According to the expertise defense, practitioners of the method of cases need not worry about findings that ordinary people’s philosophical intuitions depend on epistemically irrelevant factors. This is because, honed by years of training, the intuitions of professional philosophers likely surpass those of the folk. To investigate this, we conducted a controlled longitudinal study of a broad range of intuitions in undergraduate students of philosophy (n = 226), whose case judgments we sampled after each semester throughout their studies. Under the (...) assumption, made by proponents of the expertise defense, that formal training in philosophy gives rise to the kind of expertise that accounts for changes in the students’ responses to philosophically puzzling cases, our data suggest that the acquired cognitive skills only affect single case judgments at a time. There does not seem to exist either a general expertise that informs case judgments in all areas of philosophy, or an expertise specific to particular subfields. In fact, we argue that available evidence, including the results of cross-sectional research, is best explained in terms of differences in adopted beliefs about specific cases, rather than acquired cognitive skills. We also investigated whether individuals who choose to study philosophy have atypical intuitions compared to the general population and whether students whose intuitions are at odds with textbook consensus are more likely than others to drop out of the philosophy program. (shrink)

Über sein Verhältnis zu Friedrich Nietzsche sagte Leszek Kolakowski: „ ich habe ihn nie studiert, im wahren Sinne des Wortes, habe auch niemals über ihn geschrieben, außer daß ich ihn hier und da kurz erwähnte." Diese Erklärung könnte im allgemeinen stimmen, obwohl Leszek Kołakowski eine Abhandlung, die den Ansichten Nietzsches gewidmet ist, geschrieben hat. Es handelt sich um den Kommentar zum Heideggers Kommentar des vermutlichen Kommentars Nietzsches zum Hegels Kommentar über das Erfordernis der Negativität. Das Ziel meiner Ausführungen besteht darin, (...) nachzuweisen, daß Kołakowski unter beachtlichem Einfluß der Nietzscheanischen Philosophie steht. Den Beweis dafür liefern nicht nur die gelegentlichen Berufungen auf Schriften des deutschen Philosophen, sondern auch die Art und Weise, wie er theoretische Probleme stellt und wie er sie löst, in weiterer Folge sein Stil des Schreibens und schließlich sein entschieden kritischer, oft spottender Abstand von der heutigen Kultur. Diese Abhängigkeit darzustellen - bei bescheidener Berufung Kolakowskis auf Nietzsches Werke - ist weder eine leichte, noch eine dankbare Aufgabe, da man ihr immer eine willkürliche Manipulation der Interpretation vorwerfen kann. Die Errungenschaften des großen Philosophen der Vergangenheit bilden das allgemeine Gut, und jeder hat das Recht, sich auf sie zu berufen, ohne seine Gedanken unbedingt zu beschreiben, die auf diese oder andere Weise in der Kultur verwurzelt sind. (shrink)

Über sein Verhältnis zu Friedrich Nietzsche sagte Leszek Kolakowski: „ ich habe ihn nie studiert, im wahren Sinne des Wortes, habe auch niemals über ihn geschrieben, außer daß ich ihn hier und da kurz erwähnte." Diese Erklärung könnte im allgemeinen stimmen, obwohl Leszek Kołakowski eine Abhandlung, die den Ansichten Nietzsches gewidmet ist, geschrieben hat. Es handelt sich um den Kommentar zum Heideggers Kommentar des vermutlichen Kommentars Nietzsches zum Hegels Kommentar über das Erfordernis der Negativität. Das Ziel meiner Ausführungen besteht darin, (...) nachzuweisen, daß Kołakowski unter beachtlichem Einfluß der Nietzscheanischen Philosophie steht. Den Beweis dafür liefern nicht nur die gelegentlichen Berufungen auf Schriften des deutschen Philosophen, sondern auch die Art und Weise, wie er theoretische Probleme stellt und wie er sie löst, in weiterer Folge sein Stil des Schreibens und schließlich sein entschieden kritischer, oft spottender Abstand von der heutigen Kultur. Diese Abhängigkeit darzustellen - bei bescheidener Berufung Kolakowskis auf Nietzsches Werke - ist weder eine leichte, noch eine dankbare Aufgabe, da man ihr immer eine willkürliche Manipulation der Interpretation vorwerfen kann. Die Errungenschaften des großen Philosophen der Vergangenheit bilden das allgemeine Gut, und jeder hat das Recht, sich auf sie zu berufen, ohne seine Gedanken unbedingt zu beschreiben, die auf diese oder andere Weise in der Kultur verwurzelt sind. (shrink)

The paper sets out to prove that Leszek Kołakowski remained under a considerable influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas, which is evidenced by the way he poses and solves theoretical problems as well as his critical and often ironical detachment from the modern culture. He devoted a great deal of attention to nihilism, and searched for mythical conditioning of the thinking of the man of today; from the late 1950s, he was a follower of the philosophy of freedom and opposed philosophical (...) and historical determinism. He rejected systemic thinking and any fundamentalism in science. (shrink)

