Epistemicism associates vagueness with ignorance produced by semantic plasticity: the shiftiness of intensions in our language resulting from small changes in usage. The recent literature (Caie 2012; Magidor 2018; Yli-Vakkuri 2016) points to a missing piece in the epistemicist theory of vagueness, namely a clear account of the semantics of the definiteness operator Δ. The fundamentals of the epistemicist theory are well understood. However, the technical work of defining the definiteness operator has proven difficult. There are several desiderata that we (...) would like Δ to satisfy. For instance, we would like the epistemicist notion of ‘definiteness’ to interact well with modal operators and validate intuitive principles like ‘necessarily, if φ is definitely true, then φ is true’. Providing an account that would meet all such desiderata has eluded the epistemicists so far. In this paper, I present a novel version of a multidimensional model inspired by the work of Robert Stalnaker and David Kaplan. Using this model, I provide an account of epistemicist definiteness that meets our desiderata. (shrink)

The epistemicist theory aims to explain ignorance due to vagueness by semantic plasticity: the shiftiness of intensions across close possible worlds resulting from shiftiness in usage. This explanation is challenged by the Omniscient Speaker Puzzle (Sennet in Philos Stud 161(2):273–285, 2012). Suppose that an omniscient speaker, Barney, who knows all the facts about usage and how these facts determine the intensions of expressions, cooks up a scheme to stabilise the intension of a normally semantically plastic term like ‘rich’. It seems (...) that ‘rich’ would display all the phenomena associated with vagueness without being semantically plastic, thus making the epistemicist explanation of ignorance due to vagueness insufficient. In this paper, I present a few choice points for epistemicism that arise as a result of the puzzle. (shrink)

As opposed to the computer, the human being can intentionally mislead in many different ways, can behave chaotically, and whenever he has the motivation can choose also by improvisation, non‐consequent misleading, and spontaneous manners of reasoning and articulation. Human perception and the elaboration of the experience are existentially interest‐related, and distorted if found necessary. The arbitrariness is unlimited; human beings can initiate and produce absurd combinations, contextual failures and deceptive expressions, and do so also by intonation and body‐language. These are (...) the sources of social behaviour, of literature, arts, jurisprudence, politics, etc., all representing systems of meaning constructed by human beings, present in their ‘Lebenswelt’. Human beings are flexible, sensible of emotions and well‐trained to code and decode hidden fallacies, to produce wild associations, capricious‐temporary conclusions, tasks that the rigid computer cannot fulfil. They can choose incorrect and dysfunctional answers; the exactness of their reasoning can be logically invalid. The computer has only inner horizons; human beings have also outer ones, in which they are able to produce multidimensional relationships. They are not truth‐conditioned.The reduction of organic human thinking to the computer’s mechanisms can end up in humankind’s dehumanisation. (shrink)

As opposed to the computer, the human being can intentionally mislead in many different ways, can behave chaotically, and whenever he has the motivation can choose also by improvisation, non‐consequent misleading, and spontaneous manners of reasoning and articulation. Human perception and the elaboration of the experience are existentially interest‐related, and distorted if found necessary. The arbitrariness is unlimited; human beings can initiate and produce absurd combinations, contextual failures and deceptive expressions, and do so also by intonation and body‐language. These are (...) the sources of social behaviour, of literature, arts, jurisprudence, politics, etc., all representing systems of meaning constructed by human beings, present in their ‘Lebenswelt’. Human beings are flexible, sensible of emotions and well‐trained to code and decode hidden fallacies, to produce wild associations, capricious‐temporary conclusions, tasks that the rigid computer cannot fulfil. They can choose incorrect and dysfunctional answers; the exactness of their reasoning can be logically invalid. The computer has only inner horizons; human beings have also outer ones, in which they are able to produce multidimensional relationships. They are not truth‐conditioned.The reduction of organic human thinking to the computer’s mechanisms can end up in humankind’s dehumanisation. (shrink)

