The aim of this paper is to propose foundations for a formal model of representation and numerical evaluation of a possibly broad class of arguments, including those that occur in natural discourse. Since one of the most characteristic features of everyday argumentation is the occurrence of convergent reasoning, special attention should be paid to the operation ⊕, which allows us to calculate the logical force of convergent arguments with an accuracy not offered by other approaches.

A novel account of semantic information is proposed. The gist is that structural correspondence, analysed in terms of similarity, underlies an important kind of semantic information. In contrast to extant accounts of semantic information, it does not rely on correlation, covariation, causation, natural laws, or logical inference. Instead, it relies on structural similarity, defined in terms of correspondence between classifications of tokens into types. This account elucidates many existing uses of the notion of information, for example, in the context of (...) scientific models and structural representations in cognitive science. It is poised to open a new research program concerned with various kinds of semantic information, its functions, and its measurement. (shrink)

The novel "Mephisto" is one of the most well-known texts by Klaus Mann. Its fame results not only from its literary virtuosity, but also and primarily from the enormous media attention which was caused by the novel’s publication. The decision of the Federal Constitutional Court, in which it dealt with the relationship between freedom of art and other constitutionally guaranteed rights of individuals, launched the unprecedented career of this novel. This article describes Klaus Mann’s political views and their development in (...) the 1920s during the time when the National Socialist movement was strengthening and the writer made the decision to emigrate. The essay deals with the circumstances of creating the novel considering both biographical and political issues. The novelist is described from the perspective of the reality of the 1930s during the National Socialist regime and the time after his emigration. The concern of the article is not a literary analysis of the novel, but to take a look at the novelist’s development up until the moment of finishing his work as a protest against National Socialism. Another goal of the essay is to analyze the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court, which regards the balance between freedom of art and other basic rights. Considering the synergy of both methodological approaches and the interdisciplinary view on the problem, the article represents a novel attempt to give a complex view on the relationship between art and the reality of a totalitarian state and between the relationship art–state in the conditions of a democratic state. (shrink)

The paper offers a critical analysis of the research program for formalizing informal logic proposed by Douglas Walton and Thomas Gordon. Since their proposal is based on employing the Carneades Argumentation System, this paper aims at answering two questions: what are main benefits of applying CAS as means for formalizing informal logic, and what are possible extensions of Walton and Gordon’s research program and modifications in employing CAS?

The author argues that behind the apparent randomness of interactions between cabdrivers and their fares in Warsaw is a temporal structure. To capture this temporal structure, the author introduces the notion of a linking ecology. He argues that the Warsaw taxi market is a linking ecology, which is structured by religious time, state time, and family time. The author then focuses on waiting time, arguing that it too structures the interactions between cabdrivers and their fares. The author makes a processual (...) argument that waiting time has been restructured by the postsocialist transformation, but only because this transformation has been continually encoded through the defensive and adaptive strategies of cabdrivers responding to the repetitive and unique events located across the social space. The author concludes with the claim that linking ecologies are a recurring structure of the social process and that they form the backbone of globalization, financialization, and mediatization. (shrink)

In the book, I argue that the mind can be explained computationally because it is itself computational—whether it engages in mental arithmetic, parses natural language, or processes the auditory signals that allow us to experience music. All these capacities arise from complex information-processing operations of the mind. By analyzing the state of the art in cognitive science, I develop an account of computational explanation used to explain the capacities in question.

