This paper centers around the notion that internal, mental representations are grounded in structural similarity, i.e., that they are so-called S-representations. We show how S-representations may be causally relevant and argue that they are distinct from mere detectors. First, using the neomechanist theory of explanation and the interventionist account of causal relevance, we provide a precise interpretation of the claim that in S-representations, structural similarity serves as a “fuel of success”, i.e., a relation that is exploitable for the representation using (...) system. Then, we discuss crucial differences between S-representations and indicators or detectors, showing that—contrary to claims made in the literature—there is an important theoretical distinction to be drawn between the two. (shrink)

Georges Florovsky, in 1936, called for a revival of the teaching of the Church Fathers. At the same time, Fr. Joseph Bocheński formulated the program for the renewal of Thomism by means of formal logic. In this paper, I propose to integrate these two projects. Analytic Patristics aims at expressing and developing patristic thought with the tools of analytic philosophy. The broad program of the logic of religion formulated by Bocheński included semiotics, methodology, and the formal logic of religion. I (...) present here three examples of the integration of analytic philosophy and patristics in these three areas. I discuss first Basil Lourié’s paraconsistent interpretation of Dionysius the Areopagite’s theory of the divine names, then Richard Swinburne’s efforts to revive Orthodox natural theology, and finally Beau Branson’s reconstruction of Gregory of Nyssa’s metaphysics of the Trinity. These examples perfectly illustrate how analytic philosophy can contribute to the development of patristics, and how the tradition of the Church Fathers can inspire contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The article reviews the book Konstytucja wolności [The Constitution of Liberty], by Friedrich August von Hayek.

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition , brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in (...) the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the relationship between literature and the text of song. First part of article concerns the songs which texts approach to literature and begin to exist in the listeners' consciousness independently from the melody. In contemporary Polish music are this: Niech żyje bal, Autobiografia, Nie pytaj o Polskę or Wychowanie. Texts of these songs are analysed and interpreted. Second part of article tells about poems which serve as texts of songs. The author of article shows (...) twentieth-century Polish poets, which texts be sung (Julian Tuwim, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, Edward Stachura, Ewa Lipska etc.) and using with poems musicians (Czesław Niemen, Marek Grechuta, Ewa Demarczyk, Grzegorz Turnau). The author writes also about methods of adaptation of poems on need of songs. (shrink)

This study was designed to determine the quality of service through the evaluation of hospitalized patients. An analysis of hospitalized patients’ subjective feelings towards service quality was carried out, in the context of the application of the SERVQUAL method. The pilot study was conducted in a Silesian hospital in a group of 29 young patients diagnosed with kidney disease. The study used a standard sheet of 22 SERVQUAL statements and an analysis of the significance of the 5 areas of quality (...) material important for the patient. According to the respondents, the most important of the 5 features that influence the quality of life is the ability of the ward staff to provide adequate medical services The least important were the aesthetics and ergonomics of rooms. Service quality gaps were seen in all the five dimensions as well as in the overall service quality. Hence, the following conclusions could be made: 1. The SERVQUAL method helps to identify discrepancies between perceptions of patients’ expectations in all the dimensions of quality of medical services. 2. For patients, the least important is the material dimension, whereas the one most affecting them is the dimension associated with the reliability of medical services. 3. An improvement of the level of satisfaction with the quality of medical services requires proper planning and effectiveness of implementation of health care services. 4. Research should be conducted on a larger population of patients. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the notion of internal representation has - at least according to some - a fundamental role to play in the sciences of the mind, not only has its explanatory utility been under attack for a while now, but it also remains unclear what criteria should an explanation of a given cognitive phenomenon meet to count as a representational explanation in the first place. The aim of this article is to propose a solution to this latter problem. (...) I will assume that representational explanations should be construed as a form of mechanistic explanations and proceed by proposing a general sketch of a functional architecture of a representational cognitive mechanism. According to the view on offer here, representational mechanisms are mechanisms that meet four conditions: the structural resemblance condition, the action-guidance condition, the decouplability condition, and the error-detection condition. (shrink)

This book presents a new approach to semantics based on Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s Directival Theory of Meaning, which in effect reduces semantics of the analysed language to the combination of its syntax and pragmatics. The author argues that the DTM was forgotten because for many years philosophers didn’t have conceptual tools to appreciate its innovative nature, and that the theory was far ahead of its time. The book shows how a redesigned and modernised version of the DTM can deliver a new (...) solution to the problem of defining linguistic meaning and that the theory can be understood as a new type of functional role semantics. The defining feature of the DTM is that it presents meaning as a product of constraints on the usage of words. According to the DTM meaning is not use, but the avoidance of misuse. Readers will see how the DTM was shelved for reasons that we don’t find so dramatic anymore, and how it contains enough original ideas and solutions to warrant developing it into a full-blown contemporary account. It is shown how many of the underlying ideas of the theory have been embraced later by philosophers and treated simply as brute facts about natural languages or even as new philosophical discoveries. Philosophers of language and researchers with an interest in how languages and the mind work will find this book a fascinating read. (shrink)

The article reviews the book Metodologia nauk [Methodology of the Sciences], by Adam Grobler.

