Street festivals such as The Night of Culture (Noc Kultury) are aimed at fostering cultural participation. The growing popularity of such festivals raises the question, whether The Night of Culture creates an environment facilitating knowledge popularization. The paper explains that The Night of Culture creates an experience of engagement and immersion. The experience of immersion and engagement is grounded in blurring the clear distinction between representational objects and elements of so-called ordinary reality. Since the art installations at The Night of (...) Culture are often designed to be treated as an extension of the physical space in which the participant is located, from the participant’s perspective they lose the standard representational function. The paper explains that blurring the distinction between representation and reality impose serious limitation on treating the installations at The Night of Culture as the objects with a cognitive function. (shrink)

The problem of the Toronto School’s theoretical identity emerges from the recognition that the most influential figures of this orientation do not agree regarding the general idea of the School as a coherent theoretical trend. Moreover, the idea of “medium” central to this orientation is fundamentally ambiguous. Therefore the aim of the paper is to consider the identity of the Toronto School by referring to the so called materialistic interpretation of the media. The paper supports the thesis that the minimal (...) definition of communication technologies in terms of physical artifacts comprises the conceptual core of the Toronto School’s identity. The failure to consider the minimalistic definition of media results in the general blurring of the Toronto School’s theoretical identity. (shrink)

The claim that the invention of literacy has cognitive consequences, so-called Literacy Theory, is subject to the criticism that it implies a form of technological determinism. This criticism, however, assumes an outdated Cartesian model of mind, a mind independent of the body and the external world. Such an internalistic framework leaves unexplored the cognitive consequences of the material dimension of writing. Therefore, in order to dismiss the accusations of technological determinism, the Cartesian model of mind and cognition needs to be (...) reconsidered. The paper demonstrates how the framework of situated cognition helps to account for the cognitive consequences of written artifacts themselves. Material characteristics of written vehicles such as spatial and temporal stability of the content, fixity of information with reference to page boundaries, lightness and small size of paper sheets, and spatial layout of documents make up the most relevant material factors enabling the distribution of cognitive work. (shrink)

The problem of the Toronto School’s theoretical identity emerges from the recognition that the most influential figures of this orientation do not agree regarding the general idea of the School as a coherent theoretical trend. Moreover, the idea of “medium” central to this orientation is fundamentally ambiguous. Therefore the aim of the paper is to consider the identity of the Toronto School by referring to the so called materialistic interpretation of the media. The paper supports the thesis that the minimal (...) definition of communication technologies in terms of physical artifacts comprises the conceptual core of the Toronto School’s identity. The failure to consider the minimalistic definition of media results in the general blurring of the Toronto School’s theoretical identity. (shrink)

The problem of the Toronto School’s theoretical identity emerges from the recognition that the most influential figures of this orientation do not agree regarding the general idea of the School as a coherent theoretical trend. Moreover, the idea of “medium” central to this orientation is fundamentally ambiguous. Therefore the aim of the paper is to consider the identity of the Toronto School by referring to the so called materialistic interpretation of the media. The paper supports the thesis that the minimal (...) definition of communication technologies in terms of physical artifacts comprises the conceptual core of the Toronto School’s identity. The failure to consider the minimalistic definition of media results in the general blurring of the Toronto School’s theoretical identity. (shrink)

Interview with Robert K. Logan by Marcin Trybulec.

The study poses the question about the consequences of incommensurability for the problem of linguistic relativity. One can reasonably argue that if two languages are incommensurable, contradiction cannot exist between the judgments formulated inside them. Therefore it is possible to compile linguistic worldviews of two incommensurable languages into one coherent cognitive perspective. The latter view is called into question; hence the article examines the problem of relation between linguistically determined incommensurable worldviews. In order to analyze the issue there are distinguished (...) three dimensions of incommensurability: linguistic incommensurability, incommensurability of experience and ontological incommensurability. Conclusion excludes possibility of compilation of two ontologically incommensurable into one coherent cognitive perspective. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to distinguish and explain some imprecise expressions indicated by prof. Anna Jedynak. Moreover the paper is focused on the fundamental disagreement between the author and his critic, which is the meaning of the term "incommensurability".