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Artykuł przedstawia model nadawczego aktu referencji komunikatywnej. Jest on ufundowany na dwóch innych aktach: akcie semantycznej referencji oraz akcie wczytania świata w adresata (akcie przypisania adresatowi roli odbiorcy). Oba akty są wzajemnie sprzężone poprzez akt metareferencji, dzięki któremu zanika Quine’owski efekt referencyjnego niezdeterminowania. Akt metareferencji jest wywoływany przez akt przypisania sobie roli nadawcy. Z kolei ten akt jest wywoływany przez akt wczytania świata w odbiorcę. Funkcją aktu metareferencji jest „wykonanie” fuzji aktu referencji semantycznej z aktem wczytania świata w adresata. Nad tym ostatnim aktem jest ufundowany lokowania odbiorcy w świecie, a nad nim akt konstytuowania ścieżki komunikacyjnej łączącej nadawcę z odbiorcą. W zależności od rodzaju aktu lokowania odbiorcy w świecie, konstytuowane ścieżki komunikacyjne mogą należeć do trzech kategorii: zakończonych, jedno-promiennych; zakończonych, wielo-promiennych oraz otwartych wielo-promiennych. Typ ścieżki determinuje typ więzi fizycznej łączącej nadawcę ze światem wczytanym w adresata. Nad aktem referencji semantycznej, skierowanym do adresata, jest ufundowany akt typizacji odbiorcy. Ten ostatni akt wraz z aktem wczytania świata w odbiorcę stanowią ufundowanie dla aktu konstytuowania bramek komunikatywnych w świecie wczytanym w odbiorcę. Bramki te determinują oczekiwany przez nadawcę sposób kwitowania odbioru transmisji komunikatywnej, przesyłanych do odbiorcy wiadomości na dany temat i w określony, oczekiwany sposób. Dzięki wszystkim wymienionym aktom składowym, nadawca ustanawia metrykę typizacyjną odbiorcy, czyli sposób, w jaki odbiorca jawi się nadawcy w procesie transmisji aktu referencji komunikatywnej.

The Lvov-Warsaw School in Philosophy – as the very name suggests – was connected mainly with two academic centers: universities in Lvov and Warsaw. However, it had a broader impact. The members of this school were active also at other universities, in particular in Cracow, Vilnius and Poznań. The aim of the paper is to present and analyze the connections of Lvov-Warsaw School with the university in Poznań.

Apophatic theology is an approach in theology that emphasizes the limitation of human language and concepts in describing the nature of the Divine. Rooted in ancient religious traditions, apophatic theology has gained attention in contemporary discourse for its potential convergence with the scientific method. This paper expands on a novel application of this approach in which the formal methods of science such as logic and mathematics are engaged to inquire into how God thinks and to what degree the modes of human reasoning can be projected on the nature of the Divine mind. This application has been proposed by Michał Heller and is referred to as the logical apophatism. In the course of the analysis carried out in this paper more in-depth understanding of the logical apophatism has been obtained by contrasting it with classical approaches to negative theology such as the Triplex Via and supplementing with recent advances within the cognitive sciences. It is concluded that Heller’s use of the apophatic approach is manifestly non-standard and its novelty consists in the shift of emphasis from the negative character of the language of theology to the logic of the Divine mind and the logic that underpins the workings of the Universe.

The aim of this paper is to show the place of legal analogy in Kant’s introduction of the concept of transcendental deduction. After remarks on Kant’s use of the term “deduction,” transcendental deduction is characterised as the method justifying necessary statements about objects. It is argued that this method has normative elements. This leads to asserting similarities between epistemic obligation and legal obligation in the framework of transcendental philosophy.

The article A Cultural History of the 19th Century Novel presents a project on the same subject, and discussed in accordance with the logic of developing the idea. Its beginning is a reflection on the 19th century that failed to await a binding that differs from a system of oppositions (work-creativity, progress-tradition, individualism-collectivism, activism-passivism, etc.). The author of the paper proposes to acknowledge the history of the (realist) novel told anew as a factor that binds "the long 19th century." The terms "realism" and "realistic" detach here from their simplest meanings, become a synonym for multifarious narrative matter that while sticking to the general rules of probability (and often even breaking them), it plays its own games with the reality. Conceived of in this mode, the 19th c. realist novel claims its cultural history embedded in all aspects of social and literal reality, from hearth and home of authors to abstract developmental lines of novelistic genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I attempt to address some of the themes of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus with the aim of their deconstructionist interpretation. My analysis is based on David Gunkel’s book Deconstruction (MIT Press 2021). Based on some of its findings, I show how the Tractatus allows deconstruction and its practice to be thought. I show that the graphic structure of signs is crucial for the young Wittgenstein’s analysis and that it justifies the metaphysical findings in favor of which he argues.

