The paper concerns the problem of the legal responsibility of autonomous machines. In our opinion it boils down to the question of whether such machines can be seen as real agents through the prism of folk-psychology. We argue that autonomous machines cannot be granted the status of legal agents. Although this is quite possible from purely technical point of view, since the law is a conventional tool of regulating social interactions and as such can accommodate various legislative constructs, including legal (...) responsibility of autonomous artificial agents, we believe that it would remain a mere ‘law in books’, never materializing as ‘law in action’. It is not impossible to imagine that the evolution of our conceptual apparatus will reach a stage, when autonomous robots become full-blooded moral and legal agents. However, today at least, we seem to be far from this point. (shrink)

This article outlines the contributions of the Kraków School to the field of science and religion. The Kraków School is a group of philosophers, scientists, and theologians who belong to the milieu of the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. The members of the group are engaged in inquiries pertaining to the relationship between theology and various sciences, in particular cosmology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience. The article includes a presentation of the historical background of the School, as well as its main (...) original contributions pertaining to the history of the interactions between science and religion, the rationality and mathematicity of the universe, theology of science, and the role of logic in theology. (shrink)

This paper addresses the black-box problem in artificial intelligence (AI), and the related problem of explainability of AI in the legal context. We argue, first, that the black box problem is, in fact, a superficial one as it results from an overlap of four different – albeit interconnected – issues: the opacity problem, the strangeness problem, the unpredictability problem, and the justification problem. Thus, we propose a framework for discussing both the black box problem and the explainability of AI. We (...) argue further that contrary to often defended claims the opacity issue is not a genuine problem. We also dismiss the justification problem. Further, we describe the tensions involved in the strangeness and unpredictability problems and suggest some ways to alleviate them. (shrink)

The Logic of Legal Requirements. Essays on Defeasibility, edited by Jordi Ferrer Beltrán and Giovanni Battista Ratti, and published by Oxford University Press in 2012, is a very much welcome contribution to one of the most discussed topics in the contemporary legal theory and philosophy. Defeasibility is connected to many essential issues such as the nature of legal reasoning, the structure of legal norms and legal system, the concept of legal validity, as well as the mechanisms and limits of..

In this paper it has been argued that the theory of conceptual maps developed recently by Paul M. Churchland provides support for Wittgenstein’s claim that language is a tool for acting in the world. The role of language is to coordinate and shape the conceptual maps of the members of the given language community, reducing the cross-individual cognitive idiosyncrasies and paving the way for joint cognitive enterprises. Moreover, Churchland’s theory also explains our tendency to speak of language as consisting of (...) concepts which correspond to things we encounter in the world. The puzzle of common sense reference is no longer a puzzle: while at the fundamental level language remains a tool for orchestrating conceptual maps, the fact that the maps encode some communally shared categorization of experience fuels our talk of concepts capturing the essences of things, natural kinds, prototypes, etc. (shrink)

The goal in this short paper is to argue that so-called intermediary concepts play an essential role in organizing and generating legal knowledge. The point of departure is a reconstruction and a critique of Alf Ross’s analysis of such concepts. His goal was to argue that there exist concepts in the law which have no semantic reference, yet it is reasonable to use them as they perform some useful function regarding the presentation of legal rules. The author believes that Ross (...) is wrong on both counts: his argument to the effect that intermediary concepts have no reference is flawed, and his characterization of the functions such concepts play in the law is too limiting. (shrink)

Cilj članka je odgovoriti na kritiko, ki jo je David Duarte usmeril zoper tezo o delni zvedljivosti, tj. trditev, ki jo Brożek zagovarja v eni izmed svojih knjig in pravi, da je analogno sklepanje deloma zvedljivo na tehtanje pravnih načel. Prvi del članka oriše okvir, ki je avtorju služil pri oblikovanju teze o zvedljivosti, tj. Alexyjevo teorijo pravnega sklepanja. Drugi del je namenjen ovrženju Duartejevih ugovorov. Ti naj namreč ne bi upoštevali prej omenjenega okvira. V zadnjem delu avtor še zatrdi, (...) da so nekateri vidiki njegove teorije analognega sklepanja neodvisni od omenjenega teoretskega okvira in zato uporabni za katerokoli pojmovanje analogije v pravu. (shrink)

