This paper explores the integration of machine learning into economics and social sciences, assessing its potential impact and limitations. It introduces fundamental machine learning concepts and principles, highlighting the differences between the two disciplines, particularly the focus on causal inference in economics and prediction in machine learning. The paper discusses diverse applications of machine learning, from extracting insights from unstructured data to creating novel indicators and improving predictive accuracy, while also addressing challenges related to data quality, computational efficiency, and data (...) ownership. It emphasizes the importance of standardization, transparency, and ethical considerations in prediction tasks, recognizing that machine learning is a powerful tool but cannot replace economic theory. Ultimately, researchers remain optimistic about the transformative potential of machine learning in re-shaping research methodologies and generating new insights in economics and social sciences. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to show that rhetoric plays an important role in economics as a science and in economy as a social system. Our task is rather demonstrative, but it aims at stripping away the illusion that economics has acquired a status equal to the natural sciences, in which there is no place for subjectivism and ambiguity. Economics belongs, after all, to the realm of the social sciences and as such it is subject to the limitations of human (...) cognition and understanding. We show that economics as a science is not free from employing sophisticated methods of persuasion and rhetoric. Next, we also try to demonstrate that rhetoric can be a useful tool in creating economic reality. It does not have influence on economic processes per se, but it is helpful in constructing an institutional architecture of the economy by influencing public opinion and decision makers. (shrink)

W niewielkim zbiorze archiwaliów, pozostałych po klasztorze i kolegium jezuickim, które funkcjonowały w Nysie przez blisko półtora wieku, zachował się materiał interesujący ze względu na związek z historią teatru na Śląsku. W rękopiśmiennej księdze znajdujemy bowiem zestawione scenariusze spektakli wystawianych przez uczniów wspomnianego kolegium. W artykule przybliżam kontekst historyczny powstania tego dokumentu oraz jego znaczenie dla badań nad dziejami kultury śląskiej i europejskiej.

In September 2010, two Polish scholars, Slawomir Czapnik and Tomasz Krawczyk, conducted an interview with Zygmunt Bauman while being hosted at his home in Leeds. The conversation in Polish was recorded, but the recording files were – it seemed irrevocably – accidentally deleted. It was not until 2023 that Slawomir Czapnik found the audio files and decided to publish the conversation, having translated it into English. It provides a better understanding of the views of arguably one of the most eminent (...) – albeit hugely controversial – contemporary sociologists in the world, who died in 2017. On the one hand, the conversation is a document of its time, of the turn of the first and second decades of the 21st century and of the international realities of the so-called ‘war on terror’, but on the other hand it raises questions that are still relevant today about the legitimacy of political power in the modern world. It shows the shift from a concern with ‘security’ (the domain of social security, characteristic of the welfare state and solid modernity) to ‘safety’ (the domain of personal security, characteristic of the neoliberal, liquid phase of modernity). Bauman's reflections are extremely valuable today, because now – after the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia's aggression against Ukraine, the rise of tensions in the Middle East and the rise of the populist right in the world – there are the issues of international problems, the weakening of the nation-state and inability to solve global issues (including such basic ones as security) locally. The response of an increasingly vulnerable state is to intensify surveillance, a mechanism for population control. Bauman also draws attention to the extremely momentous issue of the just society and the fight against injustice. For Bauman, the sociological imagination must delve into how power works and what are its consequences for freedom and moral responsibility. (shrink)

We study the structure of analytic ideals of subsets of the natural numbers. For example, we prove that for an analytic ideal I, either the ideal {X (Ω × Ω: En X ({0, 1,…,n} × Ω } is Rudin-Keisler below I, or I is very simply induced by a lower semicontinuous submeasure. Also, we show that the class of ideals induced in this manner by lsc submeasures coincides with Polishable ideals as well as analytic P-ideals. We study this class of (...) ideals and characterize, for example, when the ideals in it are Fσ or when they carry a locally compact group topology. We apply these results to Borel partial orders to rederive a theorem of Todorcevic and to Borel equivalence relations to answer a question of Kechris and Louveau. As another application we give a characterization of σ-ideals of μ-zero sets for Maharam submeasures μ on the Cantor set which is to a large extent analogous to a characterization of the meager ideal due to Kechris and the author. (shrink)

The paper describes in detail the procedure of identification of the inner language and an inner logico of a physical theory. The procedure is a generalization of the original ideas of J. von Neuman and G. Birkhoff about quantum logic.