Über sein Verhältnis zu Friedrich Nietzsche sagte Leszek Kolakowski: „ ich habe ihn nie studiert, im wahren Sinne des Wortes, habe auch niemals über ihn geschrieben, außer daß ich ihn hier und da kurz erwähnte." Diese Erklärung könnte im allgemeinen stimmen, obwohl Leszek Kołakowski eine Abhandlung, die den Ansichten Nietzsches gewidmet ist, geschrieben hat. Es handelt sich um den Kommentar zum Heideggers Kommentar des vermutlichen Kommentars Nietzsches zum Hegels Kommentar über das Erfordernis der Negativität. Das Ziel meiner Ausführungen besteht darin, (...) nachzuweisen, daß Kołakowski unter beachtlichem Einfluß der Nietzscheanischen Philosophie steht. Den Beweis dafür liefern nicht nur die gelegentlichen Berufungen auf Schriften des deutschen Philosophen, sondern auch die Art und Weise, wie er theoretische Probleme stellt und wie er sie löst, in weiterer Folge sein Stil des Schreibens und schließlich sein entschieden kritischer, oft spottender Abstand von der heutigen Kultur. Diese Abhängigkeit darzustellen - bei bescheidener Berufung Kolakowskis auf Nietzsches Werke - ist weder eine leichte, noch eine dankbare Aufgabe, da man ihr immer eine willkürliche Manipulation der Interpretation vorwerfen kann. Die Errungenschaften des großen Philosophen der Vergangenheit bilden das allgemeine Gut, und jeder hat das Recht, sich auf sie zu berufen, ohne seine Gedanken unbedingt zu beschreiben, die auf diese oder andere Weise in der Kultur verwurzelt sind. (shrink)

Die Philosophie bringt Ideen hervor. Nur von ihnen - von ihrer theoretischen Tragkraft und Neuigkeit hängt die Stellung eines Denkers in einer Kultur ab; ausschließlich von seinem Werk. Sie ist jedoch mit bloßem Auge und auf den ersten Blick nicht zu erkennen. Die Mühlsteine der Geschichte mahlen grob, erst nach Jahrhunderten klären sich die Leistungshierarchien auf. Die Inkubationszeit in einer Kultur dauert lange. Man bedenke nur, dass fünf Jahrhunderte nach Aristoteles dieser neben Plato größte griechische Denker nur einer von 80 (...) Philosophen im Werke von Diogenes Laertios war. Letzterer widmete Aristoteles gerade mal drei Prozent seines Manuskripts. Heute bezweifelt keiner die herausragende Stellung dieses Philosophen. Vor dem Hintergrund zufälliger Geschichtsfaktoren geraten besonders diejenigen menschlichen Erzeugnisse schnell ins Vergessen, um die man sich wenig kümmerte. Aber das ist kein Zufall. Es überdauern nicht diejenigen, die zu Lebzeiten große Scharen von Anhängern hatten, sondern jene, die durch die Jahrtausende hindurch in jeder Generation wenigstens einen vernünftigen Vertreter haben. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE On the Rhetorical Point of View. Why rhetoric declined, and what remained of it. Once upon a time rhetoric was a vast and influential branch of ...

The chapter discusses potential benefits of corpus analysis in philosophical investigations, in particular in experimental philosophy. Philosophers often assume that what happens in language is crucial for the analysis of concepts of philosophical interest. In doing so, they commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions, which has been claimed to be methodologically dubious (Bluhm 2013, 2016). Bluhm’s own model of philosophical research has a place for corpus analysis. However, the model has some limitations. I present an alternative model for the (...) use of corpus analysis in philosophical research that can be especially useful for experimental philosophy. As an example, I examine Shepard and Wolf (2013) study on the causal structure of Knobe scenarios. Corpus analysis can be used to show that the verb “cause” used in their scenarios has a negative aura. I discuss the implications of this fact for the design of further studies. (shrink)

Barcz and Zaręba (2021) argue that depending on the shape and the size of the asymmetry in attributions of intentional actions one can distinguish various interpretations of the Knobe effect. Their classification of these interpretations can be used to compare judgments of intentional action across different languages and cultures. Our study in three languages (Polish, English and Italian) indicates that there is some cross-cultural variation both in the ascription of intentionality to an action and in the ascription of actions to (...) the agent. (shrink)

Clinical Ethics Consultations are an important tool for physicians in solving difficult cases. They are extremely common in North America and to a lesser extent also present in Europe. However, there is little data on this practice in Poland. We present results of a survey of 521 physicians practising in Poland concerning their opinion on CECs and related practices. We analysed the data looking at such issues as CECs’ perceived availability, use of CECs, and perceived usefulness of such support. Physicians (...) in our study generally encounter hard ethics cases, even—surprisingly—those who do not work in hospitals. Most physicians have no CEC access, and those that do still do not employ CECs. However, physicians perceive this form of support as useful—even more so among actual users of CECs. We compared these findings with similar studies from other European countries and the North America. We point out peculiarities of our results as compared to those in other countries, with some possible explanations. We hope the results may encourage regulatory debate on the need to formally introduce CECs into the Polish healthcare system. (shrink)