The logic of change formulated by K. Świętorzecka, has its motivation coming from the Aristotelian theory of substantial change which is undrstood as a transformation consisting in the disappearing and becoming of individual substances. The transition: becoming/disapearing (and conversely) is expressed in by the primitive operator C, to be read: it changes that …, and it is mapped by the progressively expanding language. We are interested in attributive changes of individual substances. We consider a formalism with two non-normal and not (...) mutually definable operators of possible and necessary change, inspired by Aristotelian distinction of accidental and essential attributes. From we adopt the idea that temporal concepts are defined via change operators, and the idea of an expanding language. In what follows, We axiomatise our new logic and describe its semantics, giving the proof of its completeness. We compare our formalism with selected modal logics. (shrink)

We compared the processing of natural language quantifiers in a group of patients with schizophrenia and a healthy control group. In both groups, the difficulty of the quantifiers was consistent with computational predictions, and patients with schizophrenia took more time to solve the problems. However, they were significantly less accurate only with proportional quantifiers, like more than half. This can be explained by noting that, according to the complexity perspective, only proportional quantifiers require working memory engagement.

Assent is an important ethical and legal requirement of paediatric research. Unfortunately, there are significant differences between the guidelines on the details of assent.

Despite the continuous emphasis on globalization, we witness increasing divisions and divisiveness in all domains of human activities. One of the reasons, if not the main one, is the intellectual fragmentation of humanity, compared in the title to the failed attempt at building the Biblical Tower of Babel. The attempts to reintegrate worldview, fragmented by the specialization of education (C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures) and expected to be achieved through reforms in curricula at all levels of education, were based on (...) the assumption that the design of a curriculum should focus on the wide distribution of subjects of study, as if the distribution was the goal. The key point is not the distribution of themes, but the development of skills in the integration of knowledge. The quantitative assessment of the width of knowledge by the number of disciplines is of secondary importance. We cannot expect the miracle that students without any intellectual tools developed for this purpose would perform the job of integration, which their teachers do not promote or demonstrate, and which they cannot achieve for themselves. There are many other reasons for the increasing interest in making inquiries interdisciplinary, but there is little progress in the methodology of the integration of knowledge. This paper is a study of the transition from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity, and further, to transdisciplinarity, with some suggestions regarding the use of methodological tools of structuralism and the choice of a conceptual framework. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the (...) study of “mindreading” and debates on emotions. We claim that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals towards the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences. (shrink)

The fall of the nineteenth century abounded in discoveries of natural laws, that is, strict and unequivocal rules of the development of life. These laws stated for example that ontogeny of individuals repeats, or recapitulates, phylogeny of the species; that big and specialized forms originate in evolution from small and unspecialized ones, while the reverse is not true; that endothermic animals are larger-sized and more compact in cool than in warm climates, and so on. Louis Dollo, a Belgian palaeontologist, proposed (...) the so-called law of irreversibility of evolution which stated that an organic structure lost in evolution cannot reappear with all the peculiarities of its design. This law seems indeed to be true but not particularly original. It was Heraclitus who first observed that one could not enter the same river twice. Dollo's law says essentially the same thing. The flow of evolutionary events combines so many processes in so many ways that past evolutionary events cannot recur exactly. “What is done, is done forever”. Time itself introduces asymmetry into the evolutionary process. (shrink)

We present the propositional logic LEC for the two epistemic modalities of current and stable knowledge used by an agent who system-atically enriches his language. A change in the linguistic resources of an agent as a result of certain cognitive processes is something that commonly happens. Our system is based on the logic LC intended to formalize the idea that the occurrence of changes induces the passage of time. Here, the primitive operator C read as: it changes that, defines the (...) temporal succession of states of the world. The notion of current knowledge concerns variable components of the world and it may change over time. We represent it by the primitive operator k read as: the agent currently knows that, and assume that it has S5 properties. The second type of knowledge, symbolized by the primitive operator K read as: the agent stably knows that, relates to constant components of the world and it does not change. As a result of the axiomatic entanglement of C, K and k we show that stable knowledge satisfies axioms of S4.3. K and k modalities are not mutually definable, stable knowledge implies the current one and if the latter never changes, then it comes to be stable. The combination of K and k with the idea of an expanding language allows questioning of the so-called perfect recall principle. It cannot be maintained for both types of knowledge just because of changes in the vocabulary of the agent and possibly the growing spectrum of possible states of the world. We interpret LEC in the semantics of histories of epistemic changes and show that it is complete. Finally, we compare our logic with selected epistemic logics based on the concept of linear discrete time. (shrink)

Aristocracy -- Body and family -- Gender and memory -- Wisdom and heresy -- In the holy places -- Modernities.