While the Catholic intellectual tradition upholds the uniqueness of humans, much contemporary scientific research has come to the opposing conclusion that humans are not significantly different from other animals. To engage in robust dialogue around the question of human uniqueness, we utilize Aquinas’s model of disputatio to focus on an attribute of human beings that is unexplored in the literature – namely, the human capacity to garden – and address five scientific and philosophical objections to our position that the capacity to garden makes humans distinct. Engaging with various branches of science, we demonstrate that human capacities and modes of gardening are not only incrementally different, but also fundamentally different in kind, from those of nonhuman creatures. Philosophically, we utilize the power-object model of division and Aristotle’s categorization of knowledge to express the difference in kind between human beings and other animals. These responses allow us to set aside each major objection.

Copyright of Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej is the property of Redakcja Przegladu Socjologii Jakosciowej and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studia Migracyjne Przegląd Polonijny is the property of Wydzial Studiow Miedzynarodowych i Politycznych UJ oraz Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article is an attempt to analyze the factors determining the effectiveness of verbal communication. The author, with reference to radio information messages, analyses the role of selected suprasegmental elements and describes disorders in their realization affecting the logic of utterances and the precision of conveyed meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annals of Philosophy / Roczniki Filozoficzne is the property of John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the theory of law in terms of the extent to which it is part of jurisprudence, on the one hand, and a philosophical pursuit, on the other. The question is explored considering the historical development of the legal sciences and the situation of Polish theory of law in the latter half of the twentieth century. Also, the author relies on the analysis of selected theoreticallegal concepts, notably the so-called multiplane theory of law and the views thought of Zygmunt Ziembiński. The conclusions suggest that philosophy is inevitable in jurisprudence.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi2.07 W artykule omawiam teorię prawdy zaproponowaną przez Haima Gaifmana z perspektywy radzenia sobie z różnymi problematycznymi zdaniami. Zamierzam pokazać, że koncepcja ta narażona jest na poważne zastrzeżenia, tak samo jak związana z nią teoria Saula Kripkego. Gaifman punktem wyjścia swojej teorii czyni łamigłówkę silnego kłamcy. W celu jej rozwiązania postuluje, by wartości logiczne przypisywać nie zdaniom-typom, lecz ich egzemplarzom. Przyjmuje ponadto, że wartość logiczna danego zdania-egzemplarza zależy nie tylko od leksykalnych i strukturalnych własności odpowiadającego mu zdania-typu, ale także od jego umiejscowienia w sieci powiązań zachodzących pomiędzy poszczególnymi zdaniami-egzemplarzami. Dwa egzemplarze tego samego zdania-typu mogą mieć różne wartości logiczne. Przedstawiona teoria jest więc paradygmatem kontekstualnej teorii prawdy. Pojęcie zdania-egzemplarza Gaifman zastępuje ogólniejszym od niego pojęciem znacznika. Wartość logiczna jest przypisywana znacznikowi przez odpowiedni algorytm (tzw. pointer semantics). Artykuł zawiera omówienie zarówno aparatu technicznego teorii Gaifmana, jak i jego wad.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi2.06 Regardless of the form it may take, the process of translation still tends to be viewed as a technical activity, a cumbersome yet necessary operation to be performed in pursuit of higher goals. Yet as a phenomenon, with its profoundness it seems to be calling for closer attention. Thus the following work aims to prove how relevant the notion of translation is for the philosophical debate—specifically, for the enquiry into the nature of truth as considered from the pragmatic perspective. Firstly then, theories of the two fathers of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce’s and William James’s, will be briefly recalled. Subsequently, the analysis will expose the role of translation process in each account. Recognition of the translative element will shed a new light on Peirce’s and James’s dispersed remarks concerning truth and offer an interesting ground on which they may be consolidated. Finally, the study yields a broader perspective on the idea of translation process as such, underscoring its philosophical potential.