The reason for my disagreement with Tadeusz Skalski is my objection to his attempts at demonizing the problems connected with the functioning of mind as presented in his essay. In my opinion, the inclination of the author towards demonization stems from the fact that he accepts an extremely limited „natural picture of the world”, a picture which is both reductionistic and mechanistic. It is no wonder then that neither intentionality nor the usage of language fits into this picture and - (...) what amounts to the same thing - can be naturalized. Both seem to be magic phenomena. Moreover, the range of „purely natural” categories in this picture seems to be so limited that even the behaviour of a cat which comes to his master when he whistles for it - i.e. which knows what the whistling means - cannot be described. The behaviour of chimpanzees which have an inborn knowledge that snakes are dangerous and should be avoided cannot be described on this view either. Hence, it is no surprise that each theory of how mind is functioning which has been constructed by a natural philosopher has a status of a „magic theory”. (shrink)

The paper is a response to Tadeusz Skalski's paper „The and... a Platform to Human Speech”, published in Filozofia Nauki 1/2000. Despite Skalski's claim that the essence of our controversy lies in verbal misunderstandings, I will demonstrate that I disagree with him on three issues: (i) the question of both in the context of using ethnic languages and in the context of the origin of these languages; (ii) the concept of emergence; (iii) the evaluation of naturalisation a la Searle.