The goal of the paper is to reply to David Duarte’s critique of the partial reducibility thesis―a claim I defended in one of my books that analogy is partly reducible to the balancing of legal principles. In the first part of the paper I sketch the framework against which the thesis was formulated, i.e. Robert Alexy’s theory of legal reasoning. In the second part I attempt to rebut Duarte’s objections, pointing out that they do not take into account the Alexian (...) background of my considerations. Finally, I suggest that some aspects of my theory of analogical reasoning are independent of its theoretical background and may be of value for any conceptualization of analogy in the law. (shrink)

Avtor zatrjuje, da imajo t. i. posredniški pojmi ključno vlogo pri urejanju in tvorbi pravnega znanja. V izhodišču povzame Rossovo razmišljanje o takšnih pojmih, ki ga nato kritizira. Ross je skušal pokazati, da v pravu obstajajo pojmi, ki nimajo nobenega pomenskega ozira, a je njihova raba kljub temu nekaj razumnega, saj imajo pri predstavitvi pravnih pravil koristno vlogo. Avtor meni, da sta obe Rossovi trditvi napačni: zmoten je njegov sklep, da posredniški pojmi nimajo nobenega pomenskega ozira, Rossova opredelitev njihove vloge (...) v pravu pa je preveč omejujoča. (shrink)

Philosophy in science should be sharply distinguished from the philosophy of science. The latter offers a philosophical reflection on the method of science; the former, on the contrary, is expected to concentrate on the mutual influence between the philosophical ideas and scientific theories and practice. The papers in this book explore both the methodological niveau of the philosophy in science and some particular philosophical issues intertwined with scientific theories. Only such a combination of two perspectives may provide a comprehensive picture (...) of the methods and applications characteristic of philosophy in science. The book includes essays by Sir Roger Penrose, Joseph LeDoux, Francisco J. Ayala, and Michael Heller who won of the Templeton Prize in 2008. (shrink)

El propósito en este breve artículo es argumentar que los llamados conceptos intermediarios juegan un rol esencial en la organización y generación del conocimiento jurídico. El punto de partida es una reconstrucción y crítica del análisis de Alf Ross sobre dichos conceptos. Su objetivo era argumentar que existen conceptos en el derecho que no tienen referencia semántica, pero que aun así es razonable usarlos dado que cumplen con algunas funciones útiles relacionadas con la presentación de las reglas jurídicas. El autor (...) de este artículo afirma que Ross está equivocado en ambos casos: su argumento al efecto de que los conceptos intermediarios no tienen referencia es defectuoso, y su caracterización de las funciones que dichos conceptos cumplen en el derecho es muy limitante. (shrink)

This book examines the fundamental issues in neuroscience from methodological and philosophical perspectives. The reader will learn about the methodological difficulties connected with the use of neuroscientific experiments in philosophical argumentation and about the nature of scientific explanation in neuroscience. In addition, the book includes case studies of several issues lying at the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy, such as theory of mind, self-consciousness, self-deception, depression, and morality.

This edited volume explores ideas of legal realism which emerge through the works of Russian legal philosophers. Apart from the well-known American and Scandinavian versions of legal realism, there also exists a Russian one: readers will discover fresh perspectives and that the collection of early twentieth century ideas on law discussed in Russia can be understood as a unified school of legal thought – as Russian legal realism. These chapters by renowned European and Eastern European legal philosophers add to ongoing (...) discussions about the nature of law, especially in the context of developments around our scientific knowledge about the mind and behaviour. Analyses of legal phenomena carried out by legal realists in Russia offer novel arguments in favour of embracing psychological and sociological perspectives on the law. The book includes analysis of the St. Petersburg school of legal philosophy and Leon Petrażycki’s psychological theory of law. This original and multifaceted research on Russian realists is of considerable value to an international audience. Researchers and postgraduate students of law, legal theory and legal ethics will find the book particularly appealing, but it will also interest those investigating the philosophy or sociology of law, or legal history. (shrink)

