The paper concerns the semantics of belief reports. The following definition is proposed: if rational agent x does not accept any sentence, which is true under x’s interpretation of expressions iff not-p, and x does not reject any sentence, which is true under x’s interpretation iff p, then (x believes that p iff x accepts  which is true under x’s interpretation iff p). The term ‘x’s interpretation of an expression e’ is to be understood: something which x actually refers (...) to by using e (rather than a object she intends to refer). This is to say that to ascribe a belief to rational agent one should use words which have the same reference as words used by the agent. We believe it could solve Krpike’s puzzles about belief on the price that sometimes names used by the agent refer to others entities than when we use them. (shrink)

Building on our diverse research traditions in the study of reasoning, language and communication, the Polish School of Argumentation integrates various disciplines and institutions across Poland in which scholars are dedicated to understanding the phenomenon of the force of argument. Our primary goal is to craft a methodological programme and establish organisational infrastructure: this is the first key step in facilitating and fostering our research movement, which joins people with a common research focus, complementary skills and an enthusiasm to work (...) together. This statement—the Manifesto—lays the foundations for the research programme of the Polish School of Argumentation. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to defend the view according to which all simple fictional sentences are meaningless. If their assertions seem to convey some truth evaluable information, and fictional sentences themselves seem to be true or false, it is because some pragmatic mechanisms are operative, enabling the expression of propositions not encoded in the semantic content of these sentences. According to some theorists, the mechanisms responsible for that process are the same as those responsible for generating conversational implicatures. (...) I argue against that claim and maintain that to comprehend the information conveyed by a fictional assertion, one must determine what kind of fictional assertion it is and only then apply the relevant interpretative rule adjusted to the fictional sentence used in that act. (shrink)

According to Adams and his colleagues, fictional sentences, i.e. sentences featuring fictional names, lack any truth value. To explain intuitions to the contrary, they refer to the pragmatics of fictional assertions and claim that sincere utterances of those sentences generate some conversational implicatures. They argue that all who take fictional sentences to have a truth value tend to mistake implicatures of assertions of such sentences with their literal content. The aim of the paper is to show that this argument is (...) not convincing.The challenge being that it doesn’t provide any satisfactory explanation as to what is negated in seemingly genuine disagreement cases in which fictional sentences are asserted. Sentential negation usually doesn’t affect (i.e. negate) a proposition which is conversationally implied, especially when it comes to the manner implicature. And, as I argue, an advocate of the pragmatic defence should maintain that this is the kind of conversational implicature that the assertion of fictional sentences generates. (shrink)

The aims of this paper are to provide a detailed taxonomy of noncanonical uses of interrogative sentences, i.e. when they are used not to ask a question but to convey some information, or to ask a question albeit not that expressed by the interrogative sentence exploited in the act, to identify properties of circumstances where an interrogative sentence is being used in this way, and to propose some maxims that govern the rational use of questions. Four main categories of such (...) cases are presented, and a few further subclasses are differentiated. I show how these types are interrelated, and what logical features differentiate them. I also propose a hypothesis for when an interrogative sentence is not being used in its primary mode. Studies on circumstances in which questions are used in other ways can shed light on maxims that govern asking and questioning in a rational conversation; therefore, some possible maxims of this kind are proposed. (shrink)

Gideon Rosen described the difficulties faced by those who claim that statements about possible worlds cannot be literally true. According to his argument, if the truth of modal sentences could be explained by referring to the hypothesis of the plurality of possible worlds, which is a sort of fiction for modal irrealists, the position would have antinomic consequence. I argue that the advocate of broad modal fictionalism can avoid such a devastating conclusion. To that end, her position should be given (...) in meta-language describing the necessary and sufficient conditions of accepting modal sentences as true in terms of fiction of possible worlds. I show that there is a coherent way of reading ‘it is accepted as true’ that allows one to maintain that the disjunction of two mutually contradictory propositions can be accepted without accepting either of them. (shrink)

