Alan Robinson This set of essays pays tribute to Bob Kowalski on his 60th birthday, an anniversary which gives his friends and colleagues an excuse to celebrate his career as an original thinker, a charismatic communicator, and a forceful intellectual leader. The logic programming community hereby and herein conveys its respect and thanks to him for his pivotal role in creating and fostering the conceptual paradigm which is its raison d’Œtre. The diversity of interests covered here reflects the variety (...) of Bob’s concerns. Read on. It is an intellectual feast. Before you begin, permit me to send him a brief personal, but public, message: Bob, how right you were, and how wrong I was. I should explain. When Bob arrived in Edinburgh in 1967 resolution was as yet fairly new, having taken several years to become at all widely known. Research groups to investigate various aspects of resolution sprang up at several institutions, the one organized by Bernard Meltzer at Edinburgh University being among the first. For the half-dozen years that Bob was a leading member of Bernard’s group, I was a frequent visitor to it, and I saw a lot of him. We had many discussions about logic, computation, and language. (shrink)

In the following paper we propose a model-theoretical way of comparing the “strength” of various truth theories which are conservative over $$ PA $$. Let $${\mathfrak {Th}}$$ denote the class of models of $$ PA $$ which admit an expansion to a model of theory $${ Th}$$. We show (combining some well known results and original ideas) that $$\begin{aligned} {{\mathfrak {PA}}}\supset {\mathfrak {TB}}\supset {{\mathfrak {RS}}}\supset {\mathfrak {UTB}}\supseteq \mathfrak {CT^-}, \end{aligned}$$ where $${\mathfrak {PA}}$$ denotes simply the class of all models of (...) $$ PA $$ and $${\mathfrak {RS}}$$ denotes the class of recursively saturated models of $$ PA $$. Our main original result is that every model of $$ PA $$ which admits an expansion to a model of $$ CT ^-$$, admits also an expansion to a model of $$ UTB $$. Moreover, as a corollary to one of the results (brought to us by Carlo Nicolai) we conclude that $$ UTB $$ is not relatively interpretable in $$ TB $$, thus answering the question from Fujimoto (Bull Symb Log 16:305–344, 2010). (shrink)

In this essay, we defend the design of the Salk polio vaccine trial and try to put some limits on the role schemata should play in designing clinical research studies. Our presentation is structured as a response to de Freitas and Pietrobon who identified the CONSORT statement as a schema that would have, had it existed at the time, ruled out the design of the Salk polio vaccine trial of 1954 in favor of a completely randomized controlled clinical trial. We (...) argue that large-scale public health interventions often require evidence beyond simple efficacy, the limit of what an RCT can provide, and that the design actually adopted for the Salk trial represented a reasonable—albeit imperfect—compromise. This is of more than historical interest in that many contemporary studies are of the scale and scope to require a more pragmatic, rather than explanatory, approach to study design. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the development of geometric cognition. We argue that to understand how geometric cognition has been constituted, one must appreciate not only individual cognitive factors, such as phylogenetically ancient and ontogenetically early core cognitive systems, but also the social history of the spread and use of cognitive artifacts. In particular, we show that the development of Greek mathematics, enshrined in Euclid’s Elements, was driven by the use of two tightly intertwined cognitive artifacts: the use of (...) lettered diagrams; and the creation of linguistic formulae. Together, these artifacts formed the professional language of geometry. In this respect, the case of Greek geometry clearly shows that explanations of geometric reasoning have to go beyond the confines of methodological individualism to account for how the distributed practice of artifact use has stabilized over time. This practice, as we suggest, has also contributed heavily to the understanding of what mathematical proof is; classically, it has been assumed that proofs are not merely deductively correct but also remain invariant over various individuals sharing the same cognitive practice. Cognitive artifacts in Greek geometry constrained the repertoire of admissible inferential operations, which made these proofs inter-subjectively testable and compelling. By focusing on the cognitive operations on artifacts, we also stress that mental mechanisms that contribute to these operations are still poorly understood, in contrast to those mechanisms which drive symbolic logical inference. (shrink)

We prove that certain natural sequent systems for bi-intuitionistic logic have the analytic cut property. In the process we show that the (global) subformula property implies the (local) analytic cut property, thereby demonstrating their equivalence. Applying a version of Maehara technique modified in several ways, we prove that bi-intuitionistic logic enjoys the classical Craig interpolation property and Maximova variable separation property; its Halldén completeness follows.

