This research evaluates the production of three dimensional (3D) clouds for geospatial viewing programs such as Google Earth, NASA World Wind, and X3D Earth. This thesis took advantage of iso-standard X3D graphics and X3D Edit in conjunction with manually produced image textures to represent 3D clouds. While a 3D geospatial viewing might never completely characterize the current state of the atmosphere, a sufficiently realistic virtual 3D rendering can be created to present current sky coverage given adequate satellite and model data. (...) Various visualization demonstration results are presented that can be rendered and navigated in real time. Further research and development is needed to match a cloud typing model output with a particular method of 3D cloud production. Data-driven adaptation and production of cloud models for web-based delivery is an achievable capability given continued research and development. (shrink)

The article aims at addressing the question of representations of World War Two in Croatian and Serbian literature that were subversive in the sense that they queried the legend not simply by rejecting communism and affirming nationalism, but by emphasizing the uncertainty and sensibility of the human beings, a typical modern reaction to violence and, in general, modernist topoi. In this article I will focus on modernist novelistic representations of the 1960s in which the uncertainty and instability of collective warrants (...) are foregrounded. As a result a subversive meaning is produced which contradicts not only communism and revolution but more generally war as such, including the universal features of war such as confronting loneliness, love as an expression of an individual rather than a collective sense of existence, and the impossibility of a valid representation of past events. (shrink)

A pervasive aspect of human communication and sociality is argumentation: the practice of making and criticizing reasons in the context of doubt and disagreement. Argumentation underpins and shapes the decision-making, problem-solving, and conflict management which are fundamental to human relationships. However, argumentation is predominantly conceptualized as two parties arguing pro and con positions with each other in one place. This dyadic bias undermines the capacity to engage argumentation in complex communication in contemporary, digital society. This book offers an ambitious alternative (...) course of inquiry for the analysis, evaluation, and design of argumentation as polylogue: various actors arguing over many positions across multiple places. Taking up key aspects of the twentieth-century revival of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, the polylogue framework engages a wider range of discourses, messages, interactions, technologies, and institutions necessary for adequately engaging the contemporary entanglement of argumentation and complex communication in human activities. (shrink)

In this article I scrutinise a crucial tension in understanding the debate over shale gas production in Europe. On the one hand, analyses predominantly grasp the debate in terms of pro-and-con dialectics, as if the pro-shale gas camp faced the anti-shale gas camp in a dyadic clash of opposing voices. On the other hand, it is commonly recognised that this debate is driven by multi-party and multi-position argumentative dynamics. In this broader context, I focus on one pivotal contribution to the (...) debate – Gazprom’s press release from October 2013 outlining Russia’s energy giant’s strategy of dealing with unconventional gas production. I employ concepts and methods of argumentative discourse analysis to contend that an arguer to a multi-party debate – argumentative polylogue – faces a number of constraints and opportunities that cannot be adequately grasped in terms of dyadic pro-and-con dialectics. The analysis reveals how Gazprom needs to simultaneously design its discourse to address a number of other parties who might also disagree among themselves: from Greenpeace to European Union governments to shale gas companies. I show why and how a stakeholder analysis used in organisational communication might lead to a better understanding of this form of multi-party public argumentation. (shrink)

The predictive processing account of action, cognition, and perception is one of the most influential approaches to unifying research in cognitive science. However, its promises of grand unification will remain unfulfilled unless the account becomes theoretically robust. In this paper, we focus on empirical commitments of PP, since they are necessary both for its theoretical status to be established and for explanations of individual phenomena to be falsifiable. First, we argue that PP is a varied research tradition, which may employ (...) various kinds of scientific representations, differing in the scope of empirical commitments they entail. Two major perspectives on PP qua cognitive theory may then be distinguished: generalized vs. hierarchical. The first one fails to provide empirical detail, and the latter constrains possible physical implementations. However, we show that even hierarchical PP is insufficiently restrictive to disallow incorrect models and may be adjusted to explain any neurocognitive phenomenon–including non-existent or impossible ones–through flexible adjustments. This renders PP a universal modeling tool with an unrestricted number of degrees of freedom. Therefore, in contrast with declarations of its proponents, it should not be understood as a unifying theoretical perspective, but as a computational framework, possibly informing further theory development in cognitive science. (shrink)

Application of either the harm principle or the best interest standard to medical decision making conflicts with some types of pediatric research that pose elevated risk without the reasonable prob...

Our new journal Philosophies is devoted to the search for a synthesis of philosophical and scientific inquiry. It promotes philosophical work derived from the experience of diverse scientific disciplines. [...].

