According to the expertise defense, practitioners of the method of cases need not worry about findings that ordinary people’s philosophical intuitions depend on epistemically irrelevant factors. This is because, honed by years of training, the intuitions of professional philosophers likely surpass those of the folk. To investigate this, we conducted a controlled longitudinal study of a broad range of intuitions in undergraduate students of philosophy (n = 226), whose case judgments we sampled after each semester throughout their studies. Under the (...) assumption, made by proponents of the expertise defense, that formal training in philosophy gives rise to the kind of expertise that accounts for changes in the students’ responses to philosophically puzzling cases, our data suggest that the acquired cognitive skills only affect single case judgments at a time. There does not seem to exist either a general expertise that informs case judgments in all areas of philosophy, or an expertise specific to particular subfields. In fact, we argue that available evidence, including the results of cross-sectional research, is best explained in terms of differences in adopted beliefs about specific cases, rather than acquired cognitive skills. We also investigated whether individuals who choose to study philosophy have atypical intuitions compared to the general population and whether students whose intuitions are at odds with textbook consensus are more likely than others to drop out of the philosophy program. (shrink)

The history of the research on peptic ulcer disease is characterized by a premature abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis, which subsequently had its comeback, leading to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori – the major cause of the disease. In this paper we examine the received view on this case, according to which the primary reason for the abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis in the mid-twentieth century was a large-scale study by a prominent gastroenterologist Palmer, which suggested no bacteria could be (...) found in the human stomach. To this end, we employ the methodof digital textual analysis and study the literature on the etiology of PUD published in the decade prior to Palmer’s article. Our findings suggest that the bacterial hypothesis had already been abandoned before the publication of Palmer’s paper, which challenges the widely held view that his study played a crucial role in the development of this episode. In view of this result, we argue that the PUD case does not illustrate harmful effects of a high degree of information flow, as it has frequently been claimed in the literature on network epistemology. Moreover, we argue that alternative examples of harmful effects of a high degree of information flow may be hard to find in the history of science. (shrink)

In this article I am going to argue that despite the fact that (1) there is nothing specific to the form of constitutive rules and (2) that in some broad sense every rule has a constitutive aspect, there is a substantial difference between what might be called trivially and genuinely constitutive rules, and the difference can be spotted by looking at practices that rules are supposed to constitute, not at these rules.

This paper addresses the black-box problem in artificial intelligence (AI), and the related problem of explainability of AI in the legal context. We argue, first, that the black box problem is, in fact, a superficial one as it results from an overlap of four different – albeit interconnected – issues: the opacity problem, the strangeness problem, the unpredictability problem, and the justification problem. Thus, we propose a framework for discussing both the black box problem and the explainability of AI. We (...) argue further that contrary to often defended claims the opacity issue is not a genuine problem. We also dismiss the justification problem. Further, we describe the tensions involved in the strangeness and unpredictability problems and suggest some ways to alleviate them. (shrink)

The goal in this short paper is to argue that so-called intermediary concepts play an essential role in organizing and generating legal knowledge. The point of departure is a reconstruction and a critique of Alf Ross’s analysis of such concepts. His goal was to argue that there exist concepts in the law which have no semantic reference, yet it is reasonable to use them as they perform some useful function regarding the presentation of legal rules. The author believes that Ross (...) is wrong on both counts: his argument to the effect that intermediary concepts have no reference is flawed, and his characterization of the functions such concepts play in the law is too limiting. (shrink)

Recenzja książki: _Panorama współczesnej filozofii_, Jacek Hołówka, Bogdan Dziobkowski, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa 2016, ss. 559.

This dissertation develops a substitutional semantics for first-order (modal) logic which, unlike truth-value semantics, allows a fine-grained analysis of the semantical behaviour of the terms and predicates from which atomic formulae are composed. Moreover, it proposes a nondenotational philosophical foundation for the semantics of substitutional quantified (modal) logic.

The paper develops a proof-theoretic semantics for belief reports by extending the constructive type-theoretical formalism presented in Więckowski with a specific kind of set-forming operator suited for the representation of belief attitudes. The extended formalism allows us to interpret constructions which involve, e.g., iteration of belief, quantifying into belief contexts, and anaphora in belief reports. Moreover, constructive solutions to canonical instances of the problem of hyperintensionality are suggested. The paper includes a discussion of Ranta’s constructive account of belief reports.

"A Special Case of Logical Contradiction – Content Implication Approach" The difference between so-called performative/pragmatic and logical contradiction seems to be one of the most firmly established philosophical distinctions. There are, however, some utterances, which fall outside this classification in its current form. Moreover, they reveal that the expressive power of the language of classical logic is too weak to express some form of the logical contradiction. The main aim of this paper is to characterize this special case of the (...) contradiction. By extending classical logic with a new connective, i.e. content implication, it also provides tools needed for adequate formal representation of this phenomenon. (shrink)

