We start by introducing the idea of echo chambers. Echo chambers are social and epistemic structures in which opinions, leanings, or beliefs about certain topics are amplified and reinforced due to repeated interactions within a closed system; that is, within a system that has a rather homogeneous sample of sources or people, which all share the same attitudes towards the topics in question. Echo chambers are a particularly dangerous phenomena because they prevent the critical assessment of sources and contents, thus (...) leading the people living within them to deliberately ignore or exclude opposing views. In the second part of this paper, we argue that the reason for the appearance of echo chambers lies in the adoption of what we call ‘epistemic vices’. We examine which vices might be responsible for their emergence, and in doing so, we focus on a specific one; ‘epistemic violence’. In assessing and evaluating the role of this epistemic vice, we note that it can be triggered by epistemic contexts characterized by high stakes that may turn ordinary intellectual virtues (such as skepticism) into vices (such as denialism). In the third part of this contribution, we suggest a way to deal with echo chambers. The solution focuses on advocating a responsibilist pedagogy of virtues and vices that -we claim- might be capable of preventing their emergence. (shrink)

At a purely instrumental level, quantum theory is all about multiplication, addition and taking mod squares of complex numbers called probability amplitudes. The rules for combining amplitudes are deceptively simple. When two or more events are independent you multiply their respective probability amplitudes and when they are mutually exclusive you add them. Whenever you want to calculate probabilities you take mod squares of respective amplitudes. That’s it. If you are prepared to ignore the explanatory power of the theory (which you (...) should not) the rest is just a set of convenient mathematical tools developed for the purpose of book-keeping of amplitudes. Thus we tabulate amplitudes into state vectors and unitary matrices, and place them in Hilbert spaces. (shrink)

In recent years some archaeological commentators have suggested moving away from an exclusively anthropocentric view of social reality. These ideas endorse elevating objects to the same ontological level as humans – thus creating a symmetrical view of reality. However, this symmetry threatens to force us to abandon the human subject and theories of meaning. This article defends a different idea. It is argued here that an archaeology of the social, based on human intentionality, is possible, while maintaining an ontology that (...) does not involve dualistic conceptions of reality. Building upon the philosophical work of Vincent Descombes, it is contended that humans are intentional actors and society is predicated on triadic relations that involve humans, objects and meanings. These relations can only be understood holistically, given that these relations are merely parts of a meta-narrative. These meta-narratives contain specific historical and social settings, and it is only within these settings that social relations are intelligible. (shrink)

Peter Achinstein has argued at length and on many occasions that the view according to which evidential support is defined in terms of probability-raising faces serious counterexamples and, hence, should be abandoned. Proponents of the positive probabilistic relevance view have remained unconvinced. The debate seems to be in a deadlock. This paper is an attempt to move the debate forward and revisit some of the central claims within this debate. My conclusion here will be that while Achinstein may be right (...) that his counterexamples undermine probabilistic relevance views of what it is for e to be evidence that h, there is still room for a defence of a related probabilistic view about an increase in being supported, according to which, if p > p, then h is more supported given e than it is without e. My argument relies crucially on an insight from recent work on the linguistics of gradable adjectives. (shrink)

The adjective ‘is justified’ has all the hallmarks of a gradable adjective. But the relationship between gradable uses and straightforward predications of the form ‘x is justified’ has been underexplored by epistemologists. In this paper we undertake to do some ground clearing as a prelude to better understanding this relationship.

This paper elaborates a new solution to the lottery paradox, according to which the paradox arises only when we lump together two distinct states of being confident that p under one general label of ‘belief that p’. The two-state conjecture is defended on the basis of some recent work on gradable adjectives. The conjecture is supported by independent considerations from the impossibility of constructing the lottery paradox both for risk-tolerating states such as being afraid, hoping or hypothesizing, and for risk-averse, (...) certainty-like states. The new proposal is compared to views within the increasingly popular debate opposing dualists to reductionists with respect to the relation between belief and degrees of belief. (shrink)