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi2.01 When J. L. Austin first presented his work on speech acts, it concentrated primarily on explaining how our utterances can change the non-linguistic reality around us. A new fruitful area of study explaining how saying something can constitute doing something else than saying was established, and for a very long time—in fact, until this day—philosophers debate what makes a promise a promise and not just a plan, what distinguishes an assertion from a conjecture, and what kind of mental states are required of a speaker for her illocution to be successful. The original framework, as presented by Austin’s colleague, John Searle, has shaped a vast landscape of many very different research projects, such as explaining the normative structure underlying performing speech acts, exploring the connections between illocutions and other pragmatic phenomena such as implicature and presupposition, or investigating how speech acts influence the conversational scoreboard, to name just a few. Yet another area of research centres on applying speech act theoretic devices to tackle apparently distant problems in philosophy of language, such as reference, disagreement or lying.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi2.03 Insinuations are indirect speech acts done for various reasons: a speaker S may insinuate P (i) because an insinuation is more polite, and S can save face by non-explicitly saying P (Brown, Levinson, 1987; Searle, 1975), (ii) because S can deny having insinuated P and avoid the responsibility of explicitly stating P, or (iii) because S perceives herself to be in a competitive rather than cooperative conversation, and she wants to pursue her interests strategically (Asher, Lascarides, 2013; Camp, 2018; Lee, Pinker, 2010; Pinker et al., 2008). These views assume that to insinuate P, S must also intend to use the deniability of P for dealing with a possible non-cooperative hearer. I argue that this requirement is too strong and falls short of accounting for cases in which S intentionally performs a deniable indirect speech act, but S has no intention to use that deniability.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi2.05 Artykuł jest próbą opisu presupozycji w sensie Strawsona przy użyciu aparatury pojęciowej teorii aktów mowy. Porównanie dwóch pojęć, presupozycji propozycjonalnej Strawsona z prezupozycją jako warunkiem przygotowawczym mocy illokucyjnej, prowadzi do wniosku, iż są to zupełnie różne pojęcia. Tymczasem w świetle intuicji językowej, dodatkowo opartej na pracy Austina (1962), wydaje się, że istnieje tylko jeden rodzaj presupozycji: warunki przygotowawcze. To oznaczałoby, iż presupozycja propozycjonalna presuponowana przez dane zdanie jest, w pewnym sensie, redukowalna do warunku przygotowawczego czynności illokucyjnej wykonywanej przez wypowiedzenie tego zdania. Ta hipoteza jest tutaj uzasadniana przez podanie przykładów presupozycji propozycjonalnych, presuponowanych przez zdania używane do wykonania elementarnych aktów illokucyjnych różnych typów.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi2.04 Korta and Perry (2011) argue that the object a speaker refers to with a demonstrative expression combined with a pointing gesture is determined by her directing intention rather than by her demonstration. They acknowledge that our use of the ordinary concept of “what is said” is affected by our judgements about the speaker’s responsibility for the results of her careless pointing; however, they claim that the effects are perlocutionary and have no bearing on determining the referential content of the speaker’s act. I argue that the consequences of careless pointing are illocutionary and play a role in determining demonstrative reference. I also distinguish between two types of referential content which are attributable to the speaker’s utterance and shape its discursive behaviour: what is intended, which is determined by the speaker’s directing intention, and what is public, which depends on what she can legitimately be held responsible for.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi2.02 This paper offers a systematic classification and characterization of speech acts and their norms. Recently, the normative approach has been applied to various speech acts, most notably to constatives. I start by showing how the work on the norms of assertion has influenced various approaches to the norms of other speech acts. I focus on the fact that various norms of assertion have different extensions, i.e., they denote different clusters of illocutions as belonging to an assertion. I argue that this has consequences for theorising about norms of other speech acts and generates certain arbitrary divisions. In the central part, I analyse two groups of speech acts. Firstly, ordinary speech acts, like predictions or retractions. Secondly, I indicate how the normative view can be extended to so-called ancillary speech acts, like presuppositions or implicatures. I end with a discussion of possible extensions of the normative approach, focusing on the debate on lying.