W 1983 roku Benjamin Libet wraz ze współpracownikami po raz pierwszy wykazał, że w prostym działaniu dobrowolnym świadoma intencja nie pełni funkcji inicjującej. Czasowy przebieg tego typu działania wskazuje również, że intencja oraz samo działanie to produkty procesów nieświadomych. Na podstawie wyniku Libeta oraz wybranych koncepcji psychologicznych Daniel Wegner zaproponował teorię pozornej mentalnej przyczynowości, w ramach której intencja to rodzaj konstruktu umożliwiającego agentowi zrozumienie własnego zachowania w kategoriach przyczynowych, gdzie jego stan mentalny (intencja) jawi mu się jako przyczyna, a działanie (...) jako skutek. Ujęcie Wegnera rodzi jednak pytanie, jaka jest faktyczna relacja pomiędzy intencjami, a celami kształtującymi nasze decyzje. Biorąc pod uwagę wyjaśnienie amerykańskiego psychologa, nie możemy być pewni, że te dwa elementy mają ze sobą jakiś związek. Może to prowadzić do zaskakującego wniosku, że nasza świadoma wola jest w gruncie rzeczy iluzją. Korzystając z wyników badań Read’a Montague nad mechanizmami ustanawiania i osiągania celów wskazuję na alternatywną możliwość rozumienia roli intencji. Zgodnie z analizą Montague, możemy postulować, że przynajmniej w wybranych przypadkach treść intencji działania oraz przebieg zachowań celowych oparte są na tej samej abstrakcyjnej reprezentacji. Znaczy to, że interpretacja świadomej woli, jako przydatnej iluzji jest za szeroka, gdyż znamy (wskazane w tekście) przypadki, kiedy treść intencji jest tożsama z reprezentacją pełniącą rolę nagrody w systemie ustanawiania i osiągania celów. (shrink)

National Socialism did not only constitute a political doctrine; it was also a kind of worldview that left its mark on German and pan­-European culture of the 20th century. The drastic changes that were linked to Hitler’s takeover of power confronted writers and poets with a completely new reality and wholly new conditions of the creative process. Those who could not or would not emigrate had to submit themselves to the policies and norms decreed by the National Socialists. National Socialism (...) – a conglomerate of different ideologies and ideologemes – perverted certain middle­-class values and ultimately aimed towards the total subjugation of all areas of life, culture being among them. The fact that the German middle­-class partly shared the values propagated by the Nazis led to an overhasty and unjust assessment of the attitude of writers belonging to the so­-called ‘Inner Emigration’. The article at hand outlines the principles of National Socialist cultural politics as well as its relationship to artists. The complicated creative situation of writers and poets in the Third Reich will be shown by representative examples. (shrink)

Book review: Łukasz Hardt, Economics Without Laws. Towards a New Philosophy of Economics, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017, pp. 220.

The paper outlines various concepts of rationality, their characteristics and consequences. In the first, most general part, the metaphysical, instrumental and discursive rationality is distinguished. The following part focuses on instrumental rationality and the rational choice theory and ordinal and cardinal utility, expected utility and game theory, respectively. All those concepts are summarised as being the most mathematically elegant and mostly decidable and helpful in the decision-making process. Giving primacy to individual preferences and withholding the judgment on their “objective” value, (...) they are also devoid of double standards. They are, however, strongly normative and weakly coincide with actual agents’ behaviour. Empirical findings on agents’ decision making seem to demonstrate their irrationality, unless we introduce into the analysis different concepts of rationality, namely based on costs efficient heuristics, inclusive fitness and ecological rationality. They are discussed respectively, and although they seem better to explain the set of humans’ seemingly irrational behaviour, they are likely week in predicting that behaviour. They are also losing their normative dimension and thus cease to be helpful in decision making. Applying the particular theory of rationality, either descriptively or normatively, seems to depend strongly on the environment, which can be characterised by its extension from a small to a large world. The more the small world’s features an environment reveals, the more effective is the application of the particular model of rationality. Beyond the small worlds, rule stochasticity, underspecification and misspecification and the only reasonable method are consecutive trials and errors, which eventually may reduce the large world to the small one. (shrink)

