. The comparison was made between wild Warsaw-Wild-Captive-Pisula-Stryjek rats and Wistar laboratory rats. The study used a purpose-built maze divided into zones connected with a corridor. Objects were placed in two out of four zones. Their location and shape were subject to experimental manipulation. Transporter used to move rats to the maze provided the opportunity (...) for spontaneous exploration of the experimental arena. Rats were subjected to a series of 10 sessions, followed by a spatial or nonspatial change in the experimental arena, after which another 5 experimental sessions were conducted. The study revealed that wild rats had much higher exploration latency than their laboratory counterparts. At each analyzed stage, WWCPS rats spent much more time in the transporter than Wistar rats. Wistar rats spent much more time during the experiment on object interaction in the experimental arena. In post-manipulation sessions, however, it was wild rats that explored object zones relatively longer than laboratory rats. No differences in the animals' behavior depending on the type of change were observed. Results suggest that wild rats tend to explore much more cautiously than laboratory rats and are more sensitive to changes in their environment. The underlying cause of these differences is likely to be the higher level of stress in wild rats, resulting from threats in their natural habitat. (shrink)

This article discusses the “Argument from Inference” raised against the view that definite descriptions are semantically referring expressions. According to this argument, the indicated view is inadequate since it evaluates some invalid inferences with definite descriptions as “valid” and vice versa. I argue that the Argument from Inference is basically wrong. Firstly, it is crucially based on the assumption that a proponent of the view that definite descriptions are referring expressions conceives them as directly referring terms, i.e., the terms which (...) contribute their referents into the semantic content of the sentences in which they occur. However, the framework of direct reference is not essential to the idea that descriptions might have semantic referential interpretation. Secondly, the Argument of Inference - if correct - suffices to establish an overgeneralized conclusion that even paradigmatically referring terms, like proper names, cannot be semantically referential. This fact indicates that the argument is flawed. In the final part of this article, I briefly consider what the source of the problem with the Argument of Inference might be. (shrink)

Does the effective protection of constitutional rights require a system of robust judicial review? This differs from the question of whether judicial review is democratically legitimate, although the two are often merged. The dominant liberal constitutional discourse concerning the requirement of judicial review has arguably suffered from a degree of insensitivity to the actual effects of specific judicial review systems. In contrast to a fact‐insensitive approach, I suggest that the ‘matrix’ of rights‐protection in any specific system of judicial constitutional review (...) must incorporate two types of calculation. The first must compare incidences of the invalidation of ‘wrong’ statutes (on the ‘gains’ side) with invalidations of ‘right’ statutes and cases of upholding ‘wrong’ statutes (on the ‘losses’ side). The second looks at the gains and losses resulting from the very existence of the system of judicial review (rather than the specific cases that have been upheld or invalidated). It thus recognizes the deep disagreement between individuals about their preferred interpretations of constitutional rights. Under some conditions, the results of this matrix may be modified by arguments about an overlap in preferred articulations of constitutional rights, prudence, and the deliberative nature of the courts that exercise constitutional review, and the paper concludes with a discussion of how this can occur. We do not have to have a court that will strike down laws—a court with the power of judicial review—to have a vibrant language of fundamental rights available to us. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to challenge the validity of the distinction between legal justice and social justice. It is argued that what we usually call legal justice is either an application of the more fundamental notion of social justice to legal rules and decisions or is not a matter of justice at all. In other words, the only correct uses of the notion of legal justice are derivative from the notion of social justice and, hence, the alleged (...) conflicts between criteria of social and legal justice result from the confusion about the proper relationship between these two concepts. Two views about the social justice/legal justice dichotomy are of particular importance and will provide the focus for the argument: this dichotomy is sometimes identified with a classical distinction between distributive and commutative justice and sometimes with the distinction between substantive and procedural justice. (shrink)

The late Richard Rorty has sometimes been described as a controversial, or even outrageous, thinker. Yet the reasons that stand behind such a reputation are obviously quite different from in the ca...

Expression of physical motion (e.g., man runs by) shows systematic variability not only between language types (i.e., inter-typological) but also within a language type (i.e., intra-typological). In this study, we asked whether the patterns of variability extend to metaphorical motion events (e.g., time runs by). Our analysis of randomly selected 450 physical motion (150/language) and 450 metaphorical motion (150/language) event descriptions from written texts originally produced by German, Polish, and Spanish authors showed strong inter-typological differences in the expression of both (...) event types. German and Polish speakers differed from Spanish speakers in how they packaged manner and path components of a motion event; they also differed in how extensively they expressed each component in their lexicalization of motion. The strong inter-typological differences were accompanied by more modest intra-typological variability: Polish and German writers differed in their packaging and lexicalization of manner and path components of metaphorical—but not physical—motion events. Our results provide evidence for robust inter-typological differences evident in the expression of both physical and metaphorical motion, along with less robust intra-typological differences, largely evident in the expression of metaphorical motion. Our study thus highlights event type as an important factor in determining crosslinguistic variation in motion expression. (shrink)