Counterpossibles are counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent. According to the orthodox view of counterfactuals, all counterpossibles are vacuously true. This is puzzling because some counterpossible statements seem to be false. The paper analyzes two approaches to explaining why certain counterpossibles, though perhaps true, may appear to be false. The first, which appeals to the Gricean mechanism of conversational implicatures, asserts that some counterpossibles appear to be false because their assertion carries with it a false conversational implicature. However, I argue that, (...) under a closer scrutiny, this approach collapses. I therefore turn to a second approach, proposed by Timothy Williamson. It appeals to a heuristic according to which speakers may regard a counterpossible to be false if they have previously accepted its opposite. Since the applicability of Williamson’s solution is limited, I suggest a more general account. Its underlining idea is that a counterpossible is rejected if the speaker cannot find what they regard as a universally true conditional function derivable from the counterpossible by substitutions and syntactic transformations. (shrink)

The Gettier problem concerns the definition of knowledge as justified true belief. In the paper I argue that Gettier's cases are not cases of justified true belief because Gettier's examples rely on some problematic assumptions. The first is rather elementary definition of justification and the other is that justification is preserved by entailment, that is, (A) for all agents X, if X is justified in believing that p , and X realizes that the truth of p entails the truth of (...) q , then X would also be justified in believing that q . For the simplistic conception of justification has some alarming consequences we pursue more adequate definition of justification which would satisfy the idea that a necessary condition of justification is to entail or to be entailed by a true proposition. We also show that the (A) is not necessary to provide an elegant counter-example to the definition of knowledge if the elementary definition of justification is adopted. (shrink)

Przedmiotem pracy są uwagi Jerzego Pelca dotyczące pojęcia kłamstwa i kłamania opublikowane w O pojęciu kłamstwa – z punktu widzenia semiotyki (1990). Przedstawioną w niej definicję kłamania porównuję z warunkami nakładanymi na to pojęcie przez innych autorów. Pokazuję, że zdaniem Pelca, warunek ekstensji przekonań nie jest koniecznym warunkiem na kłamstwo. Dodatkowo, zauważam, iż pewne uwagi Pelca skłaniają do wniosku, że można kłamać implikując coś, co uważa się za fałsz, nie zaś wyraźnie to stwierdzając. Argumentuję, że przyjmowany w analizowanej pracy warunek (...) chęci oszukania adresata jest wątpliwym warunkiem koniecznym kłamania. Ostatecznie, uwzględniając spostrzeżenia Pelca, proponuję następująca definicję: (DEF. Kłamania*) Osoba A kłamie w określonym kontekście K osobie B, że p, zawsze i tylko wtedy, gdy: (1) A posługuje się w K pewnym znakiem Z, zaś zgodnie z pewną przyjętą lub utartą konwencją posłużenie się Z przez A wobec B w K może być zasadnie uznane za twierdzenie przez A wobec B, że p, i (2) A nie uznaje w K, że p, oraz (3) nie powiadamia uprzednio o tym B, albo też (2*) A uznaje w K, że p, ale (3*) zakłada, że pomimo (1) B uzna, że A nie sądzi, że p. (shrink)

W artykule przedstawiam tzw. chwyt z zasadnej stwierdzalności (WAM) wymierzony w znaną argumentację E. Gettiera, która miała wykazać nieadekwatność tradycyjnej definicji wiedzy. Keith DeRose sformułował trzy warunki poprawności WAM – pokazuję, że zaproponowany w pracy WAM je spełnia. Jeśli zaproponowany sposób wyjaśnienia Gettierowskich przykładów jest poprawny, to konkluzywność argumentacji Gettiera staje się wątpliwa. Jeśli jednak nie jest i przykładów Gettiera nie można wyjaśnić poprzez odwołanie się do generowania fałszywych implikatur konwersacyjnych przez prawdziwe asercje określonych zdań, to warunki poprawności nałożone przez (...) DeRose’a na WAM okazują się niewystarczające. W pracy proponuję więc uzupełnić listę tychże o następujący warunek: jeżeli w określonym kontekście k asercja danego zdania Z ma być nieakceptowalna jedynie ze względu na generowanie w tych okolicznościach fałszywych implikatur i1, ..., in, to asercja tego zdania w każdym innym kontekście k*, która generować będzie w k* dokładnie te same fałszywe implikatury i1, ..., in, ma być również nieakceptowalna (i to w równym stopniu). (shrink)