Archaeology and Intentionality explores perhaps one of the most overlooked topics in archaeology, that of intentionality. In archaeology, most explanations of human behaviour rely on intentionality and this book fills a surprising gap in the literature. By identifying the historical trajectory of the notion of intentionality, this book reframes our understanding of what it means to act intentionally and how archaeologists provide explanations concerning past (and present) societies. In general, this book presents a strong framework for archaeological research, one that (...) fits to current archaeological practices and research around the world. This framework considers that past actors were not unconditional free agents, who could act however they wished, nor were they absolute prisoners of the economic, biological, and environmental circumstances in which they lived. From the standpoint of intentionality, it becomes clear that human agency is not about what you can or cannot do, but about what you should, that is to say, actions are above all ethical. In a world wealth inequality runs rampant, where humans have damaged the environment beyond recognition, and where technology advances at an alarming rate - it is important that we recognize our intentions and the ethical responsibility that accompanies those intentions. The book highlights how archaeology is the perfect discipline to understand how and from where those intentions come from. Addressing several problems in archaeological theory and connecting archaeology, philosophy and social theory, this book. (shrink)

Archaeology is currently bound to a series of metaphysical principles, one of which claims that reality is composed of a series of discrete objects. These discrete objects are fundamental metaphysical entities in archaeological science and posthumanist/new Materialist approaches and can be posited, assembled, counted, and consequently included in quantitative models (e.g. Big Data, Bayesian models) or network models (e.g. Actor-Network Theory). The work by Sørensen and Marila shows that archaeological reality is not that discrete, that some objects cannot be easily (...) identified, and that perhaps reality is not always necessarily composed of discrete objects. The aim of this article is to take Sørensen and Marila’s arguments to their ultimate logical consequences: most archaeological theory today operates under the illusion of a general metaphysics. This illusion dictates not only that all of reality is composed of discrete objects, but that since reality manifests in a certain way, there has to be a methodology that accurately represents that reality. A brief discussion on the notion of “conjecture,” as conceived in certain historical theories, is also presented. (shrink)

Початок повномасштабного російського вторгнення в 2022 році викликав значні зміни в українській національній ідентичності. Соціологічні опитування демонструють трансформацію цінностей та повсякденних практик українців. Вони почали частіше вживати українську мову, змінили історичні та конфесійні вподобання. Необхідним є отримання об’єктивного соціологічного знання стосовно причин та наслідків цих змін. Передумовою цього є дослідження існуючих робіт по даній тематиці. Метою статті є систематизація та критичне узагальнення наукових праць по тематиці української національної ідентичності у вітчизняній науці. Автор розглядає роботи по цій темі, написані дослідниками в (...) галузі різних наук: історії, філософії, політології, філології, соціології. Особливу увага приділяється огляду дисертацій. Узагальнюються основні ідеї праць, даються авторські висновки по можливості їх використання в майбутньому. Показується, що автори зачіпають широке коло питань, що стосуються національної ідентичності: її історична ґенеза, трансформації, фактори мови та історичної пам’яті, відображення ідентичності в мистецтві та медіа, вплив на неї глобалізації та російської агресії. Автор констатує, що дана проблематика поки що слабо розвинута в рамках соціологічної науки. У відкритому доступі відсутні значні теоретичні роботи, здебільшого соціологи займаються виключно емпіричними дослідженнями. Також відсутні теоретичні роботи, присвячені аналізу трансформацій національної ідентичності, що стались з початку повномасштабної російської агресії в лютому 2022 році. Це пояснюється недостатнім проміжком часу, що пройшов на даний момент. Також складності додає швидка зміна політичних та військових реалій. Враховуючи значну суспільну значимість, автор робить висновок про необхідність посилення соціологічного осмислення цієї тематики. (shrink)

In a recent publication Travis Timmerman has claimed that sometimes it is morally permissible to not prevent something bad from happening, even if it is in one’s power to do so without sacrificing anything nearly as important.1 To defend his point, he has proposed a thought experiment and based his claims on putative common-sense morality intuitions. To aid in the subsequent discussion, Timmerman’s case is reproduced as follows.