Between 11–14 February 2021 the first international Philosophical Workshop organized by The Lvov–Warsaw School Research Center (LWSRC) and Kazimierz Twardowski Philosophical Society of Lviv (KTPSL) took place in the on–line version due to the ongoing COVID–19 pandemic. The working languages of the event were Polish, Ukrainian and English. The coordinators’ goal was to refer to the tradition of seminar of Kazimierz Twardowski, who was not only a distinguished philosopher but also a great educator, to stimulate interest and support for the young generation of researchers into the heritage of the Lvov–Warsaw School (LWS). It is claimed that due to Twardowski’s unprecedented didactical engagement he managed to upbring dozens of Professors like Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Stefan Baley, Leopold Blaustein, Tadeusz Czeżowski, Izydora Dąmbska, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, tanisław Leśniewski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Władysław Witwicki.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.09 In the paper, I argue against Dummett’s and Stanley’s objections to the direct reference theory. Dummett and Stanley make use of the notorious descriptive names to formulate the objection against Kaplan’s argument in favour of the direct reference theory. Kaplan argued that difference in modal behaviour of sentences is a reason to regard some singular terms appearing in the sentences as directly referential. Dummett ad Stanley argue, on the other hand, that in the case of descriptive names and the descriptions used to fix the reference of the names, the modal difference between sentences arises merely from the fact that descriptive names are rigid, while descriptions are not. There is no reason then to claim that being directly or indirectly referential has anything to do with the modal differences between sentences. What I attempt to show in the paper is that Dummett and Stanley made wrong assumptions about the modal properties of descriptive names and the descriptions that are used to fix the reference of such names. In Section 1, I characterise descriptive names and discuss some controversies that they create. Section 2 is devoted to the review of Kaplan’s argument for the direct reference theory, while Section 3 presents Dummett’s and Stanley’s arguments against direct reference. In section 4, I raise two preliminary objections against Dummett’s and Stanley’s positions. In Section 5, I discuss in detail “the great mystery” of rigidity of descriptive names which in my opinion lies at the bottom of the whole issue of descriptive names and direct reference. I argue, contrary to Dummett and Stanley, that descriptive names and their mother descriptions have the same modal properties. The last section includes conclusions and presents how the results from the previous parts of the paper affect the arguments of Dummett and Stanley.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.06 Philosophers discuss whether we should commit ourselves to fictional objects or not. There is a test—quite widespread among philosophers—to settle the matter: if fictional objects are required to give an adequate semantic/pragmatic analysis of either intra-fictional or extra-fictional sentences, then we are committed to them; if we can account for this analysis without them, we are not so committed. I am going to consider this test and I will claim that on its own it cannot be considered a definitive test.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.07 The chief purpose of this paper is to advance a defence of the old-fashioned view that empty names are neither proper names nor any other kind of interpretable expressions. A view of this sort usually makes it easy to account for the meaning of first-order sentences in which they occur in subject position: taken literally, they express no fully-fledged particular propositions, are not truth-evaluable, cannot be used to make assertions and so on. Yet, semantic issues arise when those very sentences are embedded in the scope of propositional attitude verbs. Such (intensional) constructions, indeed, turn out to be literally meaningful, truth-evaluable, and eligible for making assertions. The novel solution put forward here is to combine a version of sententialism with the idea that de dicto reports play a distinctive kind of metalinguistic expressive function. Roughly, that of enabling the ascriber to make explicit a mismatch between the way the embedded sentences are used by the ascribee and the way they are ordinarily used ̶ and, in turn, a mismatch between the way the (empty) names occurring in them are used by the ascribee and the way they are ordinarily used. Fictional names are then regarded as a mere subset of empty names. Accordingly, the above strategy is applied to account for the meaning and use of parafictional (and fictional) sentences and fictional vocabulary in general.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.10 This paper advances the thesis that the proper names of some institutions, such as the names of universities, heads of state and certain positions or agencies, inherit the linguistic types of the nouns which denote the basic category of the objects that the names refer to, e.g., “university”, “school” or “company”. A reference by those names may select particular aspects of institutions, in the same way that “city” or “book” selects the physical, legal or informational aspects of objects in the extension of the nouns. This view is based on Asher’s and Pustejovsky’s conception of dot-type semantics.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.05 In this article, I argue for two theses. The first is that, among different existing accounts of proper name semantics, indexicalism—a stance that treats proper names as indexical expressions—is best suited to explaining various phenomena exhibited by the use of proper names in fictional discourse. I will discuss these phenomena and compare the solutions offered by traditional descriptivist and causal-historical theories of proper name reference with those proposed by indexicalists. Subsequently, I will offer a novel account of indexicalism about proper names, which uses the apparatus of so-called hybrid expressions (Ciecierski, 2020; Künne, 1992; Predelli, 2006) as an alternative to traditional Kaplanian semantics for demonstratives. I offer an argument explaining why, among the variety of indexical views, one should favour such a hybrid theory over other available ones (e.g., Pelczar, Rainsbury, 1998; Rami, 2014) based on the analysis of “distributed utterances” (McCullagh, 2020) and statements that employ more than one fictional context.