This handbook offers a deep analysis of the main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation from both a logical-philosophical and legal perspective. These forms are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and the handbook accordingly divides in three parts: the first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the main general forms of reasoning and argumentation relevant for legal discourse. The third one looks at their application in law as well as at (...) the different areas of legal reasoning. The handbook’s division in three parts reflects its conceptual architecture, since legal reasoning and argumentation are considered in relation to the more general types of reasoning. (shrink)

The previous volume of the series Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science at Warsaw University---entitled Imperatives from Different Points of View---was the first result of the project Theory of Imperatives and Its Applications realized by the group composed by Anna Brożek, Jacek Jadacki and Berislav Žarnić. The project was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science within the program Homing Plus. One of the most important points of this project was the International Symposium Imperatives in Theory and Practice which took (...) place in Warsaw, on the 18th and 19th May, 2012. The symposium was the meeting of many specialists in the domain of the theory of imperatives – from China, Croatia, Japan, Poland and The United States. Contents: Berislav Žarnić, Logical Root of Linguistic Commitment; Jacek Jadacki, Witwicki’s Square; Tomoyuki Yamada, On the Very Idea of Imperative Inference; Fengkui Ju, Semantics of Sentences in Mixed Moods of Indicative and Imperative; Piotr Kulicki & Robert Trypuz, Two Faces of Obligation; Bartosz Brożek, Types of Obligations; Anna Brożek, Functional Ambiguity of Imperatives; Anna Brożek, Logic of Prescriptions and Instruction; Aleksandra Horecka, Imperative Sentence as a Performative Sentence, which Refers to the Optative State of Affairs; Jakub Bazyli Motrenko, The Concept of Praxiological Directive; Maciej Witek, How to Establish Authority with Words: Imperative Utterances and Presupposition Accommodation; Wojciech Załuski, Remarks on the Lexical Order of Rawls’s Two Principles of Justice; Natalia Miklaszewska, Acts of Will as Convictions; Anna Brożek, Imperatives in the Gospel. (shrink)

How does a lawyer think? Does legal intuition exist? Do lawyers need imagination? Why is legal language so abstract? It is no longer possible to answer these questions by applying philosophical analysis alone. Recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of the human mental faculties and the tools we use to solve problems. A new picture of the functioning of the legal mind is emerging. In The Legal Mind, Bartosz Brożek uses philosophical arguments and insight from (...) the cognitive sciences to depict legal thinking as a close cooperation between three cognitive mechanisms - intuition, imagination, and language - and addresses the question of how to efficiently use these mental tools. This novel and provocative approach provides a fresh perspective on legal thinking and gives rise to important questions pertaining to the limits of legal interpretation and rationality in the law. (shrink)

We prove that the theory of the extensional compositional truth predicate for the language of arithmetic with \Delta 0 -induction scheme for the truth predicate and the full arithmetical induction scheme is not conservative over Peano Arithmetic. In addition, we show that a slightly modified theory of truth actually proves the global reflection principle over the base theory.

Brandom (Citation1994) made inferentialism an intensely debated idea in the philosophy of language in the last three decades. Inferentialism is a view that associates the meaning of linguistic expression with the role said expression plays in inferences. It seems rather uncontroversial that the correct theory of meaning should distinguish between linguistic correctness and factual correctness. For instance, speaker S can be wrong in saying ‘I have arthritis’ in two distinct ways: (i) S fails to apply a word correctly to make (...) a true statement due to having made a factual error, and (ii) S uses an expression incorrectly because they are wrong about its meaning. In this paper, I show that properly understood normative inferentialism can make room for such a distinction. I propose that linguistic correctness is a structural issue: linguistic mistakes stem from the improper or insufficient acquisition of an inferential role. Factual correctness, on the other hand, is a one-off issue of the correct application of inferential rules to a particular situation. I argue that, by tying the issue of correctness to the game of giving and asking for reasons, inferentialism can establish a reliable method for distinguishing between two types of correctness (and mistakes). (shrink)

