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)

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)

In this article, for the first time, the work of Professor E. K. Virsaladze in class on the "Symphonic Etudes" Op. 13 by R. Schumann was reviewed and a small performance analysis of her performance in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory was given. The concert took place on April 16, 2010, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of R. Schumann. The author, being a student of her class and an assistant trainee, made notes of the teacher's wishes (...) in the work on the "Symphonic Etudes" by the romantic composer R. Schumann. The suggestions and recommendations expressed by E. K. Virsaladze on "Symphonic Sketches" are presented for the first time and have great practical and artistic value. The author discusses in detail the work on each etude. In his work, the professor pays attention to all means of musical expression: rhythm, strokes, dynamics… Advises a certain fingering, pedal… Such work of a teacher should undoubtedly contribute to obtaining certain performing skills from students for their further development. As an example, the article examines Virsaladze's performance of "Symphonic Etudes" in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in a concert dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the birth of R. Schumann. The article is recommended for students of music universities, colleges, colleges preparing for a concert performance of Schumann's works, in particular, "Symphonic Etudes" Op. 13. (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)

The goal of this article is to show that instrumental rationality and utility that have been used in economics for many years does not work well. What is presented in the article is how significant the influence of utilitarianism has been on economics and why the economists get rid of humans’ goals and motivations. It is shown in the article that the human who decides in present is absolutely different from the human who decides over time. Many economists neglected this (...) problem because they wanted to have an effective and simple model. Becker’s economic method is presented as a dead end to which economics has been brought to. It is impossible to connect different selves of one human being by using the utility measure. The works of Schelling and J.S. Mill are used to explain this impossibility. The conclusion of this article is that instrumental rationality and utility have affected economics significantly. But, this simplified view on human nature is no longer valid. Hence, economics needs to think not only about the means but also about the human goals. Economics needs to rebuff relativism and show people how to achieve well-being. If we want to help people with their self-governance, we will have to choose reason over emotions. (shrink)

Christopher Arciszewski (1592–1656), Arian mercenary and man of many facets, conducted a journal in which, it is suspected, he described military campaigns, the state of the colony and other interesting phenomena he was able to observe during his time of service in Brazil. In 1641, Gerard Vossius was completing his magnum opus De theologia. In Chapter 8 of the first volume, Vossius discusses the “cult of the demon” among various peoples. As an example the Netherlander erudite provides a colorful description (...) of such a cult among the Brazilian Tapuya tribe. Since the author never traveled to Brazil, he makes use of the observations of Christopher Arciszewski. How does an Arian, brought up in an atmosphere of intense pluralism and far-reaching tolerance towards other belief systems (or at least imbued with a strong relativism), react when he encounters, first-hand, a culture utterly different, and completely alien to him? His presentation of a hierarchically constructed morality existent among various cannibalistic tribes is, in a sense, an intellectual breakthrough. Instead of treating the nativescollectively as one homogenous culture, as simply “savages”, Arciszewski distinguishes between various cultural units, and treats them individually. The nobleman attempts to convey their own views of morality not on the basis of European ethical systems, but on the local ones in place. In his day, such ideas were nearly unthinkable for most educated Europeans. Cannibalism of any kind was perceived as godless behavior, a sort of devilry, which would eventually be abolished with coming of the “light of Christianity” to the New World and the inevitable Europeanization of the natives. The reader can marvel at the extent to which Arciszewski is willing go in his relativism, to the point of sympathizing with the Tapuya. He allows them to explain to the reader the functioning of theirendo-cannibalistic culture. Arciszewski adds to the rationalization of cannibalism a detailed description of the death-rite among the Tapuya, presenting these ceremonial customs in accordance with their own beliefs, as something potentially interesting for humanistic intellectuals back in the Old World. Vossius’ book also discusses the question of the tribe’s spiritual beliefs: their conceptions of good and evil, deities, etc. The reader once again witnesses Arciszewski’s readiness to accept beliefs and deities completely unknown to European religion. The author does not prima facie discount the possibility that the “universal laws” operating in the Old World have no place in the Brazilian wilderness. His philosophical outlook, demonstrated by his rationalization of what had before been considered “magical” or “irrational”, is surely a foreshadowing of the rationalism of Enlightenment, whose modes of thinking constitute the core-foundation for alllater philosophical and scientific inquiry. Arciszewski, as an Arian brother par excellence, essentially operated with such conceptual tools as relativism, toleration and universalism, and his intellectual arsenal did not altogether differ from our own. As such, Arciszewski, and Europeans like him, helped free the Western worldview of its mediaeval philosophically limited conceptions of the cosmos, and propelled it in new directions of inquiry. This led eventually to a decided shifting of the European worldview away from superstition towards reason: the most definitively crucial moment in European intellectual history. (shrink)