Most discussions of the reproducibility crisis focus on its epistemic aspect: the fact that the scientific community fails to follow some norms of scientific investigation, which leads to high rates of irreproducibility via a high rate of false positive findings. The purpose of this paper is to argue that there is a heretofore underappreciated and understudied dimension to the reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience that may prove to be at least as important as the epistemic dimension. This is (...) the communication dimension. The link between communication and reproducibility is immediate: independent investigators would not be able to recreate an experiment whose design or implementation were inadequately described. I exploit evidence of a replicability and reproducibility crisis in computational science, as well as research into quality of reporting to support the claim that a widespread failure to adhere to reporting standards, especially the norm of descriptive completeness, is an important contributing factor in the current reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience. (shrink)

We argue that Yarkoni's proposed solutions to the generalizability crisis are half-measures because he does not recognize that the crisis arises from investigators' underappreciation of the roles of theory in experimental research. Rather than embracing qualitative analysis, the research community should make an effort to develop better theories and work toward consistently incorporating theoretical results into experimental practice.

Inequality of incomes is one of the significant factors forming the social capital. Two views dominate among economists dealing with the influence of inequality of income on economic growth. On the one hand, a too low inequality of income does not motivate people to increase the labour productivity. A low inequality of income might result from an extended social care system and overloading GDP with social transfers. A good example of it may be a situation when the unemployed refuses to (...) accept a job offer and prefers the unemployment benefit rather to a slightly higher salary. Moreover, a lack of incentives for the employee who fails to acknowledge the economic sense of increasing the productivity of his work might lead to the slower growth of economy. On the other hand, a contrary view suggests that an increase of the inequality of income has a negative impact on the economy. The accumulation of wealth by a small number of citizens raises doubts about good use of that wealth for investments necessary for the growth of the economy. An excessive inequality of income is confronted with disapproval of the significant part of society and regarded as unfair and unjustified. It may also increase the crime level and decrease the trust and, more generally, lead to the weakening of social capital. The arguments above lead to a hypothesis that the influence of the inequality of income on the growth of the economy has a non-linear character. We confirmed this hypothesis in growth models of the US and Swedish economies. We assess the historically optimal inequality of income measured by the Gini coefficient at 46% and 24% for the US and Sweden respectively. The optimal inequality of income in Poland was assessed previously at 29%. The dissimilarities may result from the cultural differences, educational level differences, ethnic differences and differences in diligence. (shrink)

According to the New Angle, any explanation of the Knobe effect must be gradable and asymmetric. It has been argued that only Hindriks’ approach meets both criteria. First, we argue that Holton’s hypothesis also meets the criteria. Second, we show that the authors are not justified in taking the criteria to be empirically justified. We have failed to replicate the asymmetry result in two experiments. Moreover, gradability can be objective or epistemic. We show that the New Angle presupposes objective gradability. (...) In our experiments, the patterns of responses to questions about epistemic and objective gradability are the same, irrespective of whether the feature is objectively gradable (e.g., blameworthiness) or not (e.g., intentionality). Our results thus question the extent to which the New Angle is empirically grounded. Moreover, they raise doubt whether the answers to questions about epistemic and objective gradability can be taken at face value at all. (shrink)

The paper presents two objections against Putnam’s Twin Earth argument, which was intended to secure semantic externalism. I first claim that Putnam’s reasoning rests on two assumptions and then try to show why these assumptions are contentious. The first objection is that, given what we know about science, it is unlikely that there are any natural-kind terms whose extension is codetermined by a small set of microstructures required by Putnam’s indexical account of extension determination. The second objection is that there (...) may not be a plausible concept of a speech community whose adoption would classify Oscar and Twin Oscar as members of different speech communities and, at the same time, render Oscar and Twin Oscar as being in the same psychological state. I contend that Putnam’s argument fails because both objections are justified. (shrink)

Beebe and Buckwalter made the surprising discovery that people are more inclined to attribute knowledge when norms are violated than when they are conformed to. The epistemic side-effect effect is the analogue of the Knobe effect. ESEE was replicated in a number of experiments. It was also studied under various conditions. We have carried out a meta-analysis of research on ESEE. The results suggest that ESEE is a robust finding but its magnitude is highly variable. Two study-level covariates influence its (...) size: the subject of the knowledge attribution and the type of norm that is violated or complied with. The effect size is not influenced, however, by the manipulation of chances, by whether the story is about a side effect or not, by language or by question phrasing. The impact of the Gettierization of the story is marginally significant. (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)