The embodied approach of human cognition suggests that concepts are deeply dependent upon and constrained by an agent's physical body's characteristics, such as performed body movements. In this study, we attempted to broaden previous research on emotional priming, investigating the interaction of emotions and visual exploration. We used the joystick-based approach-avoidance task to influence the emotional states of participants, and subsequently, we presented pictures of news web pages on a computer screen and measured participant's eye movements. As a result, the (...) number of fixations on images increased, the total dwell time increased, and the average saccade length from outside of the images toward the images decreased after the bodily congruent priming phase. The combination of these effects suggests increased attention to web pages' image content after the participants performed bodily congruent actions in the priming phase. Thus, congruent bodily interaction with images in the priming phase fosters visual interaction in the subsequent exploration phase. (shrink)

W artykule autor dowodzi, że u podstaw etyki Osho leżą indywidualizm i subiektywizm. Wraz z autonomicznym podmiotem, to znaczy człowiekiem postrzeganym jako twórca wartości, stanowią one najważniejsze źródła moralności tej koncepcji. Ponadto kluczową rolę odgrywają tutaj pojęta w sposób bliski Sartre’owi wolność, a także odpowiedzialność, świadomość i samorealizacja.

In this article I focus on some unduly neglected common-sense considerations supporting the view that one's evidence is the propositions that one knows. I reply to two recent objections to these considerations.

Marxist studies in the history of philosophy are based on the assumption that all philosophical schools and currents fall into two main traditions, materialism and idealism, and that the whole of the history of philosophy can be described as an opposition between the two. Lenin observed that this distinction goes back to antiquity, and that even then the "tendencies "l of Democritus and Plato were already in evidence.

'The world is tragically splendid in its fragmentedness. Its harmony lies in its disharmony, its unity in its enmity. Such is the paradoxical doctrine of Heraclitus, subsequently paradoxically developed by Friedrich Nietzsche into the theory of 'tragic optimism."'.

A general problem of philosophy concerns the possibility of objective knowledge of other cultures (including past cultures), and the adequacy of their reconstruction. The problem of cultural development is also crucial. In this paper, I argue that a culture which has expanded its potentialities in various independent forms is an open culture capable of entering into dialogue with other cultures.

Humans are often extraordinary at performing practical reasoning. There are cases where the human computer, slow as it is, is faster than any artificial intelligence system. Are we faster because of the way we perceive knowledge as opposed to the way we represent it? -/- The authors address this question by presenting neural network models that integrate the two most fundamental phenomena of cognition: our ability to learn from experience, and our ability to reason from what has been learned. This (...) book is the first to offer a self-contained presentation of neural network models for a number of computer science logics, including modal, temporal, and epistemic logics. By using a graphical presentation, it explains neural networks through a sound neural-symbolic integration methodology, and it focuses on the benefits of integrating effective robust learning with expressive reasoning capabilities. -/- The book will be invaluable reading for academic researchers, graduate students, and senior undergraduates in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive science and engineering. It will also be of interest to computational logicians, and professional specialists on applications of cognitive, hybrid and artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

According to the good reasoning view of normative reasons, p is a reason to F, just in case p is a premise of a good pattern of reasoning. This article presents two counterexamples to the most promising version of the good reasoning view.

The text, starting from the classic picture taken from Polish literature on the barbaric destruction of higher culture, first shows the contemporary manifestations of an attack on one of the basic...

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage costs (...) elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quickly and why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a murky issue in current grammatical research. (shrink)

According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

The idea of cognitive enhancement refers to multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach aimed at improving human mental processes. Cognitive enhancement is the amplification or extension of core mind capacities through improvement or augmentation of either internal or external information processing systems. This includes improvements of intelligence and attention, reinforcement of creativity and memory, or extension of perception range. The main feature of cognitive enhancement is voluntariness of use for overcoming natural mental limitations. This article is a synthesis of current trends in (...) cognitive enhancement from the perspective of transhumanism. The article presents various definitions of cognitive enhancement, methods of cognitive enhancement as well as challenges and questions concerning improving human mental processes. (shrink)