a This is an outline of a coherence theory of law. Its basic ideas are: reasonable support and weighing of reasons. All the rest is commentary.a (TM) These words at the beginning of the preface of this book perfectly indicate what On Law and Reason is about. It is a theory about the nature of the law which emphasises the role of reason in the law and which refuses to limit the role of reason to the application of deductive logic. (...) In 1989, when the first edition of On Law and Reason appeared, this book was ground breaking for several reasons. It provided a rationalistic theory of the law in the language of analytic philosophy and based on a thorough understanding of the results, including technical ones, of analytic philosophy. That was not an obvious combination at the time of the booka (TM)s first appearance and still is not. The result is an analytical rigor that is usually associated with positivist theories of the law, combined with a philosophical position that is not natural law in a strict sense, but which shares with it the emphasis on the role of reason in determining what the law is. If only for this rare combination, On Law and Reason still deserves careful study. On Law and Reason also foreshadowed and influenced a development in the field of Legal Logic that would take place in the nineties of the 20th century, namely the development of non-monotonic (a defeasiblea (TM)) logics for the analysis of legal reasoning. In the new Introduction to this second edition, this aspect is explored in some more detail. (shrink)

This paper looks closely at previously enunciated axioms that specifically include phenomenology as the sense of a self in a perceptual world. This, we suggest, is an appropriate way of doing science on a first-person phenomenon. The axioms break consciousness down into five key components: presence, imagination, attention, volition and emotions. The paper examines anew the mechanism of each and how they interact to give a single sensation. An abstract architecture, the Kernel Architecture, is introduced as a starting point for (...) building computational models. The thrust of the paper is to relate the axioms to the kernel architecture and indicate that this opens a way of discussing some first-person issues: tests for consciousness, animal consciousness and Higher Order Thought. (shrink)

Procrastination as putting off until tomorrow what one had intended to do today is well-known tendency in everyday life. In an attempt to understand the character of procrastination in different life-domains, a large body of research has been accumulated over the last decades. This article was aimed to evaluate a specific decisional procrastination of school-to-work transition that is treated as maturity postponement. Two studies are reported examining SWT procrastination defined as career indecision among Polish students graduating universities. In Study 1, (...) attitudinal and identity statuses were analyzed as correlates of career procrastination. A path analysis conducted for the model, which was aimed to explain the influence of career self-efficacy and occupational commitment on career indecision, revealed its very good fitness. Those two independent variables explain 10% of career indecision variance. Stepwise multiple regression analyses conducted to ascertain relationship of five identity statuses to procrastination measure showed that Commitment Making and Ruminative Exploration are strongest predictor variables. In study 2, the stepwise multiple regression analyses conducted to ascertain the independent relationship of each of Big Five personality factor revealed that Neuroticism and Extraversion accounts of the most of explained variance of school-to-work transition procrastination. (shrink)

Źródeł koncepcji genocentrycznej należy dopatrywać się w dynamicznym rozwoju XIX- i XX-wiecznej genetyki – zwłaszcza współczesnej syntezy ewolucyjnej oraz genetyki molekularnej. Za ideą tą stoi teza, iż w naukach biologicznych wyjaśnienia odwołujące się do czynników genetycznych są uprzywilejowane; przy tym istotnym założeniem idei genocentrycznej w ramach genetyki molekularnej jest to, że geny oraz kod genetyczny pełnią szczególną rolę w determinowaniu rozwoju organizmu. Chociaż stanowisko genocentryczne jest jednym z fundamentów współczesnej teorii ewolucji, to przez długi czas nie podejmowano na tym gruncie (...) problematyki biologii rozwoju. W związku z tym w ostatnich latach można dostrzec zwrot w stronę nurtu alternatywnego, wykazującego istotność uwzględnienia czynników poza-genetycznych w wyjaśnianiu zjawisk i procesów biologiczno-rozwojowych. Najistotniejsze w tym kontekście są argumenty i idee stojące za odrzuceniem specjalnej roli genów, zwłaszcza na gruncie ewolucyjnej biologii rozwoju; kontekst evo-devo wydaje się interesujący ze względu na ambicję integracji biologii rozwojowej i biologii ewolucyjnej. (shrink)

Aleksander Peczenik, Lund Introduction to the Proceedings of the 21st IVR World Congress General Information This volume opens the Proceedings of the 21st ...