The article presents Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics as an attempt to return to the classical ideal of the art of good speaking, in which the purpose of speech is seen as an intertwining of truth and goodness. Rhetoric understood in this way opposes its sophistic antithesis, which is directed at defending the speaker’s individual ratios and interests, ‘truth’ constructing, manipulating the audience’s beliefs and seductive qualities of style. The text analyzes selected issues of hermeneutics – truth taken as aletheia, the hermeneutic (...) circle and language, relating them to the classical stages of speech preparation – inventio, dispositio and elocutio. In this way, rhetoric and hermeneutics will be shown as disciplines founded on ethics. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 50 Heft: 1 Seiten: 129-162.

This article takes issue with Kuhn’s description of the ‘Aristotle experience,’ an event that took place in 1947 and that he retrospectively characterized as a revelation that instantly delivered to him the key concepts of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). We trace a certain transformation of this narrative over time: whereas it commenced from a description of his impression of disparity between the textbook image of science and the study of historical sources, Kuhn started to characterize it as a (...) revelation after learning of the English translation of Fleck’s 1935 Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. This book anticipates many central Kuhnian claims. Kuhn read it as early as 1949, but never fully acknowledged it as a source of inspiration. We discuss four hypotheses concerning the possible influence of Fleck’s theory on Kuhn’s in light of the available evidence. We conclude that the degree of similarity between them is too great to be coincidental. (shrink)

Philosophy in technology is a research program that studies the philosophical roots of engineering and technology. Technologists, by virtue of their education, believe that the limits, goals, possibilities, and effects of technology on society and humankind are exclusively technological problems, hence their solutions must lie exclusively in technology. In contrast, philosophy in technology asserts that the resolutions to these problems need to be rooted in an understanding of their philosophical origins. This program paper defines the objectives of philosophy in technology, (...) the kinds of questions it explores, the methods it uses, and how it differs from the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how an agent may manage a questioning agenda in a situation where multiple information sources are available. We work within the framework of formal dialogue systems with the underpinning of Inferential Erotetic Logic. Firstly, we present the formal dialogue system DL(IEL)mult for managing multi-agent information retrieval. Then, we extend the proposed system so that it is capable of representing group and individual levels for the question decomposition process. We also propose two measures for evaluating information (...) sources: their cooperativeness and success levels; next, we analyse how the choice of agents may influence the way in which a solution for a given problem is reached. (shrink)

Recent developments in virtual reality technology raise a question about the experience of presence and immersion in virtual environments. What is immersion and what are the conditions for inducing the experience of virtual presence? In this paper, we argue that crucial determinants of presence are perception of affordances and sense of embodiment. In the first section of this paper, we define key concepts and introduce important distinctions such as immersion and presence. In the second and third sections, we respectively discuss (...) presence, immersion and their determinants in detail. In the fourth and fifth sections, we argue for the importance of perception of affordances and sense of embodiment in increasing the degree of presence. Finally, we show the consequences of our view and discuss possible future implications. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to assess the situation in terms of wage inequality and identify factors influencing changes in the levels, dynamics and relations of wages in voivodeships in Poland in 2012–2021. In Poland, during the analyzed period, an economic crisis occurred in 2012 as a consequence of the crisis of 2008–2009 and since 2020. Average monthly gross wages in Poland will be used for this purpose. Based on this data, deviations, relationships, and rates of change will be (...) calculated. To carry out the analysis and evaluation, I will use statistical data published in the Statistical Yearbooks of the Central Statistical Office in Warsaw for the years 2012–2021. In this article, the region will be identified with the voivodeship, according to the administrative division. (shrink)

Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it (...) is possible that what is currently advocated as unconscious perception of the stimulus is in fact momentaneous perceptual awareness (or residual perceptual awareness) of the stimulus making the subject prone to judge in some way rather than another, or to act in some way rather than another. As to the apodosis, I show that neither the core of naïve realism nor any of its main motivations is undermined if SFK is assumed. On the contrary, certain incentives for endorsing naïve realism become more tempting on this assumption. Since the main motivations for naïve realism retain force under SFK, intentionalism is neither compulsory nor the best available explanation of unconscious perception. (shrink)

After a brief look at Drafts on Polish philosophy of the twentieth century you could get the impression that this is a work dedicated to the most recent works of Polish philosophy. However after a moment of consideration, it seems hard to believe that a contemporary philosopher would write a history of twentieth century philosophy which could be considered neither as his history nor his philosophy. The distinction between history and philosophy in this case is not accidental since Wojciech Słomski (...) does not try to present a completely closed view of philosophical thought in the last century but aims at expressing that which he himself considers most valuable in contemporary Polish philosophy. It turns out that despite first impressions, we are not dealing with a systematic lecture, maintaining a cold and impartial approach to the subject but with a text written by an independent philosopher who cannot write differently about philosophy than Wojciech Słomski has done. For this reason too, the philosophy in Drafts is a living philosophy, made up of the most current propositions considered by W. Słomski as more important than the task of executing clear distinctions and pigeonholing of presented views into categories created by philosophers. (shrink)

Assuming, according to Jaspers, that the measure of truth of a philosophical system is the lifestyle of its creator as well as his ability at drawing conclusions resulting from philosophical speculation to the requirements of practical action, the question must be asked, to what extent, if at all Wojciech Słomski's book tries to recognise and name the philosophically characteristic merging of theory and practise. Despite this, it shouldn't be the superior aim of any biography, let alone the biography of a (...) philosopher. However in the case of Professor Antoni Kępiński, the connection between theoretical views and real life holds meaning not only for judging the truth of these views but most of all for a correct understanding of them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present study examined relationships between attention to negative words and daily rumination and daily adjustment in a sample of clinically depressed individuals. We recorded eye movements of 43 individuals diagnosed with major depression while they were freely viewing dysphoric, threat-related, neutral, and positive words. Then, each day for one week, participants provided measures of their daily rumination and psychological adjustment. Multilevel analyses found that attention to dysphoric and threat-related words was positively related to daily rumination and attention to threat-related (...) words was negatively related to daily adjustment. These findings suggest that the impaired ability to disengage from negative words is positively related to rumination in daily life and is negatively related to well-being, as defined in terms of Beck’s Triad. (shrink)

Perceptual experience usually comes with “phenomenal force”, a strong sense that it reflects reality as it is. Some philosophers have argued that it is in virtue of possessing phenomenal force that perceptual experiences are able to non‐inferentially justify beliefs. In this article, I introduce an alternative, inferentialist take on the epistemic role of phenomenal force. Drawing on Bayesian modeling in cognitive science, I argue that the sense of reality that accompanies conscious vision can be viewed as epistemically appraisable in light (...) of its rational etiology. (shrink)

Semen Frank (1877–1950) was one of the first and most ardent advocates of the ontological argument in the twentieth century. He proposed an original interpretation of the ontological argument based on its analogy to Descartes’ Cogito. Frank believed that it is possible to develop Cogito ergo sum into Cogito ergo est ens absolutum. In this paper, I analyze his version of the ontological argument. First, I propose a simple reconstruction of his reasoning, paying attention to its hidden premise. Second, departing (...) from the classical logical interpretations of Descartes’ argument, I show that for Frank the claim that God exists had the same logical properties as Cogito. As a result, it seems that his argument was formally correct, though based on a premise which could hardly be convincing for a non-believer. This should not be surprising, however, since Frank, as most Russian religious philosophers, was not interested in the project of philosophical theology. His main concern was rather the development of philosophy based on religious premises, which might be called “theological philosophy”. (shrink)

In the past centuries Maṇḍana Miśra was regarded as the most prominent figure of the advaita school of philosophy, to the extent that the whole system of advaita was frequently described by his name as ‘maṇḍana-matam’ (‘the view of Maṇḍana’). Nowadays advaita is almost exclusively associated, if not identified, with the name of Maṇḍana’s contemporary Śaṅkara. Both thinkers philosophizing along advaita lines, their views on the ultimate being, the highest bliss, ignorance etc. were substantially different. The present paper is intended (...) as a bird’s eye view on the whole of Maṇḍana’s legacy, including his Sphoṭasiddhi, being his contribution to the grammatical tradi­tion of Bhartṛhari. It is also aimed at finding the reason why in the hierarchy of eminent advaita thinkers Maṇḍana was eventually supplanted by Śaṅkara and his œuvre unacknowledged. (shrink)

