Quality is usually considered to be an attribute of an object, its degree of excellence or, more subjectively, fitness for use. Stemming from this point of view, the goal of most ranking systems is to find efficient ways of discovering, or rather uncovering, the quality of specific products or services. However, from a social psychological perspective it seems that the notion of quality belongs predominantly to the realm of social relationships. We argue that quality exists mainly between the users of (...) an object, not within the object itself, and its functions are predominantly social, i.e. promoting interactions, creating a shared reality, or building social relationships. Quality is constructed in social interactions and used as a token therein. In the present paper we outline the social functions of quality, and discuss the implications of this perspective for designing more useful recommendation systems. (shrink)

Modern technology offers an increasing number of tools for teaching mathematics, but technology adoption in schools encounters many barriers. The Technology Acceptance Model explains that technology usage is dependent on intentions, which rest on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Less is known about the relationship between intentions and actual behaviour. In the current study we show that the level of cognitive investment on the part of the teachers, captured by the construct of Need for Cognition (NC), is crucial (...) in the use of technology in mathematical instruction, while controlling for a variety of background factors. Furthermore NC moderates the relationship between intentions and technology use, such that high NC weakens the relationship between the perceived usefulness of technology in pedagogy and its actual use. (shrink)

The paper has two goals. First, I reconstruct Nowak's model of provincialism. Second, I argue that there is no room in this model for an intellectual superpower. An intellectual superpower is not simply a paradigm that is buttressed by economic, political, and social resources. Rather it is a network of paradigms that recognize one another as such. In so doing, they create a new quality on the scientific arena that surpasses all single paradigms.

Contents: Leszek NOWAK, Marcin PAPRZYCKI: Introduction. ON THE NATURE OF SOCIAL SYSTEM. Ulrich K. PREUSS: Political Order and Democracy. Carl Schmitt and his Influence. Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA: A Paradox in Hobbes' Philosophy of Law. Stephen L. ESQUITH: Democratic Political Dialogue. Edward JELINSKI: Democracy in Polish Reformist Socialist Thought. Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA: The Master and Slave Configuration in Hegel's System. Maurice GODELIER: Lévi-Strauss, Marx and After. A reappraisal of structuralist and Marxist tools for analyzing social logics. Krzysztof NIEDZWIADEK: On the (...) Structure of Social System. Waldemar CZAJKOWSKI: Social Being and Its Reproduction. ON RATIONALITY AND CAPTIVITY. Marek ZIO??L??KOWSKI: Power and Knowledge. Leszek NOWAK: Two Inter-Human Limits to the Rationality of Man. Marcin PAPRZYCKI: The non-Christian Model of Man. An Attempt at a Psychoanalytic Explanation. Robert EGIERT: Toward the Sophisticated Rationalistic Model of Man. ON SOCIAL REVOLUTION. Leszek NOWAK: Revolution is an Opaque Progress but a Progress Nonetheless. Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA, Marcin PAPRZYCKI: How Do Enslaved People Make Revolutions? Grzegorz TOMCZAK: Is It Worth Winning a Revolution? Krzysztof BRZECHCZYN: Civil Loop and the Absorption of Elites. Richard C. MCCLEARY: What Makes Marxist Historical Materialism Objective? Grzegorz KOTLARSKI: Classes and Masses in Social Philosophy of Rosa Luxemburg. ON REAL SOCIALISM. Ernest GELLNER: The Civil and the Sacred. Witold MARCISZEWSKI: Economics and the Idea of Information. Why socialism must have collapsed? Leszek NOWAK, Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA, Marcin PAPRZYCKI: On Multilinearity of Socialism. Achim SIEGEL: The Overrepression Cycle in the Soviet Union. An Operationalization of a Theoretical Model. Krzysztof BRZECHCZYN: The State of the Teutonic Order as a Socialist Society. DISCUSSIONS. Richard MCCLEARLY: Socioanalysis and Philosophy. W??l??odzimierz HELLER: The Public and the Private in Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy. Methodological Remarks. Krzysztof BRZECHCZYN: Unsuccessful Conquest and Successful Subordination. A contribution to the theory of intersocial relations. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to propose an understanding of idealization in terms of Nowak’s unitarian metaphysics. Two natural interpretations of the procedure are critically discussed and rejected as inadequate. The first account of idealization is unable to explain why idealized factors cease to exert influence on the investigated magnitude. The second account of idealization solves this problem but does so at the cost of blurring the distinction between idealization and abstruction. Moreover, it faces the consequence that the (...) process of idealization instead of leading to a sharper understanding of phenomena will normally result in making the picture more and more probabilistic. I propose a third account of idealization in unitarian terms that solves all three problems. (shrink)

