Philosophical hermeneutics, understood as the theory of nterpretation, investigates some questions that are also asked in the cognitive sciences. The nature of human understanding, the way that we gain and organize knowledge, the role played by language and memory in these considerations, the relations between conscious and unconscious knowledge, and how we understand other persons, are all good examples of issues that form the intersection of hermeneutics and the cognitive sciences. Although hermeneutics is most often contrasted with the natural sciences, (...) there are some clear ways in which hermeneutics can contribute to the cognitive sciences and vice versa. (shrink)

Zadaniem niniejszego wprowadzenia jest nakreślenie pewnych ram historycznych i teoretycznych współczesnej immunologii. Dyscyplina ta stosunkowo niedawno ukształtowana stara się wyjaśnić wszelkiego rodzaju zjawiska stojące na straży integralności organizmu. Organizmu rozumianego jako złożona struktura, wielosystemowa, ukształtowana w toku ewolucji. W wypadku tak szeroko rozumianego pojęcia odporności ewidentnie wymagana jest wnikliwa dyskusja, dlatego filozofowie biologii i naukowcy immunolodzy od pół wieku analizują podstawowe definicje i dochodzą do interesujących konkluzji.

Obóz Kultury 2.0 Mirosław Filiciak, Alek Tarkowski, Agata Jałosińska, Andrzej Klimczuk, Maciej Rynarzewski, Jacek Seweryn, Stunża M., D. Grzegorz, Marcin Wilkowski & Anna Orlik .

There is a long-standing disagreement among Branching-Time theorists. Even though they all believe that the branching representation accurately grasps the idea that the future, contrary to the past, is open, they argue whether this representation is compatible with the claim that one among many possible futures is distinguished—the single future that will come to be. This disagreement is paralleled in an argument about the bivalence of future contingents. The single, privileged future is often called the Thin Red Line. I reconstruct (...) the history of the arguments for and against this idea. Then, I propose my own version of the Thin Red Line theory which is immune to the major objections found in the literature. I argue that the semantic disagreement is grounded in distinct metaphysical presuppositions. My solution is expressed in a conceptual framework proposed by John MacFarlane, who distinguishes semantics from postsemantics. I extend his distinction and introduce a new notion of presemantics to elucidate my idea. (shrink)

It is argued that the assignment of truth values to future contingents is threatened not by a tensed metaphysics but by a temporally “local” notion of truth, i.e., by the assumption that whatever is true at a given time needs to be grounded in what exists at that time. If this assumption is accepted, tensed and tenseless metaphysics are equally vulnerable; if it is rejected, both can accommodate true future contingents. This means that semantic decisions are largely independent of metaphysical (...) considerations. The work of Correia and Rosenkranz (2018) is a clear example of how the tensed metaphysics of the growing block can incorporate true future contingents. Two potential worries are discussed in the context of their work: (a) that their grounding strategy overgeneralizes and admits true counterfactual contingents; and (b) that the growing block theory lacks sufficient resources to distinguish the unique possible future course of events that is relevant for the grounding of future contingents. (shrink)

Let J be any proper ideal of subsets of the real line R which contains all finite subsets of R. We define an ideal J * ∣B as follows: X ∈ J * ∣B if there exists a Borel set $B \subset R \times R$ such that $X \subset B$ and for any x ∈ R we have $\{y \in R: \langle x,y\rangle \in B\} \in \mathscr{J}$ . We show that there exists a family $\mathscr{A} \subset \mathscr{J}^\ast\mid\mathscr{B}$ of power ω (...) 1 such that $\bigcup\mathscr{A} \not\in \mathscr{J}^\ast\mid\mathscr{B}$ . In the last section we investigate properties of ideals of Lebesgue measure zero sets and meager sets in Cohen extensions of models of set theory. (shrink)

The dispute in philosophical decision theory between causalists and evidentialists remains unsettled. Many are attracted to the causal view’s endorsement of a species of dominance reasoning, and to the intuitive verdicts it gets on a range of cases with the structure of the infamous Newcomb’s Problem. But it also faces a rising wave of purported counterexamples and theoretical challenges. In this paper I will describe a novel decision theory which saves what is appealing about the causal view while avoiding its (...) most worrying objections, and which promises to generalize to solve a set of related problems in other normative domains. (shrink)

In this paper, I enter the debate between those who hold that our normative uncertainty matters for what we ought to do, and those who hold that only our descriptive uncertainty matters. I argue that existing views in both camps have unacceptable implications in cases where our descriptive beliefs depend on our normative beliefs. I go on to propose a fix which is available only to those who hold that normative uncertainty matters, ultimately leaving the challenge as a threat to (...) recent skepticism about such views. (shrink)