Psychedelic substances elicit powerful, uncanny conscious experiences that are thought to possess therapeutic value. In those who undergo them, these altered states of consciousness often induce shifts in metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental structure of reality. The contents of those beliefs range from contentious to bizarre, especially when considered from the point of view of naturalism. Can chemically induced, radically altered states of consciousness provide reasons for or play some positive epistemic role with respect to metaphysical beliefs? In this paper, (...) I discuss a view that has been underexplored in recent literature. I argue that psychedelic states can be rationally integrated into one’s epistemic life. Consequently, updating one’s metaphysical beliefs based on altered states of consciousness does not have to constitute an instance of epistemic irrationality. (shrink)

The titular "Bandie" is a fictional creature devised by Tadeusz Skalski in his "Fairy Tales of Functionalism" (published in "Folia Philosophica" 24). It is supposed to be a reduction ad absurdum for the thesis of organizational invariance. I show that the argument works only because the though experiment Skalski uses is highly suggestive and that, contrary to Skalski's intentions, The Bandie is in fact quite a complex dynamic system.

Debunking arguments aim to undermine common sense beliefs by showing that they are not explanatorily or causally linked to the entities they are purportedly about. Rarely are facts about the aetiology of common sense beliefs invoked for the opposite aim, that is, to support the reality of entities that furnish our manifest image of the world. Here I undertake this sort of un-debunking project. My focus is on the metaphysics of ordinary physical objects. I use the view of perception as (...) approximate Bayesian inference to show how representations of ordinary objects can be extracted from sensory input in a rational and truth-tracking manner. Drawing an analogy between perception construed as Bayesian hypothesis testing and scientific inquiry, I sketch out how some of the intuitions that traditionally inspired arguments for scientific realism also find application with regards to proverbial tables and chairs. (shrink)

In this article I am trying to compare the methods of phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Such a general comparison is of course impossible in a small article. In order to make it possible I am comparing selected authors. Phenomenology is thus represented by Husserl and Ingarden, analytic philosophy by Putnam and Kripke (they are chosen because of their realism and essentialism). I am trying to analyze the way the authors describe their methods. First I am analyzing analytic philosophy from the (...) phenomeneological point of view, then phenomenology from the point of view of analytic philosopher. I'm. pointing out that Kripke and Putnam often say about intuition, and that they do not understand it as any kind of linguistic intuition. Then I'm. pointing out that phenomenologists often refer to the way w describe things, although they are convinced that their experience is always prior to any linguistic form. I am suggesting that even if we agree that the practice of both schools is similar, and that the description of methods could be translated, there is no chance of a real agreement between phenomenology and analytic philosophy. My thesis is that neither the practice nor the description of the way we obtain our philosophical goals is important. What really is important is all the philosophical background (ontology, philosophical assumptions and the like). In this particular situation considered in my article, the most important factor is the answer for the following question: Can we think without the language? Phenomenologist can not answer 'no' to this question. If he did he would admit that his philosophy isn't free of assumptions. Analytic philosopher can not answer 'yes' to this question. If he did he would admit that he is interested only in some kind of 'package for thought'. The answer itself depends on some kind of philosophical faith. Thus, the answer for the main question of my article depends only on Kripke's will of changing his declaration of faith. (shrink)

Paweł Florenski starał się sformułować ontologiczną teorię miłości. Uważał on, że miłość jest nie tylko zjawiskiem psychicznym, lecz zakłada takżejakiegoś rodzaju rzeczywiste zjednoczenie. Florenski proponował, by rozumieć je jako współistotność. Dwa numerycznie różne podmioty mogą stać się czymś jednym dzięki swojej numerycznie tożsamej istocie. Prócz tego Florenski zarysował teorię ontologiczną opartą na odróżnieniu między rzeczami a osobami. Wydaje się, że uznawał on wiązkową teorię przedmiotów i nominalizm tropowy dla kategorii rzeczy i teorię substratu połączoną z realizmem dla kategorii osób. (...) Pogląd Florenskiego można więc uznać za jedno ze stanowisk w dyskusji o zasadzie identyczności nieodróżnialnych. Staram się także pokazać, że można przezwyciężyć pewne poważne problemy filozoficzne i teologiczne ontologii miłości Florenskiegojeśli doda się do niej patrystyczne rozróżnienie między istotą a energią. (shrink)