AbstraktPEŁNY TEKST: PDF References Heidegger Martin, Bycie i czas, przeł. B. Baran, PWN, Warszawa 1994. Hoły-Łuczaj Magdalena, Kształtowalność. Postheideggerowskie pytanie o inny wymiar bycia, Copernicus Center Press, Kraków 2022. Hoły-Łuczaj Magdalena, Radykalny nonantropocentryzm. Martin Heidegger i ekologia głęboka, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa–Rzeszów 2018.

The cognitive foundations of geometry have puzzled academics for a long time, and even today are mostly unknown to many scholars, including mathematical cognition researchers. -/- Foundations of Geometric Cognition shows that basic geometric skills are deeply hardwired in the visuospatial cognitive capacities of our brains, namely spatial navigation and object recognition. These capacities, shared with non-human animals and appearing in early stages of the human ontogeny, cannot, however, fully explain a uniquely human form of geometric cognition. In the book, (...) Hohol argues that Euclidean geometry would not be possible without the human capacity to create and use abstract concepts, demonstrating how language and diagrams provide cognitive scaffolding for abstract geometric thinking, within a context of a Euclidean system of thought. -/- Taking an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on research from diverse fields including psychology, cognitive science, and mathematics, this book is a must-read for cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists of mathematics, alongside anyone interested in mathematical education or the philosophical and historical aspects of geometry. (shrink)

In consequence of significant social, political, economic, and demographic changes several wildlife species are currently growing in numbers and recolonizing Europe. While this is rightly hailed as a success of the environmental movement, the return of wildlife brings its own issues. As the animals arrive in the places we inhabit, we are learning anew that life with wild nature is not easy, especially when the accumulated cultural knowledge and experience pertaining to such coexistence have been all but lost. This book (...) provides a hermeneutic study of the ways we come to understand the troubling impacts of wildlife by exploring and critically discussing the meanings of 'ecological discomforts'. Thus, it begins the work of rebuilding the culture of coexistence. The cases presented in this book range from crocodile attacks to mice infestations, and their analysis consequently builds up an ethics that sees wildlife as active participants in the shaping of human moral and existential reality. This book is of interest not only to environmental philosophers, who will find here an original contribution to the established ethical discussions, but also to wildlife managers, and even to those members of the public who themselves struggle to make sense of encounters with their new wild neighbors. (shrink)

One of the logic defined by Richard Epstein in a context of an analysis of subject matter relationship is Symmetric Relatedness Logic S. In the monograph [2] we can find some open problems concerning relatedness logic, a Post-style completeness theorem for logic S is one of them. Our paper introduces a solution of this metalogical issue.

The paper presents a partial evaluation of employment and factors related to the labour markets in European countries in 2007-2016. The interconnectedness of these determinants in the context of GDP dynamics per capita for each country was examined. The quoted partial subject literature and empirical research allowed to formulate the most important conclusions, among others: in the context of GDP dynamics per capita, at least four groups of countries can be distinguished in Europe, each of them has completely different characteristics (...) having an influence (in the Granger causality sense) on change in GDP per capita of these countries for various time steps. (shrink)

In "Variations on a theme of Curry," Humberstone conjectured that a certain logic, intermediate between BCI and BCK, is none other than monothetic BCI—the smallest extension of BCI in which all theorems are provably equivalent. In this note, we present a proof of this conjecture.

Author: Bonecki Mateusz Title: HUMANISTIC INTERPRETATION AND THEORETICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF CULTURE (Interpretacja humanistyczna a teoretyczna rekonstrukcja kultury) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.12, number: 2011/1, pages: 189-211 Keywords: CULTURE, SOCIO-REGULATORY THEORY OF CULTURE, KMITA, INTERPRETATION, HUMANITIES, FUNCTIONALISM, CULTURAL STUDIES, KULTURWISSENSCHAFTEN Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:In this paper the author presents crucial aspects of Jerzy Kmita’s socio-regulatory conception of culture in order to define it as a theoretical background of “humanistic (...) interpretation”. When the latter is to be understood as a method of explanation of human behavior with regard to its cultural meaning, the theoretical background is provided by variety of research activities which the author defines as “theoretical reconstruction of culture”. They consist in e.g. socio-functional explanation, linguistic and semantic analysis, or even in epistemological considerations, and guarantee theoretically independent justification of the interpretive hypotheses applied in the course of “humanistic interpretation”. Such “reconstruction” specifies further conditions of intersubjective acceptability of the statements within the discourse of humanities and therefore it also limits the subjective and individual character of the attribution of cultural beliefs to the members of a certain cultural community. (shrink)