The set of design features developed by Charles Hockett in the 1950s and 1960s remains probably the most influential means of juxtaposing animal communication with human language. However, the general theoretical perspective of Hockett is largely incompatible with that of modern language evolution research. Consequently, we argue that his classificatory system—while useful for some descriptive purposes—is of very limited use as a theoretical framework for evolutionary linguistics. We see this incompatibility as related to the ontology of language, i.e. deriving from (...) Hockett’s interest in language as a product rather than a suite of sensorimotor, cognitive and social abilities that enable the use but also acquisition of language by biological creatures. After a reconstruction of Hockett’s views on design features, we raise two criticisms: focus on the means at the expense of content and focus on the code itself rather than the cognitive abilities of its users. Finally, referring to empirical data, we illustrate some of the problems resulting from Hockett’s approach by addressing three specific points—namely arbitrariness and semanticity, cultural transmission, and displacement—and show how the change of perspective allows to overcome those difficulties. (shrink)

Wśród prekursorów nowoczesnej nauki o religii David Hume zajmuje szczególne miejsce. Znany jest bowiem nie tylko jako dociekliwy badacz racjonalności religii, należącej do kluczowych problemów filozofii religii, ale także badacz naturalnych podstaw religii, zaprezentowanych zwłaszcza w „Naturalnej historii religii”. Jednym z najważniejszych dokonań Hume’a jest wyraźne oddzielenie, a zarazem komplementarność, dwóch sposobów badania religii, z których jeden koncentruje się na racjach wierzeń religijnych, zaś drugi na przyczynach występowania określonych wierzeń i praktyk. W wystąpieniu swoim argumentuję, że Hume’owski sposób myślenia o (...) religii nie tylko stanowił ważny etap na drodze do nowoczesnej nauki o religii, ale również wykazuję, że ta ostatnia w znacznym stopniu inspirowała się i nadal inspiruje Hume’owską krytyką religii. (shrink)

We prove that for every family I of closed subsets of a Polish space each Σ 1 1 set can be covered by countably many members of I or else contains a nonempty Π 0 2 set which cannot be covered by countably many members of I. We prove an analogous result for κ-Souslin sets and show that if A ♯ exists for any $A \subset \omega^\omega$ , then the above result is true for Σ 1 2 sets. A theorem (...) of Martin is included stating that this result is also true for weakly homogeneously Souslin sets. As an application of our results we derive from them a general form of Hurewicz's theorem due to Kechris, Louveau, and Woodin and a theorem of Feng on the open covering axiom. Also some well-known theorems on finding "big" closed sets inside of "big" Σ 1 1 and Σ 1 2 sets are consequences of our results. (shrink)

We prove that every analytic set in ω ω × ω ω with σ-bounded sections has a not σ-bounded closed free set. We show that this result is sharp. There exists a closed set with bounded sections which has no dominating analytic free set, and there exists a closed set with non-dominating sections which does not have a not σ-bounded analytic free set. Under projective determinacy analytic can be replaced in the above results by projective.

We construct free algebras in the variety generated by the equivalential algebra with conjunction on dense elements and compute the formula for the free spectrum of this variety. Moreover, we describe the decomposition of free algebras into directly indecomposable factors.

We study the variety generated by the three-element equivalential algebra with conjunction on the dense elements. We prove the representation theorem which let us construct the free algebras in this variety.

The technological advances of the 20th century resulted in the creation of the Internet and its introduction into everyday life on a global scale. The Internet provides access to information and the sale and purchase of goods. Medications are also subject to trade. Their sale is conducted by online pharmacies and their global turnover amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars. Medications ordered over the Internet are sent by mail all over the world. Considering the events of recent years, we (...) cannot exclude the risk of a terrorist attack through online pharmacies. Terrorists can establish such companies, legally or illegally, or acquire ones already existing. Parcels, which are highly trusted by the customers of online pharmacies, can, for example, be contaminated with dangerous materials. The sale of online medications in the international system is potentially dangerous and requires international regulation. (shrink)

Words of gratitude and deep respect for Maria Dmitrivna Kultaeva from her colleague Sławomir Sztobryn.