Table of ContentsAndrzej KLAWITER, Krzystof #ASTOWSKI: Introduction: Originality, Courage and Responsibility List of Books by Leszek NowakSelected Bibliography of Leszek Nowak's WritingsScience and Idealization Theo A.F. KUIPERS: On Two ...

Recenzja J. Haidt, Prawy umysł. Dlaczego dobrych ludzi dzieli religia i polityka?, przeł. Agnieszka Nowak-Młynikowska, Sopot, Smak Słowa 2014, 447 str.

Log-linear analysis is a practical tool for examining relationships, successfully applied in many fields of science. This paper discusses the topic of estimation of the chance of getting pregnant in couples that underwent ART insemination. The authors focus on finding significant interactions between variables, on the basis of which statistical models are built. With the use of results of log-linear analysis, a model predicting the chances of achieving a clinical pregnancy that contained interactions was successfully built. Moreover, it was more (...) complete than the model obtained with the use of logistic regression alone. (shrink)

Much of modern ethics is built around the idea that we should respect one another’s autonomy. Here, “we” are typically imagined to be adult human beings of sound mind, where the soundness of our mind is measured against what we take to be the typical mental capacities of a neurodevelopmentally “normal” person—perhaps in their mid-thirties or forties. When deciding about what constitutes ethical sex, for example, our dominant models hold that ethical sex is whatever is consented to, while a lack (...) of consent makes sex wrong.1 Consent, in turn, is analysed in terms of autonomous decision-making: a “yes” or “no” that reflects the free and informed will of our idealised, sound-minded adult. Whether such models provide adequate normative guidance for ethical, much less good, sex between neurotypical human adults is an open question.2 3 When it comes to the ethics of sexual activity between humans and non-humans—robots, say—or between humans who don’t fit the rational stereotype, we hardly know where to begin.4–7 It is therefore heartening to see a number of papers in this issue tackling the difficult question how to respectfully facilitate or respond to the needs, desires, and decisions of people with different kinds or degrees of autonomy.8 For example, Sumytra Menon and colleagues9 explicitly discuss the notion of “borderline capacity” and argue, in the medical domain, for shared and supportive decision-making practices to “foster the autonomy of patients with compromised mental capacity while being mindful of the need to safeguard their well-being.” Touching on a similar theme, Zahra Ladan 10 asks how we should conceive of liberty in the case of persons with certain inborn physical or mental limitations. Might it sometimes be necessary to …. (shrink)

The Lodz Film School has existed since 1948.... In the year of the school's jubilee, we decided to publish five selected MA theses written by Direction Department graduates. Three of th theses, written by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Marcel Łoziński and Wojciech Wiszniewski, concern documentary film, whereas the two remainingones written by Grzegorz Królikiewicz and Edward Żebrowski refer to fiction films.... Their authors, excellent Polish film-makers, presented their auteurs' concept they had at the beginning of their artistic careers which were carried out (...) and verified by them through their work on... subsequent film projects. We decided to combine those theses with five complementary essays in which film historians and theoreticians analyse these directors' films which followed in the course of their career in the context of the concepts described by the directors in their MA theses."--English section, page 6. (shrink)

The study aims to analyse the clinical proceedings in pregnant women diagnosed with brain death. Apart from the diagnostic premises and the patient’s rights, the ontological status of the foetus proves to be a severe problem. In reference to the principles of zeroth-order logic, the assumption of potential used by personalists is not a tautology.

