The endorsement of epistemically suspect (i.e., paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscientific) beliefs is widespread and has negative consequences. Therefore, it is important to understand the reasoning processes – such as lower analytic thinking and susceptibility to cognitive biases – that might lead to the adoption of such beliefs. In two studies, I constructed and tested a novel questionnaire on epistemically suspect beliefs (Study 1, N = 263), and used it to examine probabilistic reasoning biases and belief bias in syllogistic reasoning as (...) predictors of the endorsement of those beliefs, while accounting for analytic thinking and worldview variables (Study 2, N = 397). Probabilistic reasoning biases, analytic thinking, religious faith, and political liberalism consistently predicted various epistemically suspect beliefs, whereas the effect of syllogistic belief bias was largely restricted to pseudoscientific beliefs. Further research will be needed to examine the role the biased evaluation of evidence plays in the endorsement of epistemically suspect beliefs. (shrink)

Social robots are expected to take over a significant number of jobs in the coming decades. The present research provides the first systematic evaluation of occupation suitability of existing social robots based on user perception derived classification of them. The study was conducted in the Middle East since the views of this region are rarely considered in human–robot interaction research, although the region is poised to increasingly adopt the use of robots. Laboratory-based experimental data revealed that a robot’s appearance plays (...) an important role in the perception of its capabilities and preference for it to perform a particular job. Participants showed a preference for machine-like robots to perform dull and dirty occupations and humanoids, but not androids, to perform jobs requiring extensive social interaction with humans. However, other aspects of appearance than morphology determine whether a robot is preferred for a job irrespective of its perceived capability to do it. (shrink)

Zwischen Ethik und Religion besteht in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants ein enges Verhältnis. In seinem frühen Denken geht Kant davon aus, dass Ethik Metaphysik voraussetzt. Diese Position wird in seiner kritischen Philosophie zugunsten der bekannten These, dass Ethik keine Religion voraussetzt, zu ihr jedoch »unausweichlich« führt, abgelöst. Im Zentrum der Überlegungen des vorliegenden Buchs steht der Versuch einer plausiblen Erklärung, wie diese Unausweichlichkeit zu verstehen ist und warum Ethik in die Metaphysik mündet. Das Ziel der Untersuchung besteht darin zu zeigen, (...) dass die Religion oder bestimmte metaphysische Annahmen in der ethischen Systematik Kants eine konstitutive und konstruktive Rolle spielen. (shrink)

While there is a general consensus around the role of religion in the abolition of the Slave Trade, historians continue to give little to no detail on exactly how Christian theology influenced the abolitionist movement. This article seeks to interrogate one major theological factor inherent in the spirituality that underpinned the activism of the British abolitionists, namely their notion of Divine Providence, and particularly its moral-emotive correlate: the fear of God’s wrath. These theological notions are discussed based mainly on the (...) analysis of the primary sources and within the theoretical framework of judicial providentialism, aptly captured by John Coffey among others. (shrink)

We show how to extend any finite probability space into another finite one which satisfies the conditional construal of conditional probability for the original propositions, given some maximal allowed degree of nesting of the conditional. This mitigates the force of the well-known triviality results.

“Is every definition persuasive?” If essentialist views on definition are rejected and a pragmatic account adopted, where defining is a speech act which fixes the meaning of a term, then a problem arises: if meanings are not fixed by the essence of being itself, is not every definition persuasive? To address the problem, we refer to Douglas Walton’s impressive intellectual heritage—specifically on the argumentative potential of definition. In finding some non-persuasive definitions, we show not every definition is persuasive. The persuasiveness (...) lies not in syntactic or semantic properties, but the context. We present this pragmatic account and provide rules for analysing and evaluating persuasive definition—a promising direction for further research. (shrink)

Quantifiers in phrasal and clausal comparatives often seem to take distributive scope in the matrix clause: for instance, the sentence John is taller than every girl is is true iff for every girl it holds that John is taller than that girl. Broadly speaking, two approaches exist that derive this reading without postulating the wide scope of the quantifier: the negation analysis and the interval analysis of than-clauses. We propose a modification of the interval analysis in which than-clauses are not (...) treated as degree intervals but as degree pluralities. This small change has significant consequences: it yields a straightforward account of differentials in comparatives and it correctly predicts the existence of hitherto unnoticed readings, viz. cumulative readings of clausal comparatives. Finally, this paper also makes the case that using degree pluralities is conceptually appealing: it allows us to restrict the analysis of comparatives by mechanisms that are postulated independently in the semantics of pluralities. (shrink)

A key component of the susceptibility to cognitive biases is the ability to monitor for conflict between intuitively cued “heuristic” answers and logical principles. While there is evidence that pe...