We introduce a principle of local collection for compositional truth predicates and show that it is arithmetically conservative over the classically compositional theory of truth. This axiom states that upon restriction to formulae of any syntactic complexity, the resulting predicate satisfies full collection. In particular, arguments using collection for the truth predicate applied to sentences occurring in any given (code of a) proof do not suffice to show that the conclusion of that proof is true, in stark contrast to the (...) case of the induction scheme. We analyse various further results concerning end-extensions of models of compositional truth and the collection scheme for the compositional truth predicate. (shrink)

The current paper studies the formal properties of the Global Reflection Principle, to wit the assertion “All theorems of$\mathrm {Th}$are true,” where$\mathrm {Th}$is a theory in the language of arithmetic and the truth predicate satisfies the usual Tarskian inductive conditions for formulae in the language of arithmetic. We fix the gap in Kotlarski’s proof from [15], showing that the Global Reflection Principle for Peano Arithmetic is provable in the theory of compositional truth with bounded induction only ($\mathrm {CT}_0$). Furthermore, we (...) extend the above result showing that$\Sigma _1$-uniform reflection over a theory of uniform Tarski biconditionals ($\mathrm {UTB}^-$) is provable in$\mathrm {CT}_0$, thus answering the question of Beklemishev and Pakhomov [2]. Finally, we introduce the notion of a prolongable satisfaction class and use it to study the structure of models of$\mathrm {CT}_0$. In particular, we provide a new model-theoretical characterization of theories of finite iterations of uniform reflection and present a new proof characterizing the arithmetical consequences of$\mathrm {CT}_0$. (shrink)

The notion of implicit commitment has played a prominent role in recent works in logic and philosophy of mathematics. Although implicit commitment is often associated with highly technical studies, it remains an elusive notion. In particular, it is often claimed that the acceptance of a mathematical theory implicitly commits one to the acceptance of a Uniform Reflection Principle for it. However, philosophers agree that a satisfactory analysis of the transition from a theory to its reflection principle is still lacking. We (...) provide an axiomatization of the minimal commitments implicit in the acceptance of a mathematical theory. The theory entails that the Uniform Reflection Principle is part of one’s implicit commitments, and sheds light on why this is so. We argue that the theory has significant epistemological consequences in that it explains how justified belief in the axioms of a theory can be preserved to the corresponding reflection principle. The theory also improves on recent analyses of implicit commitment based on truth or epistemic notions. (shrink)

This paper is a follow-up to [4], in which a mistake in [6] was corrected. We give a strenghtening of the main result on the semantical nonconservativity of the theory of PT−with internal induction for total formulae${$, denoted by PT−in [9]). We show that if to PT−the axiom of internal induction forallarithmetical formulae is added, then this theory is semantically stronger than${\rm{P}}{{\rm{T}}^ - } + {\rm{INT}}\left$. In particular the latter is not relatively truth definable in the former. Last but not (...) least, we provide an axiomatic theory of truth which meets the requirements put forward by Fischer and Horsten in [9]. The truth theory we define is based on Weak Kleene Logic instead of the Strong one. (shrink)

The article examines the nature of the self in Plotinus’ philosophy and particularly what scholars have called the mobile or fluid self, as opposed to the static, hierarchical structure of the individual soul. This freely moving self, able to fall into the sensible realm and return to the One, is one of the most intriguing ideas of Plotinus. However, there seems to have been little attempt to locate this self within the Plotinian metaphysics and anthropology. In the paper it is (...) argued that the most probable metaphysical seat of this self is the transcendent, hypernoetic aspect of the intellect, due to its inchoate and potential nature as well as to its closeness to the One. (shrink)