There has been considerable philosophical debate in recent years over a thesis called epistemic permissivism. According to the permissivist, it is possible for two agents to have the exact same total body of evidence and yet differ in their belief attitudes towards some proposition, without either being irrational. However, I argue, not enough attention has been paid to the distinction between different ways in which permissivism might be true. In this paper, I present a taxonomy of forms of epistemic permissivism (...) framed as the upshot of different ways one might respond to a basic argument against the view from Roger White. I then introduce a new type of permissive view which the contemporary debate has completely ignored and which is made available when we reject a widespread and largely unexamined background commitment to static rational norms connecting beliefs and evidence in favor of dynamic norms governing processes of consideration. I show how the dynamic strategy of rejecting static norms on belief opens the door to a new kind of permissivism which is both independently attractive and especially well-placed to answer worries that have been raised against traditional permissivist views. (shrink)

Autonomy is almost certainly the most important value “discovered” in bioethics after its birth in 1960s. It is sometimes said that autonomy is a specific kind of freedom – one that can be enjoyed only by rational beings; the most difficult problem connected with its definition is that we can easily define this notion in such a way that autonomy could not be treated as a kind of freedom at all. Among other possibilities, especially interesting definition of autonomy refers not (...) to the autonomous agent oneself but to its action: we can say that patient’s action is autonomous only when it is done: 1. intentionally, 2. with understanding and 3. without any controlling influences. (shrink)

There are some reasons to treat the principle of beneficence and the principle of nonmaleficence as separates. One of these reasons is, that they may sometimes stay in opposition. Then the question arises: to which of the two priority should be given. To resolve this in the area of medical ethics, a definition of the principle of nonmaleficence, considering its meaning and importance, seems to be necessary.

Finite agents such as human beings have reasoning and updating processes that are extended in time; consequently, there is always some lag between the point at which we gain new reasons and the point at which our attitudes have fully responded to those reasons. This phenomenon, which I call rational delay, poses a threat to the most common ways of formulating rational requirements on our attitudes, which do not allow rational beings to exhibit such delay. In this paper, I show (...) first how this problem undermines synchronic formulations of rational norms. Then I show how it likewise undermines the most natural diachronic modifications of these norms. Ultimately, I argue that a successful account of rational delay will reject norms that directly govern attitudes or states of mind like belief and intention altogether, in favor of norms that fundamentally concern temporally extended rational processes like deliberation. (shrink)

On the face of it, in ordinary practices of rational assessment, we criticize agents both for the combinations of attitudes, like belief, desire, and intention, that they possess at particular times, and for the ways that they behave cognitively over time, by forming, reconsidering, and updating those attitudes. Accordingly, philosophers have proposed norms of rationality that are synchronic—concerned fundamentally with our individual time-slices, and diachronic—concerned with our temporally extended behaviour. However, a recent movement in epistemology has cast doubt on the (...) very existence of requirements of the latter type. My aim in this paper is to address what I take to be the most direct and general recent attack on diachronic epistemic rationality, the arguments for so-called ‘time-slice epistemology’ by Brian Hedden. I argue that Hedden's attempt to motivate the rejection of diachronic rational norms ultimately fails, and in particular that an independently attractive view about the nature of such norms, namely one on which such norms govern processes, escapes his assault unscathed. (shrink)

In this article we consider linear isomorphisms over the field of rational numbers between the linear spaces ℝ2 and ℝ. We prove that if f is such an isomorphism, then the image by f of the unit disk is a strictly nonmeasurable subset of the real line, which has different properties than classical non-measurable subsets of reals. We shall also consider the question whether all images of bounded measurable subsets of the plane via a such mapping are non-measurable.

In this paper the notion of unifier is extended to the infinite set case. The proof of existence of the most general unifier of any infinite, unifiable set of types (terms) is presented. Learning procedure, based on infinite set unification, is described.

This paper discusses the problem of inconsistencies in the metaphorical conceptualizations of time that involve motion within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). It demonstrates that the TIME AS A PURSUER metaphor contrasts with the reverse variant TIME AS AN OBJECT OF PURSUIT, just as the MOVING TIME metaphor contrasts with the MOVING OBSERVER variant. Such metaphorical conceptualizations of time functioning as pairs of minimally differing variants based on Figure-Ground reversal are, strictly speaking, inconsistent with one another. Looking at (...) these inconsistencies from a wider perspective suggests that time may belong to a separate category of conceptual phenomena. This paper puts forward a proposal to approach time from the perspective of “phenomena of the third kind”, which according to Keller’s thesis include conceptual establishments resulting from human cognition, but not of human design. (shrink)

Obcy Inny. Analiza przypadków. 2017, ed. Małgorzata Karwatowska, Robert Litwiński, AdamSiwiec. Wydawnictwo UMCS, Lublin.Obcy/Inny, Propozycje aplikacji pojęciowych. 2018, ed. M. Karwatowska, R. Litwiński, A. Siwiec,Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, Lublin.