In the presented article, I consider what the process of designing the future can be. In detail, I am interested in what role touch plays in this process, combined with the practice of speculative imagination. In order to better understand this phenomenon, I use the transdisciplinary model of knowledge production, whose specific feature is the crossing and blurring of boundaries between fields of knowledge. The goal of this activity is to produce new forms of knowledge by combining methods and cognitive (...) tools derived from science, art, humanities, and crafts. In such a context, I am interested in how discursive practices and body practices are complementary. As a research perspective, I adopt the currents of posthumanism and new materialism oriented toward the analysis of human and nonhuman expressions of agency and processes of self-organization of matter. The starting point for the considerations presented here is a critical analysis of the vision of the future in the form of the absence of any future inscribed in the concept of the Anthropocene. Referring to the considerations of feminist thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad, I analyze what the future, understood as the commonality of the human and nonhuman, in the perspective of planetary changes, can be. (shrink)

This massive book is an intensive inquest into the fate of the human subject as it passes through the primitive, despotic, passional and capitalist regimes found in Deleuze and Guattari. Emphatic, acerbic, loquacious, impassioned, and marshaling a considerable array of theoretical and literary frameworks--from Schelling, Kantorowicz, Agamben, Hegel, Nietzsche, Badiou, Rosenzweig, Lévinas, Derrida, Blanchot, Kierkegaard, Marx, Lazzarato, Berardi, Zizek and Plotinus to Solzhenitsyn, Pessoa, Fuentes, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Mann, Schreber, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Sade, the Midrash and Kabbalah--and cavorting through vast (...) expanses of world history, Bartosz Łubczonok scrutinizes the maladies of pain, resentment, bad conscience, ideology, immiseration, torture, death, depression and suicide that have and continue to afflict humanity, and the possibilities of its vertiginous liberation. All is here: the auto-genesis of God, the Crucifixion, the Holocaust, September 11. The Apotheosis of Nullity is a searing indictment of all forms of oppression and despotism, inclusive of neoliberal capitalism, and far surpasses any usage of Deleuze and Guattari to date. It is relentless. (shrink)

Brandom (Citation1994) made inferentialism an intensely debated idea in the philosophy of language in the last three decades. Inferentialism is a view that associates the meaning of linguistic expression with the role said expression plays in inferences. It seems rather uncontroversial that the correct theory of meaning should distinguish between linguistic correctness and factual correctness. For instance, speaker S can be wrong in saying ‘I have arthritis’ in two distinct ways: (i) S fails to apply a word correctly to make (...) a true statement due to having made a factual error, and (ii) S uses an expression incorrectly because they are wrong about its meaning. In this paper, I show that properly understood normative inferentialism can make room for such a distinction. I propose that linguistic correctness is a structural issue: linguistic mistakes stem from the improper or insufficient acquisition of an inferential role. Factual correctness, on the other hand, is a one-off issue of the correct application of inferential rules to a particular situation. I argue that, by tying the issue of correctness to the game of giving and asking for reasons, inferentialism can establish a reliable method for distinguishing between two types of correctness (and mistakes). (shrink)

Wittgenstein's insights -- Imitation -- Is meaning normative? -- How to blunt Hume's guillotine? -- The miracle of mathematics -- Into Popper's world.

Social constructivists use to say that economists cannot study objective reality, absolute truth does not exist, and economic knowledge is being constructed, not discovered and it depends on temporary culture. Realists notice and admit social conditions which may affect economic theories and unrealistic assumptions of models, but they claim that these models describe the real world, at least to some extent. The notions of truth and reality are crucial in both of these concepts. In this papar they are analysed based (...) on Hilary Putnam theory developed by Adam Grobler. (shrink)

In the late 1960s, a whole pantheon of thinkers regarding themselves as radicals stole a part of the anarchic praxis of late capitalism, turned it into philosophy, and with the resulting set of views turned against the foundations of the system in a purportedly radical gesture. Postmodernism was the name for the superficially revolutionary culture which then came into existence. The thought of the late left appears as the subsequent response to the cunning of the system.<BR> The main figures of (...) <I>Farewell to Postmodernism are Perry Anderson, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Zižek. The book provides an encyclopaedic introduction to their work, while at the same time seeking to grasp the current trajectory of radical thought. (shrink)

W latach 80. i 90. ubiegłego stulecia pojęcie postmodernizmu budziło skrajne emocje. Po jednej stronie lokowali się kpiarze i skrajni sceptycy, którzy uznali pisarstwo postmodernistyczne za humbug i wytwór intelektualnej mody. Po drugiej stronie znajdowali się ci, którzy w postmodernizm uwierzyli aż za bardzo, widząc w nim festiwal wszelkich różnic, a zarazem nadejście długo wyczekiwanego królestwa wolności. Czym był jednak w swej istocie ów straszny bądź ekscytujący postmodernizm? I czy nie nadszedł już czas, by spojrzeć na tę sprawę odrobinę chłodniejszym (...) okiem? W Polsce wydaje się to tym bardziej wskazane, że tematykę postmodernizmu i ponowoczesności rozwijali w swych pracach głównie anglosascy marksiści, których twórczość została w naszym kraju po 1989 roku niesłusznie, choć ze zrozumiałych względów zaniedbana. Bohaterowie Goodbye Mr. Postmodernism to Perry Anderson, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton oraz Slavoj Žižek, których autor umieszcza pod wspólnym szyldem „późnej lewicy". Książka stanowi zarazem encyklopedyczne wprowadzenie do ich teorii, jak i próbę uchwycenia nowego klimatu lewicowej myśli, która manierze wiecznej emancypacji oraz upodobaniu do kolorowych marginesów (wspólnym postmodernizmowi i "nowej", zrodzonej pod koniec lat sześćdziesiątych lewicy) coraz częściej przeciwstawia skłonność do odpowiedzialnej etycznie refleksji. (shrink)