Oikologia to nauka o domu rozumianym szeroko, w kontekście dialektyki zakorzenienia człowieka w świecie, jako relacja zachodząca między nim a otaczającą go rzeczywistością. Dotyka w swojej analizie m.in. pytań z zakresu etyki środowiska dotyczących ludzkiej ingerencji w strukturę świata i stara się wspierać refleksję i wynikającą z niej postawę pełną wrażliwości na związek człowieka ze środowiskiem. Ekofilozofia, jako dyscyplina podejmująca wieloaspektową problematykę ochrony środowiska z perspektywy filozoficznej refleksji, w centrum zainteresowania stawia również badanie samej relacji łączącej człowieka ze środowiskiem przyrodniczym. (...) Celem artykułu jest wskazanie, iż refleksja oikologiczna może okazać się pomocną perspektywą dla szeroko pojętej ekofilozofii, a więc właśnie dla rozważań skupiających się na odpowiednim ułożeniu wspomnianej interakcji. Przykładem praktycznego problemu, w którym tego typu spojrzenie zostanie zaprezentowane, jest kwestia przestrzeni miejskiej, a konkretniej jej rewitalizacji, ze szczególnym naciskiem na obszary poprzemysłowe, którą w omawianym kontekście ekofilozofii wiąże się przede wszystkim z ideą zrównoważonego rozwoju. (shrink)

The article concerns two axiom systems of Słupecki for the functionally complete three-valued propositional logic: W1–W6 and A1–A9. The article proves that both of them are inadequate—W1–W6 is semantically incomplete, on the other hand, A1–A9 governs a functionally incomplete calculus, and thus, it cannot be a semantically complete axiom system for the functionally complete three-valued logic.

Boolean connexive logic is an extension of Boolean logic that is closed under Modus Ponens and contains Aristotle’s and Boethius’ theses. According to these theses a sentence cannot imply its negation and the negation of a sentence cannot imply the sentence; and if the antecedent implies the consequent, then the antecedent cannot imply the negation of the consequent and if the antecedent implies the negation of the consequent, then the antecedent cannot imply the consequent. Such a logic was first introduced (...) by Jarmużek and Malinowski, by means of so-called relating semantics and tableau systems. Subsequently its modal extension was determined by means of the combination of possible-worlds semantics and relating semantics. In the following article we present axiomatic systems of some basic and modal Boolean connexive logics. Proofs of completeness will be carried out using canonical models defined with respect to maximal consistent sets. (shrink)

A method of constructing Hilbert-type axiom systems for standard many-valued propositional logics was offered by Rosser and Turquette. Although this method is considered to be a solution of the problem of axiomatisability of a wide class of many-valued logics, the article demonstrates that it fails to produce adequate axiom systems. The article concerns finitely many-valued propositional logics of Łukasiewicz. It proves that if standard propositional connectives of the Rosser–Turquette axiom systems are definable in terms of the propositional connectives of Łukasiewicz’s (...) logics, and thus, they are normal ones, then every Rosser–Turquette axiom system for a finite-valued Łukasiewicz’s logic is semantically incomplete. (shrink)

The modeling of the human mind based on quantum effects has been gaining considerable interest due to the intriguing possibility of applying non-local interactions in the studies of consciousness. Inasmuch as the majority of the pertinent studies are restricted to the exclusive analysis of mental phenomena, the quantum model of mind proposed by Roger Penrose constitutes a part of a much larger scheme of the ultimate unification of physics. Penrose's efforts to find the 'missing science of consciousness' presuppose the non-algorithmic (...) character of human thinking inferred from Gödel's incompleteness theorem. This is supposed to combine with the anticipated non-algorithmic character of the future quantum gravity theory involving the objective reduction of a quantum mechanical state vector. By surveying contemporary achievements of cognitive sciences as well as the development of Penrose's conjectures, presented in his recent work The Road to Reality, we wish to show that his non-algorithmic quantum model of human mind is contingent upon the fundamental philosophical assumption of the mathematicity of the Universe. (shrink)

This article explores the conception of self-knowledge in book 10 of Augustine’s De Trinitate. Augustine starts from the worry in Plato’s Meno that one cannot search for something entirely unknown and engages with Plotinus, Ennead 5.3 in developing his own understanding of the mind’s self-knowledge. He concludes that this knowledge is paradoxical in nature: it is necessary and, at the same time, futile; and it is separated from the knowledge of God. Augustine reaches this point by rejecting the Aristotelian identity (...) of the knower with the known, as well as by grounding self-knowledge in the fact of the mind’s intimate presence to itself. Ultimately, self-knowledge appears to be an ‘objectless’ knowledge, a knowledge that the mind exists rather than knowledge of what the mind is. (shrink)