For G a group definable in some structure M, we define notions of “definable” compactification of G and “definable” action of G on a compact space X , where the latter is under a definability of types assumption on M. We describe the universal definable compactification of G as View the MathML source and the universal definable G-ambit as the type space SG. We also point out the existence and uniqueness of “universal minimal definable G-flows”, and discuss issues of amenability (...) and extreme amenability in this definable category, with a characterization of the latter. For the sake of completeness we also describe the universal compactification and universal G-ambit in model-theoretic terms, when G is a topological group. (shrink)

In 1978 Jacques Derrida published a short text on Friedrich Nietzsche, entitled Spurs. Nietzsche’s Styles. Basing on it and on other of both authors’ writings, the article presents their understanding of truth, conceived metaphorically as a woman. The Nietzschean-Derridian concept of truth involves a mutual style of writing, therefore of thinking — since for the two philosophers language is an impassable sphere of thought. It turns out that philosophy — as an affirmation of the woman-truth — must rely on repeating (...) the existing notions and problems in new configurations, therefore on a continuous interpretation and on undertaking all over again the effort of writing. (shrink)

May Amusement Serve as a Social Courage Engine? According to Fredrickson's "Broaden-and-Built Theory of Positive Emotions" positive emotions have different effects in social life and are based on different mechanisms than negative emotions do. Moreover positive emotions vary among themselves - there are quality differences between them and they shall not be treated only as a single positive mood. Three simple studies presented here and inspired by the Fredrickson's theory demonstrate that amusement, in comparison to neutral condition as well as (...) to another positive emotion, may serve as a social courage engine. Amused participants were more courageous in the radio as well as in the TV interview and declared more courage in case of meeting new hypothetical person. (shrink)

Giovanni Sartori (1924-2017) was a founder and icon of contemporary political science. A number of his books and articles have become part of the theoretical and conceptual basis of the field, and of social science in general. This volume brings together selected essays that examine Sartori as a scholar, university professor and intellectual. It is unique in covering all three aspects of Sartori's academic work: comparative politics, social science methodology and political theory. General overviews of Sartori's contribution to political science (...) are complemented by chapters that focus on specific areas of his interest; and Sartori's theoretical and methodological contributions are examined alongside his extensive public appearances, which remain little known outside Italy. (shrink)

In this article, I present one view of Guardini’s ethics, to which he dedicated his late academic life. Christian ethics for Guardini is only a natural consequence of the whole Christian existence and thus unique. Therefore, it is fundamentally a christocentric ethics but it affirms also the being of man as creature and hence realistic. It is indeed based on the nature of man, but not natural in the biological sense. I focus on the interpretation of the good that is (...) never in Guardini’s eyes a mere concept, but objectively existing and concrete. I point out that ethics is always connected with the personal dimension, that man’s doing is radically a working-with-God, and that in and through action man grasps and perfects himself. Christian ethics is a participation in Christ’s properties and conformity to him, who is the personal and living norm of the new life. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to amend the Stalnakerian view of context in such a way that it can allow for an adequate treatment of a contextualist position regarding the Liar Paradox. I discuss Glanzberg’s contextualism and the reason why his position cannot be encompassed by the Stalnakerian view, as it is normally construed. Finally, I introduce the phenomenon I call “semantic dissonance”, followed by a mechanism accommodating the Stalnakerian view to the demands of Glanzberg’s contextualism.

