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The aim of this paper is to survey informal interpretations of relational semantics for relevant logics in terms of the theory of semantic information. Relational semantics for relevant logics introduced a ternary accessibility relation which was often criticized as unintuitive. The paper presents three interpretations of the ternary accessibility relation based on the framework of situation theory.
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The aim of the paper is to present an ontology of scientific laws as a tool for presentation of results extracted from research articles. The way we represent scientific laws is founded on our classification of scientific laws, which is based on the works of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Władysław Krajewski. The classification isdescribed formally and complemented with the specification of requirements for each type of law, in order to obtain an ontology in the sense of ontological engineering. The ontology is used to represent research results from the domain of agri-food science. We give examples of representation of laws taken from scientific papers and reasoning algorithms that lead to automatic generation of new information and identification of conflicts in the literature.
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The aim of this article is to indicate that the ideas of Leonardo Torres y Que- vedo presented in his short Essays on Automatics constitute essential link between early Babbage’s concepts of analytical engine and modern computer science. These ideas include de nition of automatics, classi cation of automa- ta, theoretical basis for robotics, electromechanical engineering, modern con- cept of chatbot, the importance of algorithm and last but not least oating point arithmetic.
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The article presents a philosophical analysis of pornography and its impact. The author suggests that pornography instantiates two kinds of solipsism. The first kind of solipsism involves treating things as people; the second kind of solipsism involves treating people as things. The paper also investigates the possible connections between these two solipsisms.
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The main focus of this article is little known in Poland political tolerance. The article aims to: reconstruct of Michael Walzer concept of the political tolerance; to place it in the typology of relativism – universalism; to make a first step towards the separation of political tolerance from personal tolerance for a general discussion of tolerance; demonstrate that tolerance is not only modern, liberal concept, associated with the individual freedom; show that the dispute about tolerance not only between the enemies.
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Individualism as a way of feeling and comprehension of reality has been a basic element of Western civilization for a long time. In 20th century individualism was criticized by personalism and similar currents. I shall point to the dualistic source (Platonic, Christian, Cartesian and Kantian) of the personalist criticism of individualism which also was, in my opinion, more or less apparent inspiration of later sociological and social-anthropological research on relationships between individual and society. I also try to answer what the social or ontological status of commonly accepted modern individualistic values is.
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Author of the article starts with a question about the meaning of the activity that is writing. He looks for answers in ‘The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences’ by Michel Foucault, which – according to the author – emerged from the experience of the laughter, triggered by the book of Jorge Louis Borges, in which he included an excerpt from the Chinese encyclopedia describing the classification of animals. The author is analyzing this phenomenon in detail, inter alia in the context of what about the laughter thought Georges Bataille, who greatly inspired Foucault. However, the author does not end his deliberation with an answer to the question: ‘Why Foucault wrote ‘The Order of Things’’, where the philosopher announced ‘the death of man’ for the first time. He is trying to go deeper and answer the question: ‘why the man had to die?’
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The main aim of this paper is searching the nature of the relation between a personand certain things that constitutes their being good or bad for her, and explainingwhat it is for something to have for us exactly that value and not other.
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Nondirectiveness is almost universally recognized as the most defining feature of genetic counseling and adherence to a nondirective approach is the generally required and professed standard; there is no widely accepted definition of nondirectiveness yet. Although the principle of nondirectiveness is still poorly understood, its importance is widely discussed and sometimes questioned. The current article tries to elaborate – by analyzing different descriptions and interpretations of nondirective approach – a theoretically consistent and practically operational concept of nondirectiveness in genetic counseling concerning reproductive choices.