The claim defended in the paper is that the mechanistic account of explanation can easily embrace idealization in big-scale brain simulations, and that only causally relevant detail should be present in explanatory models. The claim is illustrated with two methodologically different models: Blue Brain, used for particular simulations of the cortical column in hybrid models, and Eliasmith’s SPAUN model that is both biologically realistic and able to explain eight different tasks. By drawing on the mechanistic theory of computational explanation, I (...) argue that large-scale simulations require that the explanandum phenomenon is identified; otherwise, the explanatory value of such explanations is difficult to establish, and testing the model empirically by comparing its behavior with the explanandum remains practically impossible. The completeness of the explanation, and hence of the explanatory value of the explanatory model, is to be assessed vis-à-vis the explanandum phenomenon, which is not to be conflated with raw observational data and may be idealized. I argue that idealizations, which include building models of a single phenomenon displayed by multi-functional mechanisms, lumping together multiple factors in a single causal variable, simplifying the causal structure of the mechanisms, and multi-model integration, are indispensable for complex systems such as brains; otherwise, the model may be as complex as the explanandum phenomenon, which would make it prone to so-called Bonini paradox. I conclude by enumerating dimensions of empirical validation of explanatory models according to new mechanism, which are given in a form of a “checklist” for a modeler. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present a general mechanistic framework for analyzing causal representational claims, and offer a way to distinguish genuinely representational explanations from those that invoke representations for honorific purposes. It is usually agreed that rats are capable of navigation because they maintain a cognitive map of their environment. Exactly how and why their neural states give rise to mental representations is a matter of an ongoing debate. I will show that anticipatory mechanisms involved in rats’ (...) evaluation of possible routes give rise to satisfaction conditions of contents, and this is why they are representationally relevant for explaining and predicting rats’ behavior. I argue that a naturalistic account of satisfaction conditions of contents answers the most important objections of antirepresentationalists. (shrink)

This paper addresses the following question: Can one and the same utterance token, in one unique speech situation, intentionally and conventionally perform a plurality of illocutionary acts? While some of the recent literature has considered such a possibility Perspectives on pragmatics and philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp 227–244, 2013; Johnson in Synthese 196:1151–1165, 2019), I build a case for it by drawing attention to common conversational complexities unrecognized in speech acts analysis. Traditional speech act theory treats communication as: a dyadic exchange (...) between a Speaker and a Hearer who trade illocutionary acts endowed with one and only one primary force. I first challenge assumption by discussing two contexts where plural illocutionary forces are performed in dyadic discussions: dilemmatic deliberations and strategic ambiguity. Further, I challenge assumption by analyzing poly-adic discussions, where a speaker can target various participants with different illocutionary acts performed via the same utterance. Together, these analyses defend illocutionary pluralism as a significant but overlooked fact about communication. I conclude by showing how some phenomena recently analyzed in speech act theory—back-door speech acts New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 144–164, 2018) and dog-whistles New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 360–383, 2018)—implicitly presuppose illocutionary pluralism without recognizing it. (shrink)

In the book, I argue that the mind can be explained computationally because it is itself computational—whether it engages in mental arithmetic, parses natural language, or processes the auditory signals that allow us to experience music. All these capacities arise from complex information-processing operations of the mind. By analyzing the state of the art in cognitive science, I develop an account of computational explanation used to explain the capacities in question.

The discussion around dignity in nursing philosophy has been underway for many years. The literature still lacks philosophical arguments that would justify the thesis that all people have dignity. Scholars who defend dignity as an intrinsic value most often refer to Kant. However, Kant does not seem to be the most suitable candidate to defend the thesis that all human beings possess dignity. In this paper, I attempt to show that Aristotle's and Aquinas's views can help justify this thesis. To (...) this end, I distinguish between actual dignity, potential dignity, and existential dignity. I state that all human beings have existential dignity or potential dignity. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the (...) study of “mindreading” and debates on emotions. We claim that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals towards the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences. (shrink)

The paper gives a survey of known results related to computational devices (finite and push–down automata) recognizing monadic generalized quantifiers in finite models. Some of these results are simple reinterpretations of descriptive—feasible correspondence theorems from finite–model theory. Additionally a new result characterizing monadic quantifiers recognized by push down automata is proven.