In the paper I try to define some basic ideas and sketch a style of Marek Siemek’s epistemological reflection and its influence on the notion of do called “meaning of history”. I referee some elements of his interpretation of Kant and Hegel as a background to paradox of “meaning of the history”—the paradox of its necessary transcendence and immanence, the contradiction between a history as an eschatology, and history as a “project”, a dialectic of sense and non-sense. The conclusion is (...) following: the “history” for Siemek is the becoming of self-sufficiency of the “modern spirit” and therefore a tragicomedy in the Hegelian sense. It excludes any transcendent point of view or any utopia. (shrink)

The Steprāns forcing notion arises as quotient of the algebra of Borel sets modulo the ideal of σ-continuity of a certain Borel not σ-continuous function. We give a characterization of this forcing in the language of trees and use this characterization to establish such properties of the forcing as fusion and continuous reading of names. Although the latter property is usually implied by the fact that the associated ideal is generated by closed sets, we show that it is not the (...) case with Steprāns forcing. We also establish a connection between Steprāns forcing and Miller forcing thus giving a new description of the latter. Eventually, we exhibit a variety of forcing notions which do not have continuous reading of names in any presentation. (shrink)

Artykuł jest zaproszeniem do ponownego namysłu nad nienową i niekoniecznie oryginalną kwestią — rolą metafory w pisarstwie naukowym. Bezpośrednim pretekstem jest metafora kompasu, mapy i treningu, a w innym planie „starych bukłaków, do których wlewa się młode wino”. Figur tych używa Sebastian Gałecki jako swoistego zwieńczenia swojej rozprawy Etyka chrześcijańska dla postchrześcijańskiej epoki, konfrontującej koncepcje: etyki sprawności charakteru (cnoty) (Alasdair MacIntyre), sumienia (John Henry Newman) i nowej teorii prawa naturalnego (John Finnis). Pozostawiając na uboczu istotę treści rozprawy, próbuję rozpoznać kilka (...) kwestii i zagrożeń związanych ze stosowaniem przez autorów metafor. Uchodzą one, w nomenklaturze Umberto Eco, za „gorące” i metodologicznie podejrzane elementy tak samej refleksji, jak i sposobu pisania w nauce. Mimo wątpliwości i zastrzeżeń wobec metafory jako figury „nienaukowej”, chciałbym bronić prawa do jej poprawnego używania w filozofii, szczególnie – etyce. Za przykład takiego właśnie użycia uważam ich zastosowanie w książce Sebastiana Gałeckiego. (shrink)

We consider the notion of everyday language. We claim that everyday language is semantically bounded by the properties expressible in the existential fragment of second–order logic. Two arguments for this thesis are formulated. Firstly, we show that so–called Barwise's test of negation normality works properly only when assuming our main thesis. Secondly, we discuss the argument from practical computability for finite universes. Everyday language sentences are directly or indirectly verifiable. We show that in both cases they are bounded by second–order (...) existential properties. Moreover, there are known examples of everyday language sentences which are the most difficult in this class (NPTIME–complete). (shrink)