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.08 This paper argues that García-Carpintero’s theory of proper names (the Mill-Frege theory) and his theory of fiction-making do not work well together. On the one hand, according to the Mill-Frege theory, proper names have metalinguistic senses which are involved in ancillary presuppositions. These metalinguistic senses and the name-bearing relation depend on acts of naming that create words for referential use. On the other hand, his theory of fiction-making claims that when the creator of a fiction uses sentences, she is not really performing the speech acts that one typically performs with those uses in default contexts; instead, they are merely pretended acts. Specifically, when she uses the sentences that typically perform speech acts of naming in default contexts, she merely pretends to do so. In this situation, these acts do not establish a name-bearing relation and thus these acts do not have a semantic significance. This result entails a flawed conceptualization of the speech act of fiction-making; specifically, one where such speech act is rendered defective.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.04 Fictional characters elicit prima facie conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, a fictional character seems linked to the particular work of fiction (a novel, a poem, a movie, etc.) in which it appears: Ulysses is described in one way in Homer’s epic poems, in another way in Virgil’s Aeneid, and in a still different way in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is natural to distinguish Homer’s Ulysses from Virgil’s and Dante’s ones, since each of them has specific properties. On the other hand, we have the strong temptation to think that Ulysses is the same fictional character that persists in the passage from one poem to another, despite the change of features. The article tackles this kind of problems by focusing on the cognitive side. By adopting the theory of mental files, I will argue that all issues on the identity of literary characters here presented can be addressed without assuming the existence of fictional objects. Presumption of co-reference between multiple depictions of a given literary character is represented in our mind by means of a network of files, each one indexed to a work of fiction in which the character appears. Indexed files have a meta-representational function, so they do not need acquaintance with real objects. Linked indexed files do not refer, but still a unique reference is presuppose. They would have the same referent, if there was one.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.03 The paper focuses on fictional discourse, discourse about fiction and dynamic relations between them. The immediate impulse came from François Recanati and his recent analysis of parafictional statements (performed by uttering sentences like “in Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes is a detective who solves mysteries”). Confrontation of basic theoretical assumptions concerning functions of fictionals names, status of fictional characters, the role of pretence, etc. (Sections 1 and 2) results in an alter¬native analysis: unlike Recanati’s version, it does not assume the switch to the mode of pretence as an ineliminable part of parafictional statements (3, 4). The author’s aim is not to replace one analysis by its rival but to show that the same sentence can be used not only to perform various functions, but also to perform the same (here: parafictional) function in various ways—and generally to demonstrate the variety of language games going on in this sphere (5). Special attention is paid to their specific dynamics, including fluctuation between “serious” and fictional mode of speech and re-evaluations of the status of previous utterances, serving to preserve the continuity of conversation or restore it on a new basis (6).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.11 E. E. Constance Jones (1848–1922) was one of the first women to study philosophy at the University of Cambridge. On her view, “Dorothea” (from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch) applies to a fictional character, which has existence in fiction, and “fairy” applies to fairies, which have existence in imagination. She proposes a novel account of negative existentials, on which “fairies are non-existent” is both meaningful and true, given that there are at least two kinds of existence: one that fairies have (so that we can talk about them) and another that they lack (so that we can truly say that they “are non-existent”). Contrary to Russell’s objection in The Principles of Mathematics, accounting for negative existentials does not require distinguishing existence and being, nor does it require rejecting the existential theory of judgment (according to which every sentence is about something that exists).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.02 Fictional characters do not really exist. Names of fictional characters refer to fictional characters. We should divorce the idea of reference from that of existence (the picture of the name as a tag has limited applications; the Predicate Calculus, with its existential quantifier, does not adequately reflect the relevant concepts in natural language; and model theory, with its domains, might also have been misleading). Many puzzle-cases are resolved this way (among other things, there is no problem assigning negative existential statements the appropriate truth values). And fictional characters, although not existing, have real powers through their representations, which are real.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.01 This special issue of Semiotic Studies is devoted to proper names, and continues to some extent the line of research discussed in the contributions to the special issue of Organon F, 28(1), on names and fictions. Modes of existence of proper names pose interesting challenges and research problems for semiotics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of literature. Contributions to this issue concentrate mainly on fictional names, fictional discourse, and narrative fiction, but also on empty names, descriptive names, and names of institutions. The authors employ and compare different theoretical approaches, and the discussion may have important consequences for theories of meaning and reference, and for ontology.