Two different kinds of multiple-conclusion consequence relations taken from Shoesmith and Smiley and Galatos and Tsinakis or Nowak, called here disjunctive and conjunctive, respectively, defined on a formal language, are considered. They are transferred into a bounded lattice and a complete lattice, respectively. The properties of such abstract consequence relations are presented.

Pragmatics and dialectics are two disciplines which have been amongst the first and most important partners for argument studies in the exploration of the complex realm of communication. Treating argumentation as a construct consisting of premises and conclusion allows for investigating some interesting properties of the phenomenon of reasoning, but does not capture a variety of aspects related to the usage of natural language and dialogical context in which real-life argumentation is typically embedded. This special issue explores some of the (...) fascinating research questions which emerge when we move beyond logic into the territory of the pragmatics and dialectics of argument. (shrink)

Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (in: Almog, Perry, Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by King (Complex Demonstratives: a Quantificational (...) Account, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001) and Elbourne (Situations and Individuals, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005). Wolter (That’s That; the Semantics and Pragmatics of Demonstrative Noun Phrases. Ph.D. thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2006), however, has shown that complex demonstratives admit non-deictic interpretations only when a precise set of structural constrains are met. In this paper, I argue that Wolter’s results, properly understood, upend the philosophical status quo. They fatally undermine the ambiguity theory and demand a fundamental rethinking of the hidden argument approach. (shrink)

The article gives a tentative interpretation of the history of the Churches in Germany starting 1945 to 1989. Crucial points are the relations oftheGerman Churches to questions of modern pluralism, to questions of peace and war and to questions of the transformation of Churchstructures. Common points are mentioned between the Churches of the older FRG and the former GDR-Churches just so differences between them.

Despite its status at the heart of a closely related field, philosophers have so far mostly overlooked a phenomenon sociolinguists call ‘social meaning’. My aim in this paper will be to show that by properly acknowledging the significance of social meanings, we can identify an important new set of forms that discursive injustice takes. I begin by surveying some data from variationist sociolinguistics that reveal how subtle differences in the way a particular content is expressed allow us to perform importantly (...) different illocutionary actions, actions we use to do things like constructing a public persona and building a rapport with an audience. The social importance of these activities and the pervasiveness of our engagement in them means that the ethical stakes involved are high—substantial injustices may result if speakers from different social groups are differently empowered with regard to the illocutionary possibilities made available to them by variation. (shrink)

According to the mainstream position in the bioethical definition of death debate, death is to be equated with the cessation of an organism. Given such a perspective, some bioethicists uphold the position that brain-dead patients are dead, while others claim that they are alive. Regardless of the specific opinion on the status of brain-dead patients, the mere bioethical concept of death, according to many bioethicists, has the merit of being unanimous and univocal, as well as grounded in biology. In the (...) present article, we challenge such a thesis. We provide evidence that theoretical biology operates with a plurality of equally valid organismic concepts, which imply different conclusions regarding the organismal status of a brain-dead patient. Moreover, the theoretical biology concepts of an organism are very distant from the view on an organism that appears by way of bioethicists theorizing on death. We conclude that if death is to be understood as the cessation of an organism, there is no single correct answer to the question of whether a brain-dead patient is alive or dead. (shrink)

According to explanatory individualism, every action must be explained in terms of an agent's desire. According to explanatory nonindividualism, we sometimes act on our desires, but it is also possible for us to act on others' desires without acting on desires of our own. While explanatory nonindividualism has guided the thinking of many social scientists, it is considered to be incoherent by most philosophers of mind who insist that actions must be explained ultimately in terms of some desire of the (...) agent. In the first part of the paper, I show that some powerful arguments designed to demonstrate the incoherence of explanatory nonindividualism fail. In the second part of the paper, I offer a nonindividualist explanation of the apparent obviousness of belief-desire psychology. I argue that there are two levels of the intelligibility of our actions. On the more fundamental (explanatory) level, the question "Why did the agent do something?" admits a variety of folk-psychological categories. But there is another (formation-of-self) level, at which the same question admits only of answers that ultimately appeal only to the agent's own desires. Explanatory individualism results from the confusion of the two levels. (shrink)