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The main objective of this paper is to reconstruct Jaspers’ views on philosophical anthropology of the early twentieth century. The text can be divided into three parts. First part tries to reconstruct direct and indirect references which Jaspers makes toward: a) term “anthropology”, b) the representatives of philosophical anthropology. Second part shows Jaspers’ attitude toward Scheler’s anthropology. Third and final part raises a question: Why do we often regard Jaspers’ philosophy as anthropology, can he be considered as philosophical anthropologist? We will show that the main point of his critic is that anthropology sets biological point of view as a starting point for its inquiry on human being. Therefore, human being can not be seen adequately from anthropological perspective. Its specificity is reduced by anthropologists to the specific characteristics of species, a collection of biological, psychological and social conditions that describe the phenomenon of man but do not reach the depths of the human being.
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Are the properties of communicative acts grounded in the intentions with which they are performed, or in the conventions that govern them? The latest round in this debate has been sparked by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015), who argue that much more of communication is conventional than we thought, and that the rest isn’t really communication after all, but merely the initiation of open-ended imaginative thought. I argue that although Lepore and Stone may be right about many of the specific cases they discuss, their big-picture, conventionalist conclusions don’t follow. My argument focuses on four phenomena that present challenges to conventionalist accounts of communication: ambiguity, indirect communication, communication by wholly unconventional means, and convention acquisition.
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Steven Pinker proposes a game-theoretic framework to help explain the use of veiled speech in contexts where the ultimate aims of the speaker and hearer may diverge—such as cases of bribing a police officer to get out of a ticket and paying a maître d’ to get a table. This is presented as a response to what Pinker sees as the failure in H. P. Grice’s infl uential theory of meaning to recognize that speakers and hearers are not always cooperating. In this paper I argue that Pinker mischaracterizes Grice’s views on cooperation, and use this to refine a positive picture of what sort of cooperation is demanded by Grice’s Cooperative Principle. This positive picture serves to insulate the Gricean framework from objectors— including Pinker—who overstate the obligations entailed by the adoption of the Cooperative Principle. I then argue that the cases Pinker presents are best treated by recognizing that in each instance the utterance is formulated with two intentions towards two different audiences and detail a resulting revision to Pinker’s game-theoretic framework that reflects this proposal. I conclude by demonstrating how this proposed game-theoretic framework of cooperation with multiple audiences can be used to model the costs and benefits of other types of discourse, including political speech.
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Though ignorance is rarely a bliss, awareness of ignorance almost always is. Had we not been able to develop this powerful skill, there would have been no philosophy or science, nor advanced forms of religion, art, and technology. Awareness of ignorance, however, is not a motivator; but when it arouses curiosity that is strong enough, it causes what may be called an “epistemic” desire; a desire to know, to understand, to learn or to gain new experiences, which is a basic motivator for inquiry. This makes the relationship between curiosity and awareness of ignorance all the more important. One can however fi nd very little on this relationship within the philosophical literature. In this essay this is what I wish to explore. After a brief discussion of the question of whether awareness of ignorance is a precondition for curiosity, based on my earlier work (The Philosophy of Curiosity, Routledge, 2012) I attempt to show that corresponding to the two forms of curiosity that I call “objectual” and “propositional”, there are also two forms of ignorance. This will refute the prejudice that awareness of ignorance must always have propositional content and therefore must always be about truth. I further argue that awareness of ignorance that does have propositional content can be of two different varieties: truth-ignorance versus fact-ignorance. One may simply be ignorant of whether a proposition is true or false (truth ignorance); one may, on the other hand, know that a proposition is true but still be ignorant of the fact that makes it true (fact-ignorance). I then show that awareness of ignorance, whether it is objectual or propositional, can always be translated into what I shall call awareness of inostensibility. An important moral to be drawn from this discussion is that reaching truth, even when it is coupled with certainty, does not always eliminate one’s ignorance and therefore cannot be the ultimate goal of inquiry.