In March 1930, Alfred Tarski visited Vienna and delivered few lectures which presented the achievements of the logical branch of the Lvov-Warsaw School. Rudolf Carnap was one of the most careful listeners of these lectures. The same year, in November, Carnap, invited by the Warsaw Philosophical Society, visited Warsaw where he gave three lectures. This was an opportunity for him to meet such members the Lvov-Warsaw School as Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, and others. Many years later, Carnap reminisced (...) that he left Warsaw “grateful for many stimulating suggestions and the fruitful exchange of ideas”.In the paper, I reconstruct the details of Carnap’s visit in Warsaw based on Carnap’s diaries, reports published in the Polish Journal Ruch Filozoficzny [Philosophical Movement] and some correspondence. I also discuss some problems presented by Carnap in Warsaw lectures and compare his views to the positons of members of the Lvov-Warsaw School. These problems are: the foundations of psychology, the status of metaphysical sentences, and the character of reasoning. (shrink)

The analysis of atomic sentences and their subatomic components poses a special problem for proof-theoretic approaches to natural language semantics, as it is far from clear how their semantics could be explained by means of proofs rather than denotations. The paper develops a proof-theoretic semantics for a fragment of English within a type-theoretical formalism that combines subatomic systems for natural deduction [20] with constructive (or Martin-Löf) type theory [8, 9] by stating rules for the formation, introduction, elimination and equality of (...) atomic propositions understood as types (or sets) of subatomic proof-objects. The formalism is extended with dependent types to admit an interpretation of non-atomic sentences. The paper concludes with applications to natural language including internally nested proper names, anaphoric pronouns, simple identity sentences, and intensional transitive verbs. (shrink)

We show that for every countable recursively saturated model M of Peano arithmetic and every subset A⊆M, there exists a full satisfaction class SA⊆M2 such that A is definable in (M,SA) without parameters. It follows that in every such model, there exists a full satisfaction class which makes every element definable, and thus the expanded model is minimal and rigid. On the other hand, as observed by Roman Kossak, for every full satisfaction class S there are two elements which have (...) the same arithmetical type, but exactly one of them is in S. In particular, the automorphism group of a model expanded with a satisfaction class is never equal to the automorphism group of the original model. The analogue of the first result proved here for full satisfaction classes was obtained also by Roman Kossak for partial inductive satisfaction classes. However, the proof relied on the induction scheme in a crucial way, so recapturing the result in the setting of full satisfaction classes requires quite different arguments. (shrink)

Boreal forests store a globally significant pool of carbon (C), mainly in tree biomass and soil organic matter (SOM). Although crucial for future climate change predictions, the mechanisms underlying C stabilization are not well understood. Here, recently discovered mechanisms behind SOM stabilization, their level of understanding, interrelations, and future directions in the field are provided. A recently unraveled mechanism behind C stabilization via interaction of root‐derived tannins with fungal necromass emphasizing fungal necromass chemistry is brought forth. The long‐lasting dogma of (...) the stability of SOM on minerals is challenged and the newest insights from the field of soil fauna and their influence on SOM stabilization are provided. In conclusion, mechanisms unraveled during the last decade are crucial steps forward to draw a holistic view of the main drivers of SOM stabilization. (shrink)

Despite the great expansion and many benefits of information and communication technologies in healthcare, the attitudes of Polish general practitioners to e-health have not been explored. The aim of this study was to determine the GPs’ perception of ICT use in healthcare and to identify barriers to the adoption of EMR in the Podlaskie Voivodeship. Online and telephone surveys were conducted between April and May 2013. Responses from 103 GP practices, 43% of all practices in the region, were analysed. The (...) results showed that 67% of the respondents agreed that IT systems improve quality of healthcare services. In the GP group who declared at least partial EMR implementation, 71.4% see the positive impact of IT on practice staff processes and 66.1% on personal working processes. In this group, more than three-quarters of GPs did not see any positive impact of ICT on the average number of patients treated per day, number of patients within the practice or scope of services. The four most common barriers to EMR implementation were: lack of funds, risk of a malfunction in the system, resistance to change, and lack of training and proper information. Although the use of ICT by Polish GPs is limited, their attitude to e-health is generally positive or neutral and resembles the overall pattern in Europe. Barriers identified by GPs need to be taken into account to ensure the effective implementation of e-health across the country. (shrink)

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)