This paper addresses the following question: Can one and the same utterance token, in one unique speech situation, intentionally and conventionally perform a plurality of illocutionary acts? While some of the recent literature has considered such a possibility Perspectives on pragmatics and philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp 227–244, 2013; Johnson in Synthese 196:1151–1165, 2019), I build a case for it by drawing attention to common conversational complexities unrecognized in speech acts analysis. Traditional speech act theory treats communication as: a dyadic exchange (...) between a Speaker and a Hearer who trade illocutionary acts endowed with one and only one primary force. I first challenge assumption by discussing two contexts where plural illocutionary forces are performed in dyadic discussions: dilemmatic deliberations and strategic ambiguity. Further, I challenge assumption by analyzing poly-adic discussions, where a speaker can target various participants with different illocutionary acts performed via the same utterance. Together, these analyses defend illocutionary pluralism as a significant but overlooked fact about communication. I conclude by showing how some phenomena recently analyzed in speech act theory—back-door speech acts New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 144–164, 2018) and dog-whistles New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 360–383, 2018)—implicitly presuppose illocutionary pluralism without recognizing it. (shrink)

We present a temporal logic of branching time with four primitive operators: |$\exists {\mathcal {C}}$| – it may change whether; |$\forall {\mathcal {C}} $| – it must change whether; |$\exists \Box $| – it may be endlessly unchangeable that; and |$\forall \Box $| – it must be endlessly unchangeable that. Semantically, operator |$\forall {\mathcal {C}}$| expresses a change in the logical value of the given formula in every state that may be an immediate successor of the one considered, while |$\exists (...) {\mathcal {C}}$| expresses a change in the logical value of the given formula in some state that is a possible immediate successor. |$\forall {\mathcal {C}} $| and |$\exists {\mathcal {C}}$| are not normal operators, they are not mutually definable and have unusual properties: |$\forall {\mathcal {C}} A\leftrightarrow \forall {\mathcal {C}} \neg A$| and |$\exists {\mathcal {C}} A \leftrightarrow \exists {\mathcal {C}} \neg A$| are axioms. Operators |$\exists \Box $| and |$\forall \Box $| express endless unchangeability in some and all paths, respectively. Our axiomatization contains two infinitary rules that allow one to obtain |$\exists \Box A$| from infinitely many combinations of formulas with |$A, \neg, \forall {\mathcal {C}}, \land $|⁠, and to get |$\forall \Box A$| from infinitely many combinations of formulas with |$A, \neg, \exists {\mathcal {C}}, \land $|⁠. We show that our formalism is complete by presenting a bridge between our logic and logic |$\textsf {UB}$|⁠, which is a fragment of |$\textsf {CTL}$| in which until operators does not occur. (shrink)

Dialectical approaches traditionally conceptualize argumentation as a discussion in which two parties debate on “two sides of an issue”. However, many political issues engender multiple positions. This is clear in multi-party online deliberations in which often an array of competing positions is debated in one and the same discussion. A proponent of a given position thus addresses a number of possible opponents, who in turn may hold incompatible opinions. The goal of this paper is to shed extra light on such (...) “polylogical” clash of opinions in online deliberation, by examining the multi-layered participation in actual online debates. The examples are drawn from the readers’ discussions on Osama bin Laden’s killing in online versions of two British newspapers: The Guardian and The Telegraph. As a result of the analysis, a distinction between sides, positions, and cases in argumentative deliberation is proposed. (shrink)

In this article I address the following question: When are reformulations in argumentative criticisms reasonable and when do they become fallacious straw men? Following ideas developed in the integrated version of pragma-dialectics, I approach argumentation as an element of agonistic exchanges permeated by arguers’ strategic manoeuvring aimed at effectively defeating the opponent with reasonable means. I propose two basic context-sensitive criteria for deciding on the reasonableness of reformulations: precision of the rules for interpretation (precise vs. loose) and general expectation of (...) cooperativeness (critical vs. constructive). On the basis of analysis of examples taken from online political discussions, I argue that in some contexts, especially those that are critical and loose, what might easily be classified as a straw man following conventional treatment should be taken as a harsh, yet reasonable, strategic argumentative criticism. (shrink)