The problem of idealization in empirical sciences is very rarely taken up in works concerned with the methodology of those sciences. It seems to be common knowledge that in advanced natural sciences references are made to concepts such as “perfectly rigid body,” “material point,” “perfect gas,” etc., but it remains a fact that the most important methodological concepts, concepts which have determined the present-day form of the philosophy of science, have been advanced without regard to the peculiarities of the procedure (...) mentioned above. And yet a moment's consideration suffices to raise doubts as to Carnap's physicalism and/or Popper's falsificationism if we just realize the trivial and commonly known truth that empirical sciences resort to idealizationism. For how are we to imagine a reduction of idealizational concepts to observation terms? And how are we to imagine that theorems which include idealizational concepts imply observation statements which refute, or at least are at variance with, those theorems? But it is a fact that such doubts have neither been raised by the authors of the conceptions mentioned above, nor have they been raised against them. (shrink)

There are exactly two nonfinitely axiomatizable algebraic matrices with one binary connective o such thatx(yz) is a tautology of . This answers a question asked by W. Rautenberg in [2], P. Wojtylak in [8] and W. Dziobiak in [1]. Since every 2-element matrix can be finitely axiomatized ([3]), the matrices presented here are of the smallest possible size and in some sense are the simplest possible.

The dissertation develops a conception of action based on the concept of practical task-responsibility rather than on the concept of intention. It answers two problems. First, it grounds the distinction between an action and a mere happening, thus meeting Wittgenstein's challenge to explain what is the difference between an agent's raising her arm and her arm rising? Second, it grounds the distinction between acting for a reason and acting while merely having a reason, thus meeting Davidson's challenge to give an (...) account of the explanatory force of reasons. ;One source of resistance to an account of action in terms of normative expectations rather than in terms of intentions comes from explanatory individualism. The explanatory individualist argues that it is ultimately the intentional attitudes of the agent rather than normative expectations of other people that are relevant to the way in which we explain one another's actions, and that they ought to figure in the account of the nature of action. I defend explanatory nonindividualism, according to which we sometimes act on our own intentions and desires but sometimes on the normative expectations and desires of others . Explanatory nonindividualism is fortified by a selectional account of the explanatory force of reasons. I demonstrate that Davidson's challenge can be met by identifying reasons with selectional criteria rather than with causes. ;In response to Wittgenstein's challenge, I propose that we understand what it is to be an action not in terms of a performance being intentional under a description, but in terms of it being reasonable to expect a performance of the agent under some description. Only one concept of reasonableness is necessary to make the distinction between actions and mere happenings, and I explicate that concept. In addition to accounting for actions that are intentional under some description, the account also captures cases that are not so straightforwardly captured by that criterion . Moreover, cases of so-called basic wayward causal chains are excluded from qualifying as actions. (shrink)

Biomedical sciences cannot answer the question who should be saved from death if not everyone can be. This is an ethical issue. However, we face exactly this question when deliberating on the criteria for organ allocation. The main aim of this article is to formulate a pluralistic theory of just distribution of organs, which incorporates the tenets of utilitarianism, egalitarianism and sufficientarianism. Each constituent theory adopts a different value as a criterion for organ allocation. For utilitarianism it is a health (...) benefit for the patient, for egalitarianism it is the ratio of deserts and health-related well being, for sufficientarianism what is important is that the candidate for a transplant be situated below the sufficientarian threshold. The article presents a proposal to reconcile these three competing theories. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to think that demonstratives are best represented as variables, sensitive not to the context of utterance, but to a variable assignment. Variablists typically explain familiar intuitions about demonstratives—intuitions that suggest that what is said by way of a demonstrative sentence varies systematically over contexts—by claiming that contexts initialize a particular assignment of values to variables. I argue that we do not need to link context and the assignment parameter in this way, and that we (...) would do better not to. (shrink)

The peculiarity of Marx's investigation method is the use of idealization, i. e. idealizing assumptions are introduced, the laws, being in force under these assumptions, are being established, and then these assumptions are being removed with the simultaneous modification of the law. This method has not been recognized in the contemporary methodology because it assumes the essentialist vision of reality while contemporary methodology developed from the phenomenalism which negates the differentiation between essence and experience.