How does a lawyer think? Does legal intuition exist? Do lawyers need imagination? Why is legal language so abstract? It is no longer possible to answer these questions by applying philosophical analysis alone. Recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of the human mental faculties and the tools we use to solve problems. A new picture of the functioning of the legal mind is emerging. In The Legal Mind, Bartosz Brożek uses philosophical arguments and insight from (...) the cognitive sciences to depict legal thinking as a close cooperation between three cognitive mechanisms - intuition, imagination, and language - and addresses the question of how to efficiently use these mental tools. This novel and provocative approach provides a fresh perspective on legal thinking and gives rise to important questions pertaining to the limits of legal interpretation and rationality in the law. (shrink)

The claim that the free energy principle is somehow related to Hamilton’s principle in statistical mechanics is ubiquitous throughout the subject literature. However, the exact nature of this relationship remains unclear. According to some sources, the free energy principle is merely similar to Hamilton’s principle of stationary action; others claim that it is either analogous or equivalent to it, while yet another part of the literature espouses the claim that it is a version of Hamilton’s principle. In this article, we (...) aim to clarify the nature of the relationship between the two principles by investigating the two most likely interpretations of the claims that can be found in the subject literature. According to the strong interpretation, the two principles are equivalent and apply to the same subset of physical phenomena; according to the weak interpretation, the two principles are merely analogous to each other by virtue of their similar formal structures. As we show, adopting the stronger reading would lead to a dilemma that is untenable for the proponents of the free energy principle, thus supporting the adoption of the weaker reading for the relationship between the two constructs. (shrink)

Beebe and Buckwalter (2010) made the surprising discovery that people are more inclined to attribute knowledge when norms are violated than when they are conformed to. The epistemic side-effect effect (ESEE) is the analogue of the Knobe effect (Knobe 2003a). ESEE was replicated in a number of experiments. It was also studied under various conditions. We have carried out a meta-analysis of research on ESEE. The results suggest that ESEE is a robust finding but its magnitude is highly variable. Two (...) study-level covariates influence its size: the subject of the knowledge attribution (agent vs third-party) and the type of norm that is violated or complied with. The effect size is not influenced, however, by the manipulation of chances, by whether the story is about a side effect or not, by language or by question phrasing. The impact of the Gettierization of the story is marginally significant. (shrink)

The history of the research on peptic ulcer disease is characterized by a premature abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis, which subsequently had its comeback, leading to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori—the major cause of the disease. In this paper we examine the received view on this case, according to which the primary reason for the abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis in the mid-twentieth century was a large-scale study by a prominent gastroenterologist Palmer, which suggested no bacteria could be found in (...) the human stomach. To this end, we employ the method of digital textual analysis and study the literature on the etiology of PUD published in the decade prior to Palmer’s article. Our findings suggest that the bacterial hypothesis had already been abandoned before the publication of Palmer’s paper, which challenges the widely held view that his study played a crucial role in the development of this episode. In view of this result, we argue that the PUD case does not illustrate harmful effects of a high degree of information flow, as it has frequently been claimed in the literature on network epistemology. Moreover, we argue that alternative examples of harmful effects of a high degree of information flow may be hard to find in the history of science. (shrink)

The paper concerns the problem of the legal responsibility of autonomous machines. In our opinion it boils down to the question of whether such machines can be seen as real agents through the prism of folk-psychology. We argue that autonomous machines cannot be granted the status of legal agents. Although this is quite possible from purely technical point of view, since the law is a conventional tool of regulating social interactions and as such can accommodate various legislative constructs, including legal (...) responsibility of autonomous artificial agents, we believe that it would remain a mere ‘law in books’, never materializing as ‘law in action’. It is not impossible to imagine that the evolution of our conceptual apparatus will reach a stage, when autonomous robots become full-blooded moral and legal agents. However, today at least, we seem to be far from this point. (shrink)

In this paper I present how the normative inferentialist can make the distinction between sentence meaning and content of the utterance. The inferentialist can understand sentence meaning as a role conferred to that sentence by the rules governing inferential transitions and content of the utterance as just a part of sentence meaning. I attempt to show how such a framework can account for prominent scenarios presented by contextualists as a challenge to semantic minimalism/literalism. I argue that inferentialism can address contextualist (...) challenges in a simple and effective manner by understanding sentence meaning as broad, but invariant. (shrink)

This collection of essays - written by philosophers, logicians, and theologians - is devoted to the problem of the utilization of logic in theological discourse. Viewed from the perspective of logic, the issues covered include such topics as the logic of miracles, the problem of God's omniscience, the application of non-classical logics to theology, and the relationships between science and theology.