The focus of this special issue of Theory & Psychology is on explanatory mechanisms in psychology, especially on problems of particular prominence for psychological science such as theoretical integration and unification. Proponents of the framework of mechanistic explanation claim, in short, that satisfactory explanations in psychology and related fields are causal. They stress the importance of explaining phenomena by describing mechanisms that are responsible for them, in particular by elucidating how the organization of component parts and operations in mechanisms gives (...) rise to phenomena in certain conditions. We hope for cross-pollination between philosophical approaches to explanation and experimental psychology, which could offer methodological guidance, in particular where mechanism discovery and theoretical integration are at issue. Contributions in this issue pertain to theoretical integration and unification of psychology as well as the growing importance of causal mechanistic explanations in psychological science. (shrink)

The predictive processing account of action, cognition, and perception is one of the most influential approaches to unifying research in cognitive science. However, its promises of grand unification will remain unfulfilled unless the account becomes theoretically robust. In this paper, we focus on empirical commitments of PP, since they are necessary both for its theoretical status to be established and for explanations of individual phenomena to be falsifiable. First, we argue that PP is a varied research tradition, which may employ (...) various kinds of scientific representations, differing in the scope of empirical commitments they entail. Two major perspectives on PP qua cognitive theory may then be distinguished: generalized vs. hierarchical. The first one fails to provide empirical detail, and the latter constrains possible physical implementations. However, we show that even hierarchical PP is insufficiently restrictive to disallow incorrect models and may be adjusted to explain any neurocognitive phenomenon–including non-existent or impossible ones–through flexible adjustments. This renders PP a universal modeling tool with an unrestricted number of degrees of freedom. Therefore, in contrast with declarations of its proponents, it should not be understood as a unifying theoretical perspective, but as a computational framework, possibly informing further theory development in cognitive science. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that some aspects of cognitive phenomena cannot be explained computationally. In the first part, I sketch a mechanistic account of computational explanation that spans multiple levels of organization of cognitive systems. In the second part, I turn my attention to what cannot be explained about cognitive systems in this way. I argue that information-processing mechanisms are indispensable in explanations of cognitive phenomena, and this vindicates the computational explanation of cognition. At the same time, it has (...) to be supplemented with other explanations to make the mechanistic explanation complete, and that naturally leads to explanatory pluralism in cognitive science. The price to pay for pluralism, however, is the abandonment of the traditional autonomy thesis asserting that cognition is independent of implementation details. (shrink)

The paper gives a survey of known results related to computational devices (finite and push–down automata) recognizing monadic generalized quantifiers in finite models. Some of these results are simple reinterpretations of descriptive—feasible correspondence theorems from finite–model theory. Additionally a new result characterizing monadic quantifiers recognized by push down automata is proven.

We present the logic$${\mathsf {LCB}}$$LCBwhich is expressed in a propositional language constantly enriched by new atomic expressions. Our formal framework is the propositional doxastic logic$${\mathsf {KD45}}$$KD45with the belief operator$${\mathcal {B}}$$B, extended by the$${\mathcal {C}}$$Coperator, to be readit changes that.... We describe the changing beliefs of an agent who uses progressively expanding language. The approach presented here allows us to weaken pragmatic objections to the so-called principle ofnegative retrospectionaccepted in$${\mathsf {KD45}}$$KD45and the problem oflogical omniscience. In what follows, we present the expanding (...) propositional language used in our formalism, interpreted using an epistemic version of Kripke semantics. Next, we give a syntactic characterization of logic$${\mathsf {LCB}}$$LCBand prove the soundness and completeness of$${\mathsf {LCB}}$$LCBin respect to our semantics. Finally, we compare the idea of expanding language with the notion ofagent awarenessand we relate our formalism to two epistemic temporal logics. (shrink)