We study the computational complexity of polyadic quantifiers in natural language. This type of quantification is widely used in formal semantics to model the meaning of multi-quantifier sentences. First, we show that the standard constructions that turn simple determiners into complex quantifiers, namely Boolean operations, iteration, cumulation, and resumption, are tractable. Then, we provide an insight into branching operation yielding intractable natural language multi-quantifier expressions. Next, we focus on a linguistic case study. We use computational complexity results to investigate semantic (...) distinctions between quantified reciprocal sentences. We show a computational dichotomy<br>between different readings of reciprocity. Finally, we go more into philosophical speculation on meaning, ambiguity and computational complexity. In particular, we investigate a possibility to<br>revise the Strong Meaning Hypothesis with complexity aspects to better account for meaning shifts in the domain of multi-quantifier sentences. The paper not only contributes to the field of the formal<br>semantics but also illustrates how the tools of computational complexity theory might be successfully used in linguistics and philosophy with an eye towards cognitive science. (shrink)

We introduce and study model-theoretic connected components of rings as an analogue of model-theoretic connected components of definable groups. We develop their basic theory and use them to describe both the definable and classical Bohr compactifications of rings. We then use model-theoretic connected components to explicitly calculate Bohr compactifications of some classical matrix groups, such as the discrete Heisenberg group ${\mathrm {UT}}_3({\mathbb {Z}})$, the continuous Heisenberg group ${\mathrm {UT}}_3({\mathbb {R}})$, and, more generally, groups of upper unitriangular and invertible upper triangular (...) matrices over unital rings. (shrink)

According to some interpreters, Foucault's encounter with the Greek and Roman ethics led him to reconsider his earlier work and to turn away from politics. Drawing mostly from Foucault's last and hitherto unpublished lecture course, this paper argues that Foucault's turn to ethics should not be interpreted as a turn away from his previous work, but rather as its logical continuation and an attempt to resolve some of the outstanding questions. I argue that the 1984 lectures on parrhesia should be (...) interpreted as Foucault's philosophical apology, as an attempt to defend himself against the charges of moral and epistemological nihilism, which were raised in response to his earlier work. In his last lectures, the Nietzschean Foucault somewhat surprisingly describes his earlier work as authentic Socratic philosophy and as ethical practice of freedom. In the conclusion, I assess the plausibility of Foucault's apology and speculate in which direction his work might have developed, had it not been cut off by his death. (shrink)

Both Hegel and the later Wittgenstein were concerned with the problem of how to begin speculation, or the problem of beginning. I argue that despite many differences, there are surprising similarities between their thinking about the beginning. They both consider different kinds of beginnings and combine them into complex analogies. The beginning has a subjective and an objective moment. The philosophizing subject has to begin with something, with an object. For Hegel, the objective moment is pure being. For Wittgenstein, the (...) objective moment is something that cannot be doubted. As regards the subjective moment, the philosophizing subject has to decide, without any reason, to conclude her quest for the presuppositionless beginning and finally begin at the beginning. The arational moment of this decision is echoed throughout any rational thought. Any application of a (rational) rule is, ultimately, a blind decision to apply this rule. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel psycholinguistic parser and tests it against experimental and corpus reading data. The parser builds on the recent research into memory structures, which argues that memory retrieval is content‐addressable and cue‐based. It is shown that the theory of cue‐based memory systems can be combined with transition‐based parsing to produce a parser that, when combined with the cognitive architecture ACT‐R, can model reading and predict online behavioral measures (reading times and regressions). The parser's modeling capacities are tested (...) against self‐paced reading experimental data (Grodner & Gibson, 2005), eye‐tracking experimental data (Staub, 2011), and a self‐paced reading corpus (Futrell et al., 2018). (shrink)

Cognitive architectures have often been applied to data from individual experiments. In this paper, I develop an ACT-R reader that can model a much larger set of data, eye-tracking corpus data. It is shown that the resulting model has a good fit to the data for the considered low-level processes. Unlike previous related works, the model achieves the fit by estimating free parameters of ACT-R using Bayesian estimation and Markov-Chain Monte Carlo techniques, rather than by relying on the mix of (...) manual selection + default values. The method used in the paper is generalizable beyond this particular model and data set and could be used on other ACT-R models. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present a concept of mind by the ethnologist Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff, as a precursor for a specific turn taking place in contemporary cognitive science. Such a turn is visible in the discarding of explanations focusing on brain or on other vehicles of cognitive processes, which are typical of traditional cognitive science. The followers of this traditional trend are united by the methodological assumption that the key to understanding cognitive processes lies in the precise (...) comprehension of the vehicle’s functioning. Currently, cognitive science is developing a paradigm describing cognition as being embodied, embedded and extended. Similarly, Shirokogoroff's research in the anthropology of religion is part of his general concept of mind understood to be a set of cognitive processes linked with a broadly viewed environment (combining its material, ecological, biological, cultural and ritual aspects). (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to argue in favour of the embodied music cognition paradigm, as opposed to traditional theories of musical mind. The thesis consists of three chapters. The goal of the first chapter is to examine computational music cognition, focusing on the main problem of this approach. In the second chapter, I will present and discuss Marc Leman’s EMC, that may serve as a response to the problems of the computational view of the musical mind. Although this (...) framework is interesting, it is unclear in several places. For that reason, I intend to enrich it with the references to the recent works on human mirror neuron system and enactivist views on music cognition. Given that, in the last chapter, I will answer the question, whether mental representations are necessary in music cognition. (shrink)