Peter Achinstein has argued at length and on many occasions that the view according to which evidential support is defined in terms of probability-raising faces serious counterexamples and, hence, should be abandoned. Proponents of the positive probabilistic relevance view have remained unconvinced. The debate seems to be in a deadlock. This paper is an attempt to move the debate forward and revisit some of the central claims within this debate. My conclusion here will be that while Achinstein may be right (...) that his counterexamples undermine probabilistic relevance views of what it is for e to be evidence that h, there is still room for a defence of a related probabilistic view about an increase in being supported, according to which, if p > p, then h is more supported given e than it is without e. My argument relies crucially on an insight from recent work on the linguistics of gradable adjectives. (shrink)

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...) made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem como pretensão oferecer um olhar outro acerca da depressão. Nossa análise sobre tal fenômeno encontra na filosofia, sobretudo, de Byung-Chul Han, uma possibilidade interessante de ir além das explicações psiquiátricas. Entretanto, são nelas que esse texto inicia sua discussão: a hipótese serotoninérgica da depressão é apresentada, mas também, problematizada, pois, muito embora a psiquiatria encontre nela ainda hoje a sua tese nuclear acerca do comportamento depressivo, é mostrado aqui que, além de ser uma teoria ausente de (...) comprovação científica, também carece de consistência para explicar o avanço da depressão ao redor do mundo. É diante da impossibilidade de pensar a depressão biologicamente que, no segundo momento deste artigo, há um esforço para analisar os modos de estruturação social contemporâneos, baseados na positivação da sociedade e na busca desenfreada por desempenho, e buscar nos mesmos, fatores desencadeantes do comportamento depressivo. A última parte do texto se concentra em apresentar um panorama filosófico centrado nas perspectivas de Han acerca da depressão. Através da exposição do mito de Eros e Psique, o artigo encerra sua análise mostrando a influência que o desaparecimento do Outro e a pressão por desempenho exerce na formação de uma sociedade de pessoas depressivas. (shrink)

Artykuł dotyczy problemu dobra i wartości w myśli Osho. Nawiązując do prac tego hinduskiego guru i filozofa, autor rekonstruuje kolejno sposób ich poznania oraz sposób ich istnienia. Broni tezy, że w myśli Osho analiza kryteriów dotyczących poznania wartości poprzedza jego refleksję na temat ich ontycznego statusu. Dobro i wartość mają bowiem charakter egzystencjalny i nie są przedmiotem poznania teoretycznego ani przedmiotem języka deskrypcyjnego, lecz stanowią rezultat relacyjno-subiektywnego sposobu ich ujmowania. Autor dowodzi, że w myśli Osho jest to zamierzona strategia, ponieważ (...) dzięki temu nie abstrahuje się ani od podmiotowego zaangażowania, ani od empirycznego konkretu sytuacji, w jakiej znajduje się podmiot. (shrink)

This paper explores one way in which the view that emotions can be epistemically justified stands in tension with two common views in epistemology; namely, that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, and that propositional justification is entirely determined by the (inferential) support relations between one's evidence and a given proposition. A tentative solution to the tension is provided.

The northern creative trips of the People's Artist of the USSR Vladimir Alexandrovich Igoshev (1921-2007) represent important and vivid pages in his creative biography. The object of this research is the creative heritage of the artist V.A. Igoshev. The subject of the study is the creative trips of the artist V.A. Igoshev to the North (Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regions) of the 1950s and 1960s. The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the overall picture of the northern creative trips of (...) the artist V.A. Igoshev of the 1950s–1960s on the basis of paintings and graphic works of the early "northern cycle", archival materials, exhibition catalogues, Soviet periodicals, individual scientific articles and information from informants. The novelty of the research lies in the most complete and detailed consideration at the moment of the issue of the northern creative trips of the artist V.A. Igoshev in the 1950s and 1960s. Previously, this topic has not received special coverage. Modern researchers of the creative heritage of the artist V.A. Igoshev in their review articles practically did not touch on this problem, limiting themselves to mentioning individual episodes from the creative biography of the master. The author of the study provides historical facts related to specific dates of trips, introduces a list of paintings and graphic works, with all the circumstances of their creation and further exposure at major art exhibitions of the 1950s and 1960s. (shrink)