The foundations of mathematics cover mathematical as well as philosophical problems. At the turn of the 20th century logicism, formalism and intuitionism, main foundational schools were developed. A natural problem arose, namely of how much the foundations of mathematics influence the real practice of mathematicians. Although mathematics was and still is declared to be independent of philosophy, various foundational controversies concerned some mathematical axioms, e.g. the axiom of choice, or methods of proof (particularly, non-constructive ones) and sometimes qualified them as admissible (or not) in mathematical practice, relatively to their philosophical (and foundational) content. Polish Mathematical School was established in the years 1915–1920. Its research program was outlined by Zygmunt Janiszewski (the Janiszewski program) and suggested that Polish mathematicians should concentrate on special branches of studies, including set theory, topology and mathematical logic. In this way, the foundations of mathematics became a legitimate part of mathematics. In particular, the foundational investigations should be conducted independently of philosophical assumptions and apply all mathematically accepted methods, finitary or not, and the same concerns other branches of mathematics. This scientific ideology contributed essentially to the remarkable development of logic, set theory and topology in Poland.

Copyright of Studia Socjologiczne is the property of Studia Socjologiczne and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This is a review of the book Jedność i wielość logik modalnych (The Unity and Diversity of Modal Logics) edited by Marcin Tkaczyk. The book contains discussions of the most recent results of contemporary modal logic, focusing on regular modal logics, epistemic logic, and temporal logic. The book comprises four chapter, each of which deals with selected formal-logical and philosophical problems associated with modal logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a survey of contemporary quidditism, understood as two interrelated metaphysical positions -- recombinatorial quidditism, which is an account of the nature of possibilities, and individuation quidditism, which is concerned with the problem of how to individuate properties. I have three aims: to examine the commitments and consequences of both views, to investigate the relationships between them, and to sketch the logic of the dispute between structuralism and quidditism. I explain how these views relate to Ramseyan humility, according to which we cannot know the fundamental structure of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If you are reading this, there is a good chance that you are interested in conditionals. Also, depending on how deep your interest is, you may recognize the first sentence of this paragraph as an example of a conditional statement. If you did not recognize this, you should know that conditionals are complex expressions of the form “If A, then C” (formally, “A > C”). We often use them to indicate a connection between two states of affairs, expressed by the antecedent A (or if-clause) and a consequent C (or then-clause). For example: “If you ever lose your credit card, immediately inform your bank”, “If there is an action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”, “If the river were to rise another two feet, the subway system would be flooded”. By asserting statements like these, one usually suggests a relationship between two states, such that one affects the other. In other words, the second somehow obtains under the condition of the first [...].

In this paper, I raise the problem of dealing with counterpossible conditionals for theories of subject matter. I argue that existing accounts of subject matter need to be revised and extended to be able to a) provide reasonable (potentially non-degenerate) verdicts about what counterpossibles are about, b) explain the intuition that counterpossibles are in some sense about what would happen if the antecedent were true, and c) explain in what sense counterpossibles can be about individuals. I sketch how one could extend atom-based and way-based theories of subject matters to handle the problem. Then, I raise the problem that it might be desirable for a theory of subject matter to prevent the inference that certain counterpossibles are about the kinds of things that they seem to mention.