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In this paper I comment on Inan’s notions of propositional and objectual curiosity. Even though Inan offers an interesting and intuitive distinction between propositional and objectual curiosity, I want to question two aspects of his theory of curiosity. One aspect concerns his thesis that propositional curiosity is interdependent on epistemic attitudes such as belief, certainty and interest. Another aspect of his theory that I discuss is his thesis that objectual curiosity is not reducible to propositional curiosity. In more detail, in the first part, I start off by explaining what propositional curiosity is according to Inan and I bring up two worries that I call: (i) over-complexity as a result of subjectivity and (ii) overcomplexity as a result of dynamics for the above mentioned epistemic attitudes. Both worries stress the problem of over-complexity of Inan’s theory of propositional curiosity. In the second part, I argue that objectual curiosity is, contrary to Inan’s hypothesis, reducible to propositional curiosity. I further argue that the object of wh- questions that, according to Inan, express objectual curiosity can either be about the truth value of general or singular proposition. In addition, I suggest that only the reading where wh- questions express curiosity in a form of de re reading and have a singular proposition as their content is the one that is compatible with Inan’s notion of objectual curiosity.
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In this work, the debate between Yuri Balashov and Hud Hudson is reviewed in terms of the views put forward by Tim Maudlin. It seems that Maudlin’s view can shed light on the debate and may ensure new discussions and perspectives. Hudson, posing an interesting thought experiment, says that superluminal motion is possible whereas Balashov argues to the contrary. If we take into account what Tim Maudlin suggests in the first chapter of his book The Metaphysics within Physics, namely, that “laws of nature ought to be accepted as ontologically primitive,” we can interpret Balashov-Hudson debate from a new perspective. It can be said that Balashov would be taking a step forward if we were to take into account Maudlin perspective.
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Keeping within the framework of analytic philosophy, the article examines Anselm of Canterbury‘s “ontological proof for God’s existence”, which, according to prevailing view, most clearly reveals specifics of pre-scholastic speculative thought. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the question of the logical validity of this proof is a matter of relevance, but this article highlights the aspect of the proof‘s soundness. After all, as it is known, formally correct reasoning can lead to false conclusions, and truth is an absolute value for philosophy, i.e. “love of wisdom”. The article not only attempts to estimate the compliance of “the ontological proof” with today’s standards of rationality, but also aims to clarify to what extent the approaches of an analytical history of philosophy enables us to reveal the intrinsic reason of Medieval thought.
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The paper is based on a strict distinction between the notion of a person referred to by a fictional name, as uttered within a text of narrative fiction, and the notion of a fictional character. The literary functions of such a text require the reader to interpret the occurences of a fictional name as records of utterances of that name by the narrator, referring to that individual which has been assigned that name at the beginning of the chain to which these utterances belong. This, according to the author’s view, provides proper basis also for interpretation of various kinds of extratextual use of fictional names. A literary character is, on the contrary, an element of a construction of a literary work and is identified by a set of requirements (e.g. of the kind mentioned above) imposed by the text’s literary functions on the reader. The author attempts to justify the assumption that the referential function of fictional names so understood is to be interpreted as directed to the actual world (rather than to an artificial world created by the writer), to specify the (rather limited) role reserved for pretense within this approach, to explain the implications of this account of fictional characters for the dispute between realists and anti-realists in this field etc.
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Jedna z klíčových filosofických diskusí poslední čtvrtiny dvacátého století se týkala sporu mezi „metafyzickým realismem“ a „relativismem“ (Putnam, 1980, 1990, 1994; Lewis, 1984; Rorty, 1972, 1993). Je jazyk, jak tvrdí „realisté“, pouze prostředkem kopírování na nás zcela nezávislého světa, nebo se, jak mají za to „relativisté“, nějak podílí na utváření tohoto světa? Z hlediska ‘selského rozumu’ se to může zdát být jasné: svět přece jasně je na nás nezávislý a představovat si, že ho my, naším jazykem, můžeme nějak „utvářet“, se zdá být absurdní. Méně absurdní se ale tahle myšlenka stává, když si uvědomíme, že to, čemu říkáme svět, se skládá z kategorizovaných objektů s různými druhy vlastností a vztahů, a že to, jaké kategorie máme či co považujeme za vlastnost či vztah může být – do nějaké míry – věcí našeho jazyka.
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