The article describes Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec's perspective on four classic philosophical images of man and the resulting theoretical and practical implications for the nursing profession. The first three images, namely man as a set of elements, man as a soul imprisoned in the body and man as a rational animal, are regarded by Krąpiec as reductionist anthropologies and are thus inadequate for nursing. The first image reduces man to a biological element. The second one reduces man to a soul and (...) treats a body as something an obstacle in personal development. The third image absolutizes reason in man. While the body is not rejected in this image, it is viewed as an indifferent mass. The last image, which regards man as a person, is an adequate image for nursing. The exceptional character of man emphasized in this image is determined by the following personal qualities: the ability for cognition, freedom, love, religiousness, dignity, subjectivity to law and completeness. These characteristics reveal the specificity of personal being in both the body and the spirit. By viewing man as a person, a nurse discovers a wide range of possibilities of providing effective help to the patient. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose foundations for a formal model of representation and numerical evaluation of a possibly broad class of arguments, including those that occur in natural discourse. Since one of the most characteristic features of everyday argumentation is the occurrence of convergent reasoning, special attention should be paid to the operation ⊕, which allows us to calculate the logical force of convergent arguments with an accuracy not offered by other approaches.

Publication date: 30 November 2016 Source: Author: Marcin Böhm The Empire of Nicaea was a successor of the Byzantium shattered in 1204. In the newly established state marine traditions of Byzantines, remain alive. The best testimony to this, are the evidence contained in the chronicle of Georgios Akropolites, devoted to activities of the rulers of Nicaea, aimed to build their own naval forces. In this paper I'll also try to answer, where was beating the heart of the Nicean shipbuilding (...) industry and how large was the navy of this state. This is important from point of view of the maritime history, because of the fleet of the Empire of Nicaea, filled the gap created after the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, which was the local naval power in previous centuries. Akropolites give us a clear and direct answer to a question, where we should search for a center of Nicaean shipbuilding industry. Georgios Akropolites suggest us, that was in two towns, Holkos and Smyrna. The above-mentioned fleet consisted of the few squadrons, each counting 5-6 ships. We can only guess that a fleet of the John III, could count about 50 warships, whose quality was worse to that belonging to the Venetians. We must say that the fleet of the Empire of Nicaea, which we see in the chronicle of Akropolites, was the force, that lent itself to the support of ground forces. And in this role worked well. The situation was different when it comes to clashing with the Venetians, with the experienced crews of their ships, who surpassed Nicaean in this matter. Even with the advantage of numbers, Nicaean was unable to overcome at the sea, the citizens of the Republic of St. Mark. The plan to build their own naval forces, which was taken by the emperors of Nicaea, was a good direction. (shrink)

Résumé L’article presente les changements qui se sont manifestes dans la recherche polonaise, essentiellement en litterature et histoire des Lumieres, entre 1945 et 1990. L’accent est mis sur l’impact du contexte politique sur la recherche. Les annees 1945-1956 ont ete marquees par de fortes contraintes ideologiques car le regime communiste imposait aux chercheurs une vision simplifiee des Lumieres censee repondre aux besoins de ses plans. Apres l’epoque stalinienne, la pression ideologique et institutionnelle s’est progressivement reduite, ouvrant la voie a davantage (...) de liberte de recherche et d’interpretation des Lumieres. Si certains episodes historiques continuaient a faire l’objet de debats publics, la vision des Lumieres produite par les travaux s’effectuait desormais sans ingerence directe du pouvoir. (shrink)

M. Resnik (2019) suggests a new version of structuralism which he calls non-ontological structuralism. In the present short article I discuss this view-point in the context of the Frege-Hilbert controversy about meaning of primitive notions in deductive theory, with special regard to the original views of K. Ajdukiewicz, Hilbert’s student. Following the proposed differentiations, I introduce a new type of structuralism which I call hypothetical structuralism, close to Resnik’s non-ontological structuralism.

Objectives: The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between a physician’s subjective mortality prediction and the level of confidence with which that mortality prediction is made.Design and participants: The study is a prospective cohort of patients less than 18 years of age admitted to a tertiary Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at a University Children’s Hospital with a minimum length of ICU stay of 10 h. Paediatric ICU attending physicians and fellows provided mortality risk predictions and the level (...) of confidence associated with these predictions on consecutive patients at the time of multidisciplinary rounds within 24 hours of admission to the paediatric ICU. Median confidence levels were compared across different ranges of mortality risk predictions.Results: Data were collected on 642 of 713 eligible patients . Mortality predictions greater than 5% and less than 95% were made with significantly less confidence than those predictions 95%. Experience was associated with greater confidence in prognostication.Conclusions: We conclude that a physician’s subjective mortality prediction may be dependent on the level of confidence in the prognosis; that is, a physician less confident in his or her prognosis is more likely to state an intermediate survival prediction. Measuring the level of confidence associated with mortality risk predictions may therefore be important because different levels of confidence may translate into differences in a physician’s therapeutic plans and their assessment of the patient’s future. (shrink)