This paper discusses the question of whether all counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents (counterpossibles) are vacuously true. The orthodox view of counterpossibles (vacuism) answers that question in the affirmative. This paper explains vacuism before turning to examples from science that seem to require us to reason non-trivially using counterpossibles, and it seems that the counterpossibles used in such cases can be true or false. This is a threat to vacuism. It is then argued that the same kind of reasoning which produces non-trivial counterpossibles in scientific cases can be extended to the case of counterpossibles in mathematics. Ordinary counterfactual reasoning relies on rejecting background assumptions in order to assume the truth of the antecedent. A failure to perform this process in the counterpossible case is what leads one to vacuism and it is explained how this process produces non-vacuous; counterfactuals, scientific counterpossibles, and mathematical counterpossibles.

Logic was once thought to describe the laws of thought; however, a plurality of logics has now replaced classical logic, obscuring rather than clarifying the nature of deduction with an embarrassment of riches. In cognitive science, on the other hand, logic is not thought to be a psychological theory of human reasoning. Research on human reasoning has focussed on deduction, although human reasoning is thought to be much richer, and two competing theories dominate contemporary discourse in cognitive science—the syntactic, formal-rule, and the semantic, mental-model theory. Jean Piaget also proposed a psychological theory of reasoning, and, in contrast to the dominant theories, he advocated an operatory theory. Deduction is an integral part of Piaget’s theory, and, in this paper, I briefly outline Piaget’s operatory theory of propositional reasoning before explicating the nature of deduction embodied in it. I conclude that the nature of propositional deduction according to Piaget lies in the interpropositional grouping, a natural structure at the heart of propositional reasoning constituted by a closed system of operations of thought regulated by laws of transformation. I then argue that the nature of propositional deduction lies specifically in the lattice constituted by the inclusion/order relations between the propositions of the interpropositional grouping. Piaget did not conceive of the interpropositional grouping as a logic; nevertheless, I wind up arguing that a logic conceived as Piaget intimated would complement the plurality of logics with a natural logic

It is commonly believed that the role of context cannot be ignored in the analysis of conditionals, and counterfactuals in particular. On truth conditional accounts involving possible worlds semantics, conditionals have been analysed as expressions of relative necessity: “If A, then B” is true at some world w if B is true at all the A-worlds deemed relevant to the evaluation of the conditional at w. A drawback of this approach is that for the evaluation of conditionals with the same antecedents at some world, the same worlds are deemed as relevant for all occasions of utterance. But surely this is inadequate, if shifts of contexts between occasions are to be accounted for. Both the linguistic and logical implications of this defect are discussed, and in order to overcome it a modification of David Lewis’ ordering semantics for counterfactuals is developed for a modified language. I follow Lewis by letting contexts determine comparative similarity assignments, and show that the addition of syntactic context parameters (context indices) to the language gives the freedom required to switch between sets of relevant antecedent worlds from occasion to occasion by choosing the corresponding similarity assignment accordingly. Thus an account that extends Lewis’ analysis of a language containing a single counterfactual connective > to a language containing infinitely many counterfactual connectives >c, each indexed by a different context name c, overcomes the limitations of traditional analyses. Finally it is also shown that these traditional accounts can be recovered from the modified account if certain contextual restrictions are in place.

In my article, I present a new version of a probabilistic truth prescribing semantics for natural language indicative conditionals. The proposed truth conditions can be paraphrased as follows: an indicative conditional is true if the corresponding conditional probability is high and the antecedent is positively probabilistically relevant for the consequent or the probability of the antecedent of the conditional equals 0. In the paper, the truth conditions are defended and some of the logical properties of the proposed semantics are described.