How has the globalization of technology contributed to the globalization of the war against the Enlightenment liberal humanism of Western civilization—in particular, to the globalization of the war between religion and science—and with what problematic moral, cultural, and spiritual consequences? Liberal-humanist and Heideggerian perspectives on this issue are considered. The latter is chosen because it constitutes an enduring philosophical and political challenge to liberal humanism. For Heidegger, liberal humanism, far from providing a solution to the problems of global technology, is (...) an inherent part of the problem. A case in point is liberal democracy’s use of technology to produce and purvey a humanly degrading mass culture which it also uses technology to export abroad, in effect, to globalize. The author sets forth a defense of liberal humanism against these criticisms. (shrink)

Formalising deontic concepts, such as obligation, prohibition and permission, is normally carried out in a modal logic with a possible world semantics, in which some worlds are better than others. The main focus in these logics is on inferring logical consequences, for example inferring that the obligation O q is a logical consequence of the obligations O p and O. In this paper we propose a non-modal approach in which obligations are preferred ways of satisfying goals expressed in first-order logic. (...) To say that p is obligatory, but may be violated, resulting in a less than ideal situation s, means that the task is to satisfy the goal p ∨ s, and that models in which p is true are preferred to models in which s is true. Whereas, in modal logic, the preference relation between possible worlds is part of the semantics of the logic, in this non-modal approach, the preference relation between first-order models is external to the logic. Although our main focus is on satisfying goals, we also formulate a notion of logical consequence, which is comparable to the notion of logical consequence in modal deontic logic. In this formalisation, an obligation O p is a logical consequence of goals G, when p is true in all best models of G. We show how this non-modal approach to the treatment of deontic concepts deals with problems of contrary-to-duty obligations and normative conflicts, and argue that the approach is useful for many other applications, including abductive explanations, defeasible reasoning, combinatorial optimisation, and reactive systems of the production system variety. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest prezentacja i krytyczna analiza koncepcji uczuć egzystencjalnych, autorstwa współczesnego filozofa psychiatrii o orientacji fenomenologicznej — Matthew Ratcliffe’a. Uczucia egzystencjalne są specjalną klasą stanów afektywnych, nadającą emocjonalnego zabarwienia subiektywnemu doświadczeniu rzeczywistości. Mają one charakter przedrefleksyjny i stanowią niejawne tło świadomości fenomenalnej, które w potocznym doświadczeniu pozostaje poza polem uwagi. Uczucia te mają ścisły związek z emocjami, determinując typy przedmiotów intencjonalnych zawartych w stanach emocjonalnych i wyznaczając repertuar możliwych do doświadczenia emocji. Najważniejsze uczucia egzystencjalne, które wyróżnia Ratcliffe, to: (1) (...) poczucie rzeczywistości, czyli przedrefleksyjne i fenomenalne wrażenie o realnym istnieniu świata jako takiego; (2) poczucie przynależności, czyli przedrefleksyjne i fenomenalne wrażenie własnego istnienia i osadzenia w świecie pośród osób i rzeczy. Te dwie kategorie stanowią fundamentalne składowe pierwszoosobowego doświadczenia podmiotu, wyznaczając tym samym jego relację do innych ludzi oraz rzeczywistości w jej najbardziej ogólnym sensie. W artykule przedstawiam główne cechy i typy uczuć egzystencjalnych. Zwracam także uwagę na szczególną rolę psychopatologii w analizie i uzasadnianiu istnienia tego zjawiska. W związku z tym, za Ratcliffem, opisuję w jaki sposób określone aspekty uczuć egzystencjalnych ulegają dezintegracji w przebiegu epizodów zaburzeń psychicznych, takich jak depresja czy schizofrenia. Pokazuję także różnicę pomiędzy fenomenologicznym i poznawczo-behoawioralnym podejściem do zaburzeń psychicznych. Powołując się na badania neurobiologiczne staram się wskazać potencjalne neuronalne korelaty uczuć egzystencjalnych. Tekst wieńczą krytyczne uwagi na temat koncepcji uczuć egzystencjalnych w ujęciu Matthew Ratcliffe’a. Rozwiązanie zidentyfikowanych wad i niedociągnięć tej teorii filozoficznej zarazem nakreśla przyszłe perspektywy jej rozwoju. (shrink)

In this book, Dean Kowalski argues that filmmakers can “do” philosophy when creating a fictional narrative film, and utilizes a careful and extensive analysis of Joss Whedon’s fictive creations—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and The Cabin in the Woods —to establish this thesis.