The subject of the article is the question of the nature of heavenly bodies in St Thomas Aquinas\' approach. The Dominican thinker, using Aristotle\'s cosmology, tries to present his understanding of the Stagirite\'s theory concerning natural indestructibility of heavenly bodies, which he treats as relatively perfect beings built of ether and indestructible in the world of nature, although they are contingent and created by God. The issue proves the Angelic Doctor\'s independence and self-reliance; studying the universe he not only used (...) Aristotle\'s cosmology but he verified it with theological knowledge basing his considerations on the ancient and medieval commentators of the Greek philosopher. In St Thomas\' studies his conviction about relative formal and material perfection of metaphysical components of heavenly bodies is of significant importance. The conception of indestructibility of heavenly bodies also presents methodological assumptions of the metaphysics developed by the Dominican thinker who made the rules of Aristotle\'s philosophy relative. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the secrecy of politics in the context of sources and mechanisms of the legitimization of state power. The author formulates a thesis according to which the category of secrecy is inapplicable and inadequate beyond the form of power that is based on broad, purposive and rational legitimacy. Secret politics – which is in principle heteronomous and unjustifiable on the basis of the broadly understood idea of representation – is a technique that allows the power to (...) mediate between the subjective motivations of individuals and social groups and the objective good of a political community. This, in turn, exposes the multifaceted contradiction between real political subjectivity and autonomy and the ‘objective’ metaphysical horizon that lies at the foundations of this subjectivity. (shrink)

Using known facts we give a simple characterization of the distributivity of lattices of finite length.

In this paper, we closely examine the various ways in which a multi-party argumentative discussion—argumentative polylogue—can be analyzed in a dialectical framework. Our chief concern is that while multi-party and multi-position discussions are characteristic of a large class of argumentative activities, dialectical approaches would analyze and evaluate them in terms of dyadic exchanges between two parties: pro and con. Using as an example an academic committee arguing about the researcher of the year as well as other cases from argumentation literature, (...) we scrutinize the advantages and pitfalls of applying a dialectical framework to polylogue analysis and evaluation. We recognize two basic dialectical methods: interpreting polylogues as exchanges between two main camps and splitting polylogues into a multitude of dual encounters. On the basis of this critical inquiry, we lay out an argument expressing the need for an improved polylogical model and propose its basic elements. (shrink)

We consider an example of a sentence which according to Hintikka's claim essentially requires for its logical form a Henkin quantifier. We show that if Hintikka is right then recognizing the truth value of the sentence in finite models is an NP-complete problem. We discuss also possible conclusions from this observation.

Despite the continuous emphasis on globalization, we witness increasing divisions and divisiveness in all domains of human activities. One of the reasons, if not the main one, is the intellectual fragmentation of humanity, compared in the title to the failed attempt at building the Biblical Tower of Babel. The attempts to reintegrate worldview, fragmented by the specialization of education and expected to be achieved through reforms in curricula at all levels of education, were based on the assumption that the design (...) of a curriculum should focus on the wide distribution of subjects of study, as if the distribution was the goal. The key point is not the distribution of themes, but the development of skills in the integration of knowledge. The quantitative assessment of the width of knowledge by the number of disciplines is of secondary importance. We cannot expect the miracle that students without any intellectual tools developed for this purpose would perform the job of integration, which their teachers do not promote or demonstrate, and which they cannot achieve for themselves. There are many other reasons for the increasing interest in making inquiries interdisciplinary, but there is little progress in the methodology of the integration of knowledge. This paper is a study of the transition from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity, and further, to transdisciplinarity, with some suggestions regarding the use of methodological tools of structuralism and the choice of a conceptual framework. (shrink)

Kazimierz Twardowski was renowned as an outstanding philosopher, teacher, and organizer of academic life. No less famous was his style of work, depicted in many recollections of his students. In the paper, I present three aspects of good mental work: a) stoic inspiration for Kazimierz Twardowski’s style of work, b) the place of the techniques of mental work in the program of pragmatic logic according to the views of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Tadeusz Kotarbiński, and c) selected contemporary approaches consistent with (...) the direction provided by the Lvov-Warsaw School. By exploring a new perspective in the study of good mental work by linking it to the ancient philosophy of life as well as to the most recent developments in the theory of good mental work, the paper reveals unexplored insights into the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School, demonstrating its significance, depth, and relevance to modern times. (shrink)