Preview: A relation is what connects two separated beings or what a being joins with itself; what is, in other words, in-between two beings or inside two parts of one being. Relations may be conceived as external or internal to those beings, as an essential part, or as separate beings of another nature. One usually cannot easily perceive or experience relations themselves. But the case is that relations must be something rather than nothing. They must be something since we use (...) relations and go around them all the time, in natural, casual, day-to-day life, as well as in philosophical, careful, and reflexive attitude. And, if they are something, one can think them. Some may say, that philosophers should think about what can only be thought. Who else could do this? So, here it is, a new Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture issue devoted to relations. (shrink)

Locke claims that a person’s identity over time consists in the unity of consciousness, not in the sameness of the body. Similarly, the phenomenological approach refuses to see the criteria of identity as residing in some externally observable bodily features. Nevertheless, it does not accept the idea that personal identity has to consist either in consciousness or in the body. We are self-aware as bodily beings. After providing a brief reassessment of Locke and the post-Lockean discussion, the article draws on (...) phenomenological arguments that show the body as lived, that is, lived as one’s own body, but also possibly as “other” or “strange.” Against what has been claimed in recent writing, especially in literature on Merleau-Ponty, the author argues that the “mineness” of the body and its “alterity” are not two mutually exclusive features. In the final part of the article, the author suggests that the becoming strange of one’s own body may legitimately be considered as a prominent experience of what it means to be a person. (shrink)

The article discusses the ecological aspects of John Milbank’s thought in the context of the growing climate crisis. For this purpose, the concept of integral ecology is interpreted in the spirit of Milbank’s integralism, which rejects the notion of “pure nature” as a manifestation of secularism and calls for theological grounding of the environmental discourse. This perspective allows us to see the limitations of the modern way of thinking, caught up in the metaphors of “conquest of nature” and “return to (...) nature.” As an alternative, the concept of “kenotic anthropocentrism” is proposed, which sees man as a rational, social, creative and religious animal, that somehow transcends his own nature, being called to union with God. On the one hand, such an approach proclaims the ontological superiority of man over other creatures, and on the other, it reminds us of his role as the guardian—and not the owner—of the Earth. Thus, it differs significantly from Clive Hamilton’s “modest anthropocentrism,” whose call to care for the environment is ultimately based on arbitrary freedom and the imperative of self-preservation. Milbank’s position is closer to Bruno Latour’s anthropocentrism emphasizing the role of man as a political representative of silent earthlings—rivers, mountains and animals. However, Milbank advocates a strong ontological hierarchy rejected by Latour, which makes him less sensitive to the material dimension of climate change. Moreover, Milbank’s militant anti-secularism may be an obstacle to a much needed broader discussion of the ecological crisis, even if his critique of modernity is hard to ignore. (shrink)

This text maps the history of debate on the authenticity of Plato's or pseudo-Plato's Alcibiades I.