In the twentieth century, due to the development of mechanical reproduction and press, photomontage became a popular means of communication – popular and diverse in its nature and methods of exploitation. It is one of the cultural phenomena related to the change of rhythm of life and a sense of its increased pace, and an impression of fragmentation of reality. This article questions the role of photomontage in such an experience. The said role is complex: sometimes photomontage allows for expression (...) of that experience, and sometimes it is meant to evoke it, in the spirit of modernity; it is both a tool of agitation and critique. In order to answer this question I shall assume the approach of Walter Benjamin, who diagnoses the crisis of experience and the loss of storytelling skills – and describes the potential of photography. This potential is differently approached by artists and scholars who point out contradictory purposes and results of using photomontage. Referring to various works of art shall make it possible to define the tensions characteristic of photomontage. Due to its plasticity and the ambiguity of a photograph, and the potential for contextualization and construction, photomontage can function in a hard to understand, rapidly changing world and address the fragmentation of experience. (shrink)

I have two aims for the present paper, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to show that a class of data originally described by Lynsey Wolter empirically undermine the leading treatments of complex demonstratives that have been described in the literature. The broader aim of the paper is to show that Wolter demonstratives, as I will call the constructions I focus on, are a threat not just to existing treatments, but to any possible theory that retains the (...) uncontroversial assumptions that relative clauses always form a constituent with the nouns they modify, and that semantic composition proceeds sequentially and locally, with the inputs to interpretation having the structure syntax tells us they do. (shrink)

Literatura odgrywa niekwestionowaną rolę w tworzeniu definicji medycyny, oferując różnorodność obrazów, które w swym metaforycznym wymiarze odnoszą się do ludzkiego życia. Fakt, iż medycyna stanowi gałąź sztuki, w bezmiarze której przesłanie wynikające z bogactwa prozy i poezji znajduje swój wyraz, podkreśla, iż owe dwa, pozornie niezwiązane ze sobą światy przenikają się wzajemnie, nadając sens własnej egzystencji. Literatura, która nie może odwołać się do medycznej rzeczywistości, nie może bowiem dotrzeć do duszy czytelnikai wpłynąć na jego wewnętrzną hierarchię wartości, podczas gdy medycyna, (...) obdarta z wielowymiarowości literackich symboli, staje się przestrzenią pozbawioną duchowości. (shrink)

Focusing on the analysis of Athens' relations with both Greeks and non-Greeks as recorded in extant fourth-century decrees, this paper challenges the applicability of the notion of Greek/barbarian antithesis to the interpretation of formal diplomatic exchanges between Athens and the non-Greek states. A comparison of the types of decrees and honors reveals a remarkable uniformity in the forms of Athens' foreign relations irrespective of the ethnicity of honorands. The distribution of honors among individuals and groups of recipients within single decrees (...) further demonstrates that the Athenian honorific system typically elevated individuals over communities they represented, suggesting that political differences between Athens and non-Greek states did not adversely influence the methods of exchanges between them. Apart from the provisions contained in the decrees, this paper also considers their function within the city as monuments that attest to the important place of philobarbaric discourse and practice in fourth-century Athens. (shrink)

The author analyses “The Merchant of Venice” by William Shakespeare, to highlight the transformation of the Christian body and the Jewish soul during the early stages of capitalism. He reveals that the Venice described by Shakespeare is a world without measure, in which money is the only value. People are objects of financial speculation and all of humanity is treated as a commodity, an exchange value. When Bassanio praises the advantages of Portia, he first mentions her ducats, and only after (...) that does he allude to her beauty and virtues of mind. The capitalism that is being formed in the eyes of the viewers mocks significant cultural, ethnic and religious differences. It buries them in heaps of money and then blurs them, forcing a new concept of man, whose existence differs little from plants and animals growing freely. In such a world, a game is the only strategy that allows for survival. In Venice, everyone pretends, wears a mask and lives in hypocrisy. This behaviour is typical of the “carnival” atmosphere. Masks separate people from themselves, covering up their tracks and blurring identities. By wearing them, they can hide behind “someone else”. (shrink)