In this article I scrutinise a crucial tension in understanding the debate over shale gas production in Europe. On the one hand, analyses predominantly grasp the debate in terms of pro-and-con dialectics, as if the pro-shale gas camp faced the anti-shale gas camp in a dyadic clash of opposing voices. On the other hand, it is commonly recognised that this debate is driven by multi-party and multi-position argumentative dynamics. In this broader context, I focus on one pivotal contribution to the (...) debate – Gazprom’s press release from October 2013 outlining Russia’s energy giant’s strategy of dealing with unconventional gas production. I employ concepts and methods of argumentative discourse analysis to contend that an arguer to a multi-party debate – argumentative polylogue – faces a number of constraints and opportunities that cannot be adequately grasped in terms of dyadic pro-and-con dialectics. The analysis reveals how Gazprom needs to simultaneously design its discourse to address a number of other parties who might also disagree among themselves: from Greenpeace to European Union governments to shale gas companies. I show why and how a stakeholder analysis used in organisational communication might lead to a better understanding of this form of multi-party public argumentation. (shrink)

A pervasive aspect of human communication and sociality is argumentation: the practice of making and criticizing reasons in the context of doubt and disagreement. Argumentation underpins and shapes the decision-making, problem-solving, and conflict management which are fundamental to human relationships. However, argumentation is predominantly conceptualized as two parties arguing pro and con positions with each other in one place. This dyadic bias undermines the capacity to engage argumentation in complex communication in contemporary, digital society. This book offers an ambitious alternative (...) course of inquiry for the analysis, evaluation, and design of argumentation as polylogue: various actors arguing over many positions across multiple places. Taking up key aspects of the twentieth-century revival of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, the polylogue framework engages a wider range of discourses, messages, interactions, technologies, and institutions necessary for adequately engaging the contemporary entanglement of argumentation and complex communication in human activities. (shrink)

The paper examines both the phenomenology of the manic self as well as critical aspects of manic neurobiology, focusing, with respect to both domains, on manic temporality. We argue that the distortions of lived time in mania exceed mere acceleration and are fundamental for manic affectivity. Mania involves radical acceleration and radical asynchronicity, which result in an instantaneous existence. People with mania rebel against the facticity of reality and suffer from an existential leap towards the future, in which the self (...) abandons normal temporal boundaries. Excerpts from the interviews with persons with mania who experienced psychosis illustrate this phenomenon. Commenting upon disrupted circadian rhythms in mania and the role of lithium in its treatment the paper posits manic temporality as the link through which manic phenomenology and manic neurobiology intertwine. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generally-available scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositional implementation of the Lasersohnian pragmatic-halos account of imprecision—one that represents clusters of similar meanings as Hamblin alternatives. In the theory that results, existential (...) closure over alternatives mediates between alternative-sets and meanings in which imprecision has been resolved. I then articulate a version of this theory in which the alternatives are not related meanings but rather related utterances, departing significantly from Lasersohn’s original conception. Although such a theory of imprecision is more clearly ‘metalinguistic’, the evidence for it from metalinguistic comparatives in English is surprisingly limited. The overall picture that emerges is one in which the grammatical distinction between ordinary and metalinguistic comparatives tracks the independently motivated distinction between vagueness and imprecision. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on a problem related to teleological theories of content namely, which notion of function makes content causally relevant? It has been claimed that some functional accounts of content make it causally irrelevant, or epiphenomenal; in which case, such notions of function could no longer act as the pillar of naturalized semantics. By looking closer at biological questions about behavior, I argue that past discussion has been oriented towards an ill-posed question. What I defend is a (...) Very Boring Hypothesis: depending on the representational phenomenon and the explanatory question, different aspects might be important, and it is difficult to say a priori which ones these might be. There are multiple facets to biological functionality and causality relevant for explaining representational phenomena, and ignoring them will lead to unmotivated simplifications. In addition, accounting for different facets of functionality helps dispense with intuition-based specifications of cognitive phenomena. (shrink)