We analyze model-theoretic connected components in extensions of a given group by abelian groups which are defined by means of 2-cocycles with finite image. We characterize, in terms of these 2-cocycles, when the smallest type-definable subgroup of the corresponding extension differs from the smallest invariant subgroup. In some situations, we also describe the quotient of these two connected components. Using our general results about extensions of groups together with Matsumoto–Moore theory or various quasi-characters considered in bounded cohomology, we obtain new (...) classes of examples of groups whose smallest type-definable subgroup of bounded index differs from the smallest invariant subgroup of bounded index. This includes the first known example of a group with this property found by Conversano and Pillay, namely the universal cover of [Formula: see text], as well as various examples of different nature, e.g. some central extensions of free groups or of fundamental groups of closed orientable surfaces. As a corollary, we get that both non-abelian free groups and fundamental groups of closed orientable surfaces of genus [Formula: see text], expanded by predicates for all subsets, have this property, too. We also obtain a variant of the example of Conversano and Pillay for [Formula: see text] instead of [Formula: see text], which was not accessible by the previously known methods. (shrink)

Philosophical views of habit were deeply influenced by Aristotle. If we understand habit in relation to hexis, to the acquired disposition to act in a certain way, then habit becomes a key phenomenon of ethics. According to the famous quotation, "It makes no small difference, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference."1 And yet we can understand habit also as a dull and (...) rigid mechanism, as something that moves us away from humanity, as we read in Immanuel Kant: "The reason for being disgusted with someone's acquired habits lies in the fact that the animal here predominates over the man."2 Is habit more an expression of our... (shrink)

Stanisław Lem, a philosopher and futurologist, in his many works devoted much attention to the condition of human and the relation between human and technology. He coined the term ‘autoevolution’ in the course of forecasting unlimited technological augmentation of human abilities. Nowadays, the term may be associated with the conceptions presented by transhumanism, a 20th-century-born philosophical movement which advocates radical transformation of Homo sapiens by means of the achievements of scientific and technological progress. Lem’s attitude towards such a transformation of (...) human is complicated yet ultimately critical due to the fact that it poses a threat to human culture as such. The phenomenon of autoevolution undermines existing values and raises a question of authenticity of a future posthuman. We examine dependence between technology and culture, present Lem’s conception of autoevolution and his philosophy of culture, then we sketch a post-metaphysical dispute about authenticity, and finally show that Lem’s thought belongs to one of the arguing sides. (shrink)

Szymanik (2007) suggested that the distinction between first-order and higher-order quantifiers does not coincide with the computational resources required to compute the meaning of quantifiers. Cognitive difficulty of quantifier processing might be better assessed on the basis of complexity of the minimal corresponding automata. For example, both logical and numerical quantifiers are first-order. However, computational devices recognizing logical quantifiers have a fixed number of states while the number of states in automata corresponding to numerical quantifiers grows with the rank of (...) the quantifier. This observation partially explains the differences in processing between those two types of quantifiers (Troiani et al. 2009) and links them to the computational model. Taking this perspective, below, we suggest the experimental setting extending the one by McMillan et al. (2005) and Troiani et al. (2009). (shrink)

In in the second half of the 1940s, Jan Patočka emphasized the essentially negative character of human existence. He thus found himself in the neighborhood of Sartre’s existentialism, Heidegger’s philosophy of being, and Hegel’s dialectic, and at the same time in opposition to schools of thought which either completely reject the substantive use of “the nothing,” such as Carnap’s positivism, or relativize it, like Bergson. It is the latter polemic, Patočka’s with Bergson, which is discussed in this article. The concept (...) of negativity in Patočka basically refers to the idea that human existence is defined by a capacity to adopt a distance toward what is pre-given, be it the reality of the physical world or the established habits and rules of a particular society. Negativity qua distance has in Patočka an absolute character. It is this claim that he defends in his critique of Bergson. The article attempts to reconstruct Patočka’s position. I claim that the wager on absolute negativity does not make Patočka a nihilist, but a philosopher of a negative holism, and, in a sense, even a moralist. Above a reconstruction of Patočka’s stance, I spell out some reservations focused especially on the systematic meaning of Patočka’s recourse to negativity. I suggest that negation is an indispensable part of a more complex existential structure Patočka is aiming at. The terms he uses for this structure include “thirst for the absolute,” “thirst for reality,” “restlessness of the heart” and “desire.” To translate these allusions onto a general plan, it is useful to talk about the capacity to establish differences that matter. As general as it seems, this turn of phrase can grasp both Patočka’s emphasis on negativity, and his emphasis on the absolute, the latter – nevertheless – not residing in a distance from being, but in differences established, maintained and abandoned by ourselves within being. (shrink)