The paper addresses the question how descriptive language is used to express legal norms. Sentences we find in legislative acts, i.e. statutes, constitutions and regulations, express legal norms. Linguistically speaking, there are various grammatical and lexical ways of expressing norms, such as imperative mood, modal verbs, deontic verbs, etc. However, norms may also be expressed by descriptive sentences, namely sentences in present or future tense and indicative (declarative) mood (i.e. _The minister determines the tax rate_). In many civil law countries (...) (including Poland), this is a very common, if not the default, form of expressing norms in legislative texts. Often presented as a legal peculiarity, this phenomenon has yet to draw much academic attention. The normative meaning of descriptive sentences is usually attributed to purely pragmatic factors stemming from our shared assumptions about the legal system. However, a closer look reveals that similar grammatical constructions are ubiquitous in everyday communication and in different languages. We tend to utter various sorts of directives using descriptive sentences (_Now we add a spoon of salt to the sauce_; _credit cards are not accepted_). This suggests the possibility for a linguistic (as opposed to exclusively legal) explanation. This paper aims to offer such an explanation. Rather than resorting to formal semantics, so prevalent in legal theory, it borrows from Cognitive Linguistics to reveal the cognitive underpinnings of our surprising tendency to express normativity in descriptive terms. This involves four different, yet complementary, theories. Firstly, the theory of conceptual metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson which explains the phenomenon in question in terms of the metaphor “ ought is is ”; with “ ought ” as the more abstract target domain and “ is ” as the more concrete, cognitively simpler source domain. Secondly, the theory of speech act metonymy by Panther and Thornburg which presents descriptive legal sentences as referring to various components of the underlying cognitive scenario of obligation. Thirdly, Ronald Langacker’s notion of the virtuality of language as the explanation for non-present, including future, perpetual and directive, uses of the present tense. Fourtly, the notion of normative generics which points to the nominal, as opposed to verbal, structure of descriptive legal sentences as the source of their normativity. (shrink)

In 1890 William James distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as “Me” and the self as “I”. This distinction has recently regained popularity in cognitive science, especially in the context of experimental studies on the underpinnings of the phenomenal self. The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and attempt to precisely distinguish between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. This distinction was originally based on the idea that the former (...) (“Me”) corresponds to the self as an object of experience (self as object), while the latter (“I”) reflects the self as a subject of experience (self as subject). I will argue that in most of the cases (arguably all) this distinction maps onto the distinction between the phenomenal self (reflecting self-related content of consciousness) and the metaphysical self (representing the problem of subjectivity of all conscious experience), and as such these two issues should be investigated separately using fundamentally different methodologies. Moreover, by referring to Metzinger’s theory of phenomenal self-models, I will argue that what is usually investigated as the phenomenal-“I” (following understanding of self-as-subject introduced by Wittgenstein) can be interpreted as object, rather than subject of experience, and as such can be understood as an element of the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model. This understanding relates to recent predictive coding and free energy theories of the self and bodily self from cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. (shrink)

That dichotomization is, at least under certain circumstances, a bad idea is not news. A well-known, early example is the biblical story of King Solomon, who used the absurdity of the procedure to help adjudicate a dispute between two women who each claimed to be the mother of a contested child. Solomon reasoned that his proposal to split the child into two, giving half to each woman, would be abhorrent to the real mother, and when one of the women objected (...) while the other thought the proposal was "only fair," the choice between the women was made obvious.Things, however, are not always so clear-cut, and it is not difficult to find arguments that point to the advantages that accrue to those that simplify matters.... (shrink)

SENSEMAKING. ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURE IN THE LIGHT OF INTEGRATED HUMANITIES Definitions of organizational culture usually focus on shared symbols, rituals, behavioral patterns, or even propositional assumptions concerning reality. Such phenomena represent heterogeneous collection of objects, events, and processes. Instead, the paradigm of integrated humanities defines organizational culture in terms of beliefs which provide both practical instructions for agents and shared interpretative schemes which guide the understanding of the environment. In this context, the process of “sensemaking” is understood as a (...) knowledge-based act of cultural sense-giving or of culturally mediated construction of organizational reality. Since the meaning-creation process seems to be both culturally mediated and knowledge-based, the perspective presented in the paper is defined as an “epistemic model of organizational culture”. Keywords: SENSEMAKING, ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE, CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE, ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE, TACIT KNOWLEDGE, KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT, CULTURE, KNOW-HOW. (shrink)