In the paper I present and analyze the most common arguments in a favor of epistemic contextualism i. e. the thesis that the truth-value of a given knowledge report varies with the context of its attribution. I point out why these arguments seem to be unsound or inconclusive. I also appeal to recent empirical studies carried out lately by Joshua May, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Jay G. Hull and Aaron Zimmerman whose results suggest that the contextualists’ intuitions concerning the evaluation of knowledge (...) attributions are not so commonly shared among competent speakers and therefore probably false. It follows from the study that the most common evaluations we make are contradict those predicted by the contextualists. (shrink)

This article explores the connection between questions and conversational implicatures. We put forward a theoretical argument to the effect that questions can contain such implicatures. We also present extensive empirical material that confirms this hypothesis. The article focuses on a class of utterances used simultaneously to express an epistemic stance toward a state of affairs stated in a subordinate clause and to receive a response from an interlocutor, like in the following example: Don’t you think Peter should be going home (...) now? (shrink)

The main aim of the paper is to discuss some recent definitions of lie and lying, particularly that proposed recently in Edukacja Filozoficzna by Andrzej Stępnik. First I point out that his proposals share common conviction that among other things one has to have intention to deceive someone in order to lie. But this is wrong since it is quite clear that in a case of bold-face lies one can lie without having this intention. And bold-face lies are lies. It (...) follows that not only Stępnik’s definitions but all descriptive definitions of lies and lying sharing this condition are too narrow, so are inadequate. Instead of giving another descriptive definition of lying and lie, some précising definitions are proposed. According to first of them: A person x lies to y iff (i) x claims to y something that x doesn’t believe, and (ii) x doesn’t inform y that she doesn’t believe what she clams. According to another; A person x lies to y iff (i) by uttering something x expresses some propositional attitude (belief, desire, knowledge etc.), (ii) x doesn’t have this attitude, (ii) x doesn’t inform y that (ii) And the last states: A person x lies to y iff (i) x performs some speech act, (ii) some propositional attitude is one of the necessary conditions of sincery condition of this act, (iii) x doesn’t have this propositional attitude, (iv) x doesn’t inform y that (iii). We also propose crucial definition of claiming: A person x claims at a context C that p iff there is some sentence S of some language L (which x understands perfectly): (i) x utters S at C, (ii) according to semantic rules of L: uttering at C sentence S means that p, (iii) x is disposed at C to confirm the truthfulness of S. and expressing: A person x by uttering S expresses some kind of propositional attitude that p iff for all who are acquainted with proper linguistic or social convention is reasonable to attribute this kind of propositional attitude that p to x. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective (...) autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics tells us that states involving indistinguishable fermions must be antisymmetrized. This is often taken to mean that indistinguishable fermions are always entangled. We consider several notions of entanglement and argue that on the best of them, indistinguishable fermions are not always entangled. We also present a simple but unconventional way of representing fermionic states that allows us to maintain a link between entanglement and non-factorizability.

In order to understand how the environment influences business owner/managers’ attitudes towards tax morale, we build a theoretical model based on a neo-institutionalist framework. Our model combines three complementary perspectives on institutions—normative, cultural–cognitive and regulatory–instrumental. This enables a broader understanding of factors that influence business owner–managers’ attitudes towards tax evasion. We test the resulting hypotheses using regression analysis on survey data on business owner/managers in Latvia—a transition country, which has undergone massive institutional changes since it was part of the Soviet (...) Union over 25 years ago. We find that legitimacy of the tax authorities and the government, feeling of belonging to the nation and perceptions of the risk and severity of punishment are all associated with higher tax morale for business owners and managers. (shrink)

This edited work collates novel contributions on contemporary topics that are related to human rights. The essays address analytic-descriptive questions, such as what legal personality actually means, and normative questions, such as who or what should be recognised as a legal person. As is well-known among jurists, the law has a special conception of personhood: corporations are persons, whereas slaves have traditionally been considered property rather than persons. This odd state of affairs has not garnered the interest of legal theorists (...) for a while and the theory of legal personhood has been a relatively peripheral topic in jurisprudence for at least 50 years. As readers will see, there have recently been many developments and debates that justify a theoretical investigation of this topic. Animal rights activists have been demanding that some animals be recognized as legal persons. The field of robotics has prompted questions about driverless cars: should they be granted a limited legal personality, so that the car itself would be responsible for damages? This book explores such concepts and touches on matters of bioethics, animal law and medical law. It includes matters of legal history and appeals to both legal scholars and philosophers, especially those with an interest in theories of law and the philosophy of law. (shrink)