In this paper, I develop an approach to population ethics which explains what we are permitted to do in virtue of the possible complaints against our action. This task is made difficult by a serious problem that arises when we attempt to generalize the view from two-option to many-option cases. The solution makes two significant moves – first, accepting that complaints are essentially pairwise comparative, and second, reimagining decision-making as a tournament between options competing two at a time. The right (...) view about when one option defeats another with respect to complaints, paired with the right view about how to pick the winners of the tournament given the relations of defeat, leads to a uniquely attractive view in the person-affecting tradition. (shrink)

Traditional rule consequentialism faces a problem sometimes called the ideal world objection—the worry that by looking only at the consequences in worlds where rules are universally adhered to, the theory fails to account for problems that arise because adherence to rules in the real world is inevitably imperfect. In response, recent theorists have defended sophisticated versions of rule consequentialism which are sensitive to the consequences in worlds with less utopian levels of adherence. In this paper, I argue that these attempts (...) underestimate the problem they are designed to avoid—the worry about ideal worlds is only one manifestation of a deeper and more general problem, the distant world objection, which threatens not only the sophisticated revisions of rule consequentialism, but any view which determines what we ought to do by evaluating worlds that differ from ours in more than what is up to us. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an approach to population ethics which explains what we are permitted to do in virtue of the possible complaints against our action. This task is made difficult by a serious problem that arises when we attempt to generalize the view from two-option to many-option cases. The solution makes two significant moves – first, accepting that complaints are essentially pairwise comparative, and second, reimagining decision-making as a tournament between options competing two at a time. The right (...) view about when one option defeats another with respect to complaints, paired with the right view about how to pick the winners of the tournament given the relations of defeat, leads to a uniquely attractive view in the person-affecting tradition. (shrink)

One of the most vigorously debated issues in attention labs concerns the nature of the coupling between the sensory-motor system and covert spatial attention. Proponents of the Premotor Theory of Attention (PToA) claim that attention should be accounted for in terms of motor preparation for goal-directed actions such as eye or hand movements. For others, it is a supramodal psychological entity that is independent of our sensorimotor machinery. Both parties also seek to articulate this controversy in terms of cognitive science (...) as a question of whether attention is embodied or disembodied cognition. The PToA is thought to advocate the embodiment of attention. We, however, are inclined to think that a more nuanced view of this conceptual framework is needed to yield some insights into how radical it actually is in terms of embodied cognition (EC). We argue that PToA still seems to bear some features of weak embodiment. Yet we suggest that it has the potential to build a stronger concept of attention as EC, but somewhat paradoxically this would require giving attention deflationary treatment and reconstructing it in other terms. We propose that the notion of pre-reflective intentionality might serve as an inspiration to this end. (shrink)

In 1968 the authors of the so-called Harvard Report, proposed the recognition of an irreversible coma as a new criterion for death. The proposal was accepted by the medical, legal, religious and political circles in spite of the lack of any explanation why the irreversible coma combined with the absence of brainstem reflexes, including the respiratory reflex might be equated to death. Such an explanation was formulated in the President’s Commission Report published in 1981. This document stated, that the brain (...) is the central integrator of the body, therefore the destruction of the brain results in the lack of that integration and the death of the organism. Therefore, according to that document, the so-called “brain dead” patients are really, biologically dead; strictly speaking they are not any more biological organisms but collections of organs and tissues. Their death was masked by the use of the medical equipment, but it was a real, biological death. Thus, the explanation given by the President’s Commission Report constituted a biological rationale for the new concept of death, known as “brain death.” However, after the long discussion, this rationale was refuted because of the evidence given by many medical authorities, that the bodies of the “brain dead” and “brainstem dead” patients are alive. In the context of the discussion about the neurological criteria for death, some authors follow the idea of Plato, that human being is the soul or mind, and the body does not belong to the human essence. Therefore, the loss of consciousness, which may be identified with the mind, constitutes the loss of personhood and may be interpreted as human death. The other group stresses the Aristotelian and Thomistic concept that the body belongs to the essence of every living creature, including human. Therefore, as long as the body is alive, the human being is alive and we cannot call the given patient dead even if he is deeply comatose. Moreover, in spite of the opinions dominating in the mass-media, these patients should be considered not only alive but also may be conscious to some degree and their state can be reversible. Their brains are lacking the electrical functions, but the neuronal tissue is alive and that state is reversible for at least first 48 hours since the onset of coma; this phenomenon is called “global ischemic penumbra” and is responsible for the regularly happening events interpreted as miracles, when some of the “brain dead” or “brainstem dead” patients turn to be alive and come back to normal life. Therefore, the neurological criteria of death are still lacking generally accepted scientific basis and should not be used in medicine and in the legal systems as a basis for diagnosing comatose/having no brainstem reflexes/apneic patients dead. (shrink)

We assess Cartwright's models for probabilistic causality, and in particular, her models for EPR-like experiments of quantum mechanics. We show that her models for the EPR are mathematically incorrect and physically implausible. Finally, we argue that her models are not adequate for EPR-phenomena, since they ignore modal and spatiotemporal aspects inherent in their setup.