Christopher Arciszewski, Arian mercenary and man of many facets, conducted a journal in which, it is suspected, he described military campaigns, the state of the colony and other interesting phenomena he was able to observe during his time of service in Brazil. In 1641, Gerard Vossius was completing his magnum opus De theologia. In Chapter 8 of the first volume, Vossius discusses the “cult of the demon” among various peoples. As an example the Netherlander erudite provides a colorful description of (...) such a cult among the Brazilian Tapuya tribe. Since the author never traveled to Brazil, he makes use of the observations of Christopher Arciszewski. How does an Arian, brought up in an atmosphere of intense pluralism and far-reaching tolerance towards other belief systems, react when he encounters, first-hand, a culture utterly different, and completely alien to him? His presentation of a hierarchically constructed morality existent among various cannibalistic tribes is, in a sense, an intellectual breakthrough. Instead of treating the nativescollectively as one homogenous culture, as simply “savages”, Arciszewski distinguishes between various cultural units, and treats them individually. The nobleman attempts to convey their own views of morality not on the basis of European ethical systems, but on the local ones in place. In his day, such ideas were nearly unthinkable for most educated Europeans. Cannibalism of any kind was perceived as godless behavior, a sort of devilry, which would eventually be abolished with coming of the “light of Christianity” to the New World and the inevitable Europeanization of the natives. The reader can marvel at the extent to which Arciszewski is willing go in his relativism, to the point of sympathizing with the Tapuya. He allows them to explain to the reader the functioning of theirendo-cannibalistic culture. Arciszewski adds to the rationalization of cannibalism a detailed description of the death-rite among the Tapuya, presenting these ceremonial customs in accordance with their own beliefs, as something potentially interesting for humanistic intellectuals back in the Old World. Vossius’ book also discusses the question of the tribe’s spiritual beliefs: their conceptions of good and evil, deities, etc. The reader once again witnesses Arciszewski’s readiness to accept beliefs and deities completely unknown to European religion. The author does not prima facie discount the possibility that the “universal laws” operating in the Old World have no place in the Brazilian wilderness. His philosophical outlook, demonstrated by his rationalization of what had before been considered “magical” or “irrational”, is surely a foreshadowing of the rationalism of Enlightenment, whose modes of thinking constitute the core-foundation for alllater philosophical and scientific inquiry. Arciszewski, as an Arian brother par excellence, essentially operated with such conceptual tools as relativism, toleration and universalism, and his intellectual arsenal did not altogether differ from our own. As such, Arciszewski, and Europeans like him, helped free the Western worldview of its mediaeval philosophically limited conceptions of the cosmos, and propelled it in new directions of inquiry. This led eventually to a decided shifting of the European worldview away from superstition towards reason: the most definitively crucial moment in European intellectual history. (shrink)

The books’ goal is to answer the question: Do the weaknesses of value-free economics imply the need for a paradigm shift? The author synthesizes criticisms from different perspectives (descriptive and methodological). Special attention is paid to choices over time, because in this area value-free economics has the most problems. In that context, the enriched concept of multiple self is proposed and investigated. However, it is not enough to present the criticisms towards value-free economics. For scientists, a bad paradigm is better (...) than no paradigm. Therefore, the author considers whether value-based economics with normative approaches such as economics of happiness, capability approach, libertarian paternalism, and the concept of multiple self can be the alternative paradigm for value-free economics. This book is essential reading to everyone interested in the current state of economics as a discipline. (shrink)

An analogue of Mathias forcing is studied in connection of free Boolean algebras and nowhere dense ultrafilters. Some applications to rigid Boolean algebras are given.

The goal of the article is to substantiate that despite the criticism the paradigm in economics will not change because of the axiomatic assumptions of value-free economics. How these assumptions work is demonstrated on the example of Gary Becker’s economic approach which is analyzed from the perspective of scientific research programme. The author indicates hard core of economic approach and the protective belt which makes hard core immune from any criticism. This immunity leads economists to believe that they are objective (...) scientists and, consequently, it results in epistemological hubris. Due to its tautological nature, economic approach is considered to be a degenerative programme. This conclusion is extended on value-free economics. In spite of these problems, many economists still believe in positive economics and they dismiss normative approaches. It has a negative influence on people. The conclusion of the article is that thanks to axiomatic assumptions economists do not have objective and ironclad methodology and they should accept normative values in their research. (shrink)