Nowadays, computers are in common use, both in experimental and theoretical research. It is worth considering if the implementation of a new, universal research tool has significantly changed the science of the end of 20th century. The crucial question which I will try to answer is if computers have revolutionized the scientific research. In order to find the answer, I will describe modern digitally aided science, taking into consideration the research conducted in the greatest elementary physics laboratory. Subsequently, I will (...) refer to the classic concept of scientific revolution proposed by Thomas S. Kuhn. Finally, I will answer the question related to digital revolution in science. (shrink)

John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument purports to demonstrate that syntax is not sufficient for semantics, and, hence, because computation cannot yield understanding, the computational theory of mind, which equates the mind to an information processing system based on formal computations, fails. In this paper, we use the CRA, and the debate that emerged from it, to develop a philosophical critique of recent advances in robotics and neuroscience. We describe results from a body of work that contributes to blurring the divide (...) between biological and artificial systems; so-called animats, autonomous robots that are controlled by biological neural tissue and what may be described as remote-controlled rodents, living animals endowed with augmented abilities provided by external controllers. We argue that, even though at first sight, these chimeric systems may seem to escape the CRA, on closer analysis, they do not. We conclude by discussing the role of the body–brain dynamics in the processes that give rise to genuine understanding of the world, in line with recent proposals from enactive cognitive science. (shrink)

Although pantomimic scenarios recur in the most important historical as well as current accounts of language origins, a serious problem is the lack of a commonly accepted definition of “pantomime”. We scrutinise several areas of study, from theatre studies to semiotics to primatology, pointing to the differences in use that may give rise to misunderstandings, and working towards a set of definitional criteria of “pantomime” specifically useful for language evolution research. We arrive at a definition of pantomime as a communication (...) mode that is mimetic; non-conventional and motivated; multimodal ; improvised; using the whole body rather than exclusively manual; holistic; communicatively complex and self-sufficient; semantically complex; displaced, open-ended and universal. So conceived, “pantomime” is a near synonym of “bodily-mimetic communication” as envisaged by Donald and Zlatev. On a wider plane, our work may help organise some of the terminology and discussion in language evolution, e.g. by drawing a clear distinction between gestural and pantomimic scenarios or by specifying the relation between pantomimic and multimodal scenarios. (shrink)

§1. Introduction. Ideals and filters of subsets of natural numbers have been studied by set theorists and topologists for a long time. There is a vast literature concerning various kinds of ultrafilters. There is also a substantial interest in nicely definable ideals—these by old results of Sierpiński are very far from being maximal— and the structure of such ideals will concern us in this announcement. In addition to being interesting in their own right, Borel and analytic ideals occur naturally in (...) the investigations of compact subsets of the space of all Baire class 1 functions on a Polish space, see [12, 18]. Also, certain objects associated with such ideals are of considerable interest and were quite extensively studied by several authors. Let us list here three examples; in all three of them I stands for an analytic or Borel ideal.1. The partial order induced by I on P: X ≥I Y iff X \ Y ϵ I and the partial order.2. Boolean algebras of the form P/I and their automorphisms.3. The equivalence relation associated with I: XEI Y iff X Δ ϵ I.In Section 4, we will have an opportunity to state some consequences of our results for equivalence relations as in 3. (shrink)

We show that each non-compact Polish group admits a continuous action on a Polish space with non-smooth orbit equivalence relation. We actually construct a free such action. Thus for a Polish group compactness is equivalent to all continuous free actions of this group being smooth. This answers a question of Kechris. We also establish results relating local compactness of the group with its inability to induce orbit equivalence relations not reducible to countable Borel equivalence relations. Generalizing a result of Hjorth, (...) we prove that each non-locally compact, that is, infinite dimensional, separable Banach space has a continuous action on a Polish space with non-Borel orbit equivalence relation, thus showing that this property characterizes non-local compactness among Banach spaces. (shrink)