Artykuł ma na celu wstępne przedstawienie Jacques’a Derridy jako filozofa historii. Rozwijane przezeń pojęcia okazują się wiązać z konkretną wizją dziejów. Wizja ta ujawnia się już od pierwszych tekstów Derridy i stanowi nie tyle jeden z pomniejszych wątków, ile główny temat jego myśli. W artykule skupiono się na wybranym eseju Derridy, który doprowadził do jego sporu z Michelem Foucaultem. Zestawienie tych dwóch – skądinąd obu uznawanych za poststrukturalistów – filozofów służy uwydatnieniu kluczowej roli, jaką problem historyczności pełni w dziele Jacques’a (...) Derridy. Tekst stanowi tym samym zachętę do rewizji statusu Derridy w polskiej humanistyce. (shrink)

Po Kartezjuszu wątpienie w istnienie Boga staje się zwolna elementem systematycznego myślenia. Wiek XVII to wyjście z ostatniego po średniowieczu stulecia, „które chce wierzyć” (Lucien Febvre), początek rewolucji naukowej i wyzwolenia od chrześcijańskich dogmatów. Taka wizja zdaje się przekonująca, potwierdzają ją pełne religijnych odniesień przednowoczesne teksty – czy jednak trzymanie się ich litery i rozwijanie na ich podstawie historii mentalności nie jest pochopne? Czy myślenie bez odwołania do Boga to specyficzne osiągnięcie nowoczesności? Polskie ujęcie filozofii wczesnonowożytnej spod znaku Leszka Kołakowskiego, (...) Stefana Swieżawskiego czy Krzysztofa Pomiana nie pozostawia wątpliwości: w epoce przednowoczesnej nie dało się myśleć o świecie, podmiocie czy wspólnocie bez Boga. Tymczasem należy wskazać na panujące przed XVII wiekiem stosunki władzy, uwarunkowania materialne (zwłaszcza wynalazek druku), sytuację wiedzy – a dalej na możliwe „sztuki działania” wbrew narzucanym schematom, w tym na zalążki pisemnego wyrażania nonkonformistycznych, groźnych dla samego autora refleksji. Każdą bowiem, nawet najszczelniej zamkniętą strukturę przebijają jej własne „linie ujścia”, każda ulega ciągłej autodekonstrukcji. Dzieje się to za pośrednictwem jednostek – dla omawianego okresu warto przyjrzeć się Mikołajowi z Kuzy, Pietro Pomponazziemu, Giordanowi Bruno i Michelowi de Montaigne. Nie dostrzegając w przednowoczesności takich jednostkowych możliwości myślenia bez Boga, a więc totalizując ją i ujednoznaczniając, reakcyjnie domagamy się jednolitości dla dzisiejszego świata. A przecież współczesność, jak i to, co ma dopiero nadejść, to zawsze różnorodność i wielość. Historia myślenia może i musi pomóc nam to rozumieć, byśmy nie popadali w – jakże nowoczesny – autorytaryzm. (shrink)

The article reconsiders a historical example of thinking about otherness. The example is the Essays by Michel de Montaigne, a piece of work from the early modern times which undermines the interpretation of the contemporary times as a modern age, i.e. supposedly more open, less dogmatic, and less hostile towards strangers. Four figures of otherness are taken into account: an infidel, a “savage,” a woman, and an animal, proving Montaigne’s particular openness. It turns out that the Essays induce a contemporary (...) man to revise his sense of historical superiority in regard to men from the previous centuries; they also let him develop a more just relationship with others of the present times. (shrink)

The problem of metaphor has come to a noteworthy revival in the analytical philosophy of today. Despite all progress that has been made, the majority of important studies consider the function of metaphor as an analogue to visual perception. Such comparison may be conceived as metaphor as well. In his late philosophy, Wittgenstein spent a lot of effort to explain the use of the expression "seeing as". I argue that his explanations can be transposed to the explanation of the function (...) of metaphor. Firstly, it is shown that all earlier attempts to do that are not satisfying. The occurrence of the expression "to see as" in everyday language led Wittgenstein to the elaboration of the notion of "aspect". Primarily these ideas should be employed in order to explain metaphors in everyday or even poetic language. My conclusion is that an internal relation can be perceived and thought of in the metaphor. (shrink)