The thesis by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay published here is probably the oldest of the texts by the Polish linguist. The text was submitted in 1864 as a part of the logic and philosophy course taught at the Warsaw Main School by Henryk Struve. It clearly shows an attempt by the young researcher to embark on a scholarly path, which turns out to be far from the one Baudouin de Courtenay took later in his academic activity. The future linguist argues here in defence of linguistics as a so-called physical science (a natural skill, as he often calls it in his dissertation), thus contrasting it with philology and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is purely theoretical. It deals with the issue of applying a holistic approach in research on strategic thinking. The first part of the article is an introduction. The second part describes the research methodology. The following part of the article focuses on the description of the holistic approach in management and quality sciences. The holistic approach in the article is not treated as a synonym for a systemic or network approach. It is a holistic view of the issue in the conducted research. The following part of the work describes strategic thinking using reductionist research logic. The next part of the work deals with the presentation of a holistic concept of strategic thinking. The last part of the work presents the limitations of the concept and indicates new directions of research on strategic thinking. The summary includes the answers to the previously asked research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum geometry on a discrete set means a directed graph with a weight associated to each arrow defining the quantum metric. However, these ‘lattice spacing’ weights do not have to be independent of the direction of the arrow. We use this greater freedom to give a quantum geometric interpretation of discrete Markov processes with transition probabilities as arrow weights, namely taking the diffusion form ∂+f = (−Δθ + q − p)f for the graph Laplacian Δθ, potential functions q, p built from the probabilities, and finite difference ∂+ in the time direction. Motivated by this new point of view, we introduce a ‘discrete Schrödinger process’ as ∂+ψ = ı(−Δ + V )ψ for the Laplacian associated to a bimodule connection such that the discrete evolution is unitary. We solve this explicitly for the 2-state graph, finding a 1-parameter family of such connections and an induced ‘generalised Markov process’ for f = |ψ|2 in which there is an additional source current built from ψ. We also mention our recent work on the quantum geometry of logic in ‘digital’ form over the field F2 = {0, 1}, including de Morgan duality and its possible generalisations.

Structuralism has recently moved center stage in philosophy of mathematics. One of the issues discussed is the underlying logic of mathematical structuralism. In this paper, I want to look at the dual question, namely the underlying structures of logic. Indeed, from a mathematical structuralist standpoint, it makes perfect sense to try to identify the abstract structures underlying logic. We claim that one answer to this question is provided by categorical logic. In fact, we claim that the latter can be seen—and probably should be seen—as being a structuralist approach to logic and it is from this angle that categorical logic is best understood.

“Is logic a physical variable?” This thought-provoking question was put forward by Michael Heller during the public lecture “Category Theory and Mathematical Structures of the Universe” delivered on 30th March 2017 at the National Quantum Information Center in Sopot. It touches upon the intimate relationship between the foundations of physics, mathematics and philosophy. To address this question one needs a conceptual framework, which is on the one hand rigorous and, on the other hand capacious enough to grasp the diversity of modern theoretical physics. Category theory is here a natural choice. It is not only an independent, well-developed and very advanced mathematical theory, but also a holistic, process-oriented way of thinking.

The article offers a re-reading of an influential series of critical essays and commentaries published by Igor Stokfiszewski and various authors in 2007 as part of a debate on the role and importance of zaangażowanie (roughly "political commitment") in contemporary poetry and criticism in Poland. In reconstructing the underlying logic of the debate, it aims to emphasise certain details and complexities that were so far largely ignored by critics in order to point out indirect and often unexpected methodological, philosophical and political implications of some of the views put forward in the course of the exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article presents a communication-based analysis of the function of the ‘bez sensu’ [meaningless/ pointless/makes no sense etc.] phraseme. The author discusses the conversational and discursive opportunities for using it. He applies the methodology of communicational grammar, which enables the analysis of communications at the ideational and interactive levels. Within the semantic level, ‘bez sensu’ removes the value of the trivialised semantic standard. In conversations, it is the reaction to scripts which contradict natural logic and the common-sensical cause-and-effect course of things. An important function is the bringing forward of scripts of failure, wastefulness, redundancy, and lack of benefit or expected or actual harm. At the interactive level, the ‘bez sensu’ expression fulfils the function of support for the argumentative power of a communication; it is also a measure of undermining an argumentation – it emphasises the frailty of its premises. In axiological strategies, ‘bez sensu’ is a major component of emotive acts and the building block of the emotional tension between interlocutors. In this instance, it is mostly used to bring forward the experience of a negative emotion. One negative outcome of using the ‘bez sensu’ expression is the introduction distance to interpersonal contact, and in some cases the sense of intellectually debasing the sender of a communication. The article includes several examples of media-based political statements with the ‘bez sensu’ expression, which are used for discrediting political opponents.

Problem of epistemic activity and their relationship with language is very well known in philosophy. Undertaking this challenge in this article we shall present some logical constructions apparent in these issues. More precisely we want to describe some difficulties of formal reconstruction of the notion of belief and utterance and try to find broader perspective appointed by notion of trust