[ENG] The aim of this paper is to analyze the „possibility puzzle” presented by Shapiro (2011) in the context of the debate between conventionalism and non-conventionalism in speech act theory. Conventionalism claims that for every speech act there is a pattern (convention) which determines its illocutionary force. To perform a felicitous speech act is to fulfil necessary and sufficient conditions for this particular speech act. Non-conventionalism criticizes the view that for every speech act there is a conventional pattern and hidden (...) conditions, which are to be fulfilled. This view maintains the conventional thesis for the so-called strict conventional speech acts (e.g. performatives), but negates using universal quantifier for so-called communicative speech acts whose aim is, in short, to express an intention and force someone to act by virtue of this intention. As in (Shapiro 2011), Phil said: in order for someone to have the power to make, change and apply rules, there has to be a rule that empowers someone to do so. This objection concerned „The First Legis- lator” only from the conventional perspective on speech acts. If it can be maintained that The First Legislator’s speech acts may be non-conventional, then Phil’s argument misses the point. Finally, I will emphasize that only lawyers analyze „the very first speech acts” whereas for philosophers, the problem of e.g. „the very first question” is less absorbing. -/- [PL] Celem niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie tak zwanej Aporii Phila (possibility puz- zle) przedstawionej przez Shapiro (2011) w kontekście sporu konwencjonalizm–nonkon- wencjonalizm w teorii aktów mowy. Konwencjonalizm utrzymuje, że dla każdego aktu mowy istnieje konwencja, która determinuje moc illokucyjną aktu. Wykonać w pełni for- tunny akt mowy to spełnić wystarczające i konieczne warunki określone dla danego aktu mowy. Nonkonwencjonalizm krytykuje pogląd, że dla każdego aktu mowy istnieje okre- ślona konwencja oraz ukryte warunki, które należy spełnić. Ten pogląd utrzymuje kon- wencjonalną tezę dla tak zwanych stricte konwencjonalnych aktów mowy (na przykład performatywów), ale neguje użycie dużego kwantyfikatora dla tak zwanych komunika- cyjnych aktów mowy, których celem jest, w skrócie, wyrażenie pewnej intencji i zmusze- nie kogoś poprzez jej wyrażenie do określonego postępowania. Phil, bohater historii z książki Shapiro (2011), podkreślił, iż zawsze musi istnieć reguła upoważniająca do two- rzenia prawa. Ten zarzut dotyczący „Pierwszego Legislatora” jest zasadny tylko z per- spektywy konwencjonalizmu. Jeżeli można utrzymywać, że akt mowy Pierwszego Legislatora może być nonkonwencjonalny, wtedy argument Phila jest nietrafny. Na końcu scharakteryzowany jest następujący fenomen: tylko prawnicy analizują „pierwsze akty mowy”, natomiast dla filozofów problem „pierwszego pytania” nie jest tak absorbujący. (shrink)

In this paper I present how the normative inferentialist can make the distinction between sentence meaning and content of the utterance. The inferentialist can understand sentence meaning as a role conferred to that sentence by the rules governing inferential transitions and content of the utterance as just a part of sentence meaning. I attempt to show how such a framework can account for prominent scenarios presented by contextualists as a challenge to semantic minimalism/literalism. I argue that inferentialism can address contextualist (...) challenges in a simple and effective manner by understanding sentence meaning as broad, but invariant. (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)

We have taken a look at the rules of games in order to acquire some knowledge concerning constitutive rules and, probably, institutional phenomena in general. In this paper we tried to elaborate a system account of constitutive rules. We claim that all accounts that put emphasis on the form of rules are vulnerable. It appears that constitutive rules are interconnected and always form a system that can be internally differentiated. Thanks to adopting certain qualitative criterion we were able to distinguish (...) central and peripheral constitutive rules. Moreover, that very account makes it possible to distinguish between different types of practices that are determined by types of systems of rules. Secondly, it appears there are three “layers” of games that should not be confused: deep conventions, constitutive rules that establish the game and determine games’ identities, and “rules of efficiency” that are some sort of recommendations as to how to play well. (shrink)