The aim of this paper is to show the main thesis concerning the theory of cognition of the eminent neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert, as presented in his work “Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis”. On the one hand, Rickert finds out that thinking is fated to “clash with nothingness”, thus creating a temptation to reject all rigours and to yield to complete discretion. On the other hand, he attributes axiological status to nothingness which subjects thinking to a particular kind of “ought”. In his (...) view, the cognizing subject is faced with an axiological choice: either discretion or truth and argues that it is worth opting for truth. His argumentation could be an interesting point of reference for contemporary culture gradually moving away from the type of thinking rooted in objectively existing principles. (shrink)

The main stream of legal theory tends to incorporate unwritten principles into the law. Weighing of principles plays a great role in legal argumentation, inter alia in statutory interpretation. A weighing and balancing of principles and other prima facie reasons is a jump. The inference is not conclusive.To deal with defeasibility and weighing, a jurist needs both the belief-revision logic and the nonmonotonic logic. The systems of nonmonotonic logic included in the present volume provide logical tools enabling one to speak (...) precisely about various kinds of rules about rules, dealing with such things as applicability of rules, what is assumed by rules, priority between rules and the burden of proof. Nonmonotonic logic is an example of an extension of the domain of logic. But the more far-reaching the extension is, the greater problems it meets. It seems impossible to make logical reconstruction of the totality of legal argumentation. (shrink)

Wiaczesław Iwanow należy do głównych animatorów tzw. renesansu rosyjskiego. Razem z D. Mereżkowskim, W. Rozanowem i N. Bierdiajewem, a także w pewnej mierze z L. Szestowem, stworzyli oni specyficzny kult Fiodora Dostojewskiego. Ten kult nie ograniczał się do podziwu dla twórczości literackiej rosyjskiego pisarza, ale wyrażał się również w traktowaniu Dostojewskiego jako filozofa, teologa, a może nawet proroka, który dotknął wszystkich najważniejszych kwestii nie tylko rosyjskiej historii, ale także historii świata i to nawet w kontekście eschatologicznym. Jak to określił M. (...) Bierdiajew, Dostojewski „był prawdziwym filozofem, największym filozofem rosyjskim. My już od długiego czasu filozofujemy o rzeczach ostatecznych pod znakiem Dostojewskiego". W. Rozanow stwierdza natomiast, ze F. Dostojewski to „wszechświatowy publicysta o znaczeniu historycznym, którego zainteresowania wychodziły daleko poza codzienność, a w apelach swych zwracał się do wieków i narodów, będąc prorokiem zapatrzonym w wieczność". (shrink)

Wiaczesław Iwanow należy do głównych animatorów tzw. renesansu rosyjskiego. Razem z D. Mereżkowskim, W. Rozanowem i N. Bierdiajewem, a także w pewnej mierze z L. Szestowem, stworzyli oni specyficzny kult Fiodora Dostojewskiego. Ten kult nie ograniczał się do podziwu dla twórczości literackiej rosyjskiego pisarza, ale wyrażał się również w traktowaniu Dostojewskiego jako filozofa, teologa, a może nawet proroka, który dotknął wszystkich najważniejszych kwestii nie tylko rosyjskiej historii, ale także historii świata i to nawet w kontekście eschatologicznym. Jak to określił M. (...) Bierdiajew, Dostojewski „był prawdziwym filozofem, największym filozofem rosyjskim. My już od długiego czasu filozofujemy o rzeczach ostatecznych pod znakiem Dostojewskiego". W. Rozanow stwierdza natomiast, ze F. Dostojewski to „wszechświatowy publicysta o znaczeniu historycznym, którego zainteresowania wychodziły daleko poza codzienność, a w apelach swych zwracał się do wieków i narodów, będąc prorokiem zapatrzonym w wieczność". (shrink)

Artykuł analizuje Polesie F. A. Ossendowskiego w kontekście międzywojennego przekonania o egzotyczności tego regionu, które kumulowało się w metaforze „polskiej dżungli”. Pokazuje, w jaki sposób narracja reportażowa wchłaniała elementy ówczesnych dyskursów przyrodoznawczych, etnograficznych, militarnych oraz państwowych oraz na ile wpłynęły one na strategie reprezentacji literackiej. W jej ramach modernizacja Polesia była przedstawiona jako misja cywilizacyjna, ściśle sprzęgnięta z polonizacją mieszkańców tego obszaru.

It is proved that the following conditions are equivalent: (a) there exists a complete, atomless, σ-centered Boolean algebra, which does not contain any regular, atomless, countable subalgebra, (b) there exists a nowhere dense ultrafilter on ω. Therefore, the existence of such algebras is undecidable in ZFC. In "forcing language" condition (a) says that there exists a non-trivial σ-centered forcing not adding Cohen reals.