The paper presents a formalization of Henryk Elzenberg’s system of axiology, which features the notions of value, ought, and obligation. The formalization I propose is constructed in the language of sentential modal logic. However, as Elzenberg was well aware, his system of axiology had several difficulties. To avoid them, I propose a modification of the system’s foundations and show that it preserves the formal properties of ought and obligation postulated by Elzenberg. To show this, I express in the proposed formal (...) language a certain theory of the logic of preference that I describe from the syntactical as well as the semantical point of view. (shrink)

Zajęcia prowadzone przez Profesora Pelca niewątpliwie wpisywały się w tak szeroko zarysowaną koncepcję logiki ogólnej. Starał się on być nauczycielem myślenia i dobrej roboty – nie tylko w filozofii, lecz w humanistyce i cel ten osiągał, nie tylko poprzez dobór tematów, wysokie wymagania, różnorodne sposoby sprawdzania wiedzy słuchaczy, lecz także – przez przykład. Wielu rzeczy nie przekazywał przez wykład czy lektury, lecz bezpośrednio kierując wysił- kami podopiecznych – zwłaszcza tymi związanymi z przygotowaniem obligatoryjnych prac rocznych. Pouczający był sam proces – (...) konsultowanie kolejnych etapów prac nad esejem – ale także oczekiwania, np. że praca będzie opatrzona abstraktem i słowami kluczowymi w jednym z języków kongresowych. Profesor Pelc dał się poznać i pozostaje w pamięci jako wybitny naukowiec, twórca współczesnej semiotyki polskiej, organizator i dydaktyk. W tym artykule starałem się pokazać, że zwłaszcza ta ostatnia rola stawia go w jednym rzędzie z przedstawicielami SLW, gdyż wspólna im była troska o wykształcenie kultury logicznej słuchaczy, wierność postulatom jasności i krytycyzmu, preferencja dla logiki w szerokim sensie nieograniczającej się jedynie do logiki formalnej, lecz dziedziny prawdziwie interdyscyplinarnej, obejmującej m.in. elementy epistemologii, psychologii, prakseologii – i pełniącej rolę współczesnego trivium. Na koniec chciałbym wyrazić głębokie przekonanie, że koncepcja logiki ogólnej – szkolnej, pedagogicznej, pragmatycznej – zasługuje, by odkryć ją na nowo, zrekonstruować ją i spisać jej historię, a co ważniejsze – by twórczo ją rozwijać. (shrink)

A Deontic Logic for Normative Dilemmas: Standard deontic logic does not tolerate normative conflicts. If we assume that one ought to do A and ought to do B, but cannot do them both, we get a contradiction within deontic logic. Philosophers who deny that there could be genuine moral dilemmas treat this fact as the proof that dilemmas are logically impossible. At the same time, the advocates of the possibility of moral dilemmas propose to reject or restrict standard deontic principles. (...) What consequences does it have for the resulting logic? Some of them are too strong because they contain the theorem of normative triviality or “deontic explosion,” which says that if there is any case of normative conflict, then everything is obligatory. On the other hand, some of them are too weak, since they are not able to validate more important deontic inferences especially the Smith Argument. Lou Goble introduces three criteria of adequacy that any deontic logic should meet if it is to accommodate normative conflicts successfully. First, I present these conditions and then I introduce a new logic of ought that fully meets all of them. (shrink)

Problem relacji między religią i nauką, rozumiany jako relacja między doktryną chrześcijańską i naukami przyrodniczymi, jest dzisiaj powszechnie znany i dyskutowany. Artykuł podejmuje bardzo praktyczne zagadnienie, jakim jest formowanie oraz rewidowanie światopoglądu chrześcijańskiego w kontekście spotkania się w człowieku religijnym dwóch wielkich idei: stworzenia i ewolucji. Wychodząc od zaproponowanej definicji światopoglądu, w artykule zostanie ukazany fundamentalny rys światopoglądu chrześcijańskiego oraz jego istotne cechy. Dopiero w takim świetle próbuje się przedstawić propozycję interpretacji spotkania i wzajemnego oddziaływania idei stworzenia i ewolucji. Zaproponowana (...) relacja dialogu jest drogą do zdobywania dojrzałej postawy względem rzeczywistości zarówno dla człowieka religijnego, jak i dla ludzi uprawiających nauki przyrodnicze. Jednocześnie jest to propozycja, która, prowadząc do wewnętrznej integracji człowieka, może stać się odpowiedzią na niektóre współczesne kryzysy kultury. (shrink)