In this paper we consider a claim that in the natural world there is no fact of the matter about the spatio-temporal separation of events. In order to make sense of such a notion and construct useful models of the world, it is proposed to use elements of a non-classical logic. Specifically, we focus here on causality, as a concept tightly related with the assumption of there being distinct, separate events, proposing a model according to which it can be considered (...) to be spatio-temporally graded. It is outlined how this can be described using the formalism of fuzzy sets theory, with the degree of causality varying between 1, that is no separation between causes and effects, and 0, that is perfect separation between causes and their effects as in classical ’billiard balls’ models of physical systems, namely such based on the notion of ideal mathematical point. Our model posits that subjective moments of time are like fuzzy sets, with their extension determined by local degrees of causality, resulting from information integration processes extended gradually in space and time. This, we argue, is how a notion of causality could be, to a certain degree, spared and reconciled with a variant of Bergsonian duration theory as formulated in the theory of continuous change. Relation of the proposed viewpoint to other theories, as well as possible solutions it suggests to various problems, in particular the measurement problem, are also discussed. (shrink)

One of the major objectives in a democratic state is ensuring health security of the citizens including combating epidemic diseases. The subject matter of this article is the presentation and analysis of legal regulations regarding preventive vaccination in Poland, in particular the aspect of imposing a legal obligation and restricting parents’ right to express consent for medical intervention. The reflections made herein are aimed at finding an answer to the question whether the adopted legal solutions are admissible in a democratic (...) state with regard to ensuring health security. The purpose of the analysis is also to assess whether the abovementioned legal regulations have been formulated in a clear way and do not raise interpretation doubts and, consequently, whether they are comprehensible to the parents obliged to comply with them. As it follows from analysis of the legal provisions, parents must not refuse to subject a child to obligatory preventive vaccination and their consent is not required by law, both as regards the medical qualifying examination to exclude contraindications to performing vaccination and the vaccination itself. It is a legal obligation, from which exemption is only possible on grounds of certain medical conditions that would render vaccination inadvisable. The legal provisions that concern obligatory preventive vaccination in Poland, including in particular those referring to its enforceability, have not been formulated in a way that is sufficiently comprehensible to parents who are under the obligation of complying with them, irrespective of the fact that the language of the provisions of law should be clear and raise no interpretative doubts. In a democratic state the protection of public health against epidemic hazards justifies the implementation of legal solutions that restrict an individual’s freedom of self-determination, thus limiting the right of patients or their statutory representatives to grant or refuse consent for a medical intervention in the form of preventive vaccination – the purpose of this legal solution being to prioritize the safeguarding of state health security. It is vitally important to engage in a social dialogue with the purpose of convincing the public of the need for vaccination, its significance and its implementation for the better good. (shrink)

In Cieśliński (J Philos Logic 39:325–337, 2010), Cieśliński asked whether compositional truth theory with the additional axiom that all propositional tautologies are true is conservative over Peano Arithmetic. We provide a partial answer to this question, showing that if we additionally assume that truth predicate agrees with arithmetical truth on quantifier-free sentences, the resulting theory is as strong as $$\Delta _0$$ Δ 0 -induction for the compositional truth predicate, hence non-conservative. On the other hand, it can be shown with a (...) routine argument that the principle of quantifier-free correctness is itself conservative. (shrink)

The history of the research on peptic ulcer disease is characterized by a premature abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis, which subsequently had its comeback, leading to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori—the major cause of the disease. In this paper we examine the received view on this case, according to which the primary reason for the abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis in the mid-twentieth century was a large-scale study by a prominent gastroenterologist Palmer, which suggested no bacteria could be found in (...) the human stomach. To this end, we employ the method of digital textual analysis and study the literature on the etiology of PUD published in the decade prior to Palmer’s article. Our findings suggest that the bacterial hypothesis had already been abandoned before the publication of Palmer’s paper, which challenges the widely held view that his study played a crucial role in the development of this episode. In view of this result, we argue that the PUD case does not illustrate harmful effects of a high degree of information flow, as it has frequently been claimed in the literature on network epistemology. Moreover, we argue that alternative examples of harmful effects of a high degree of information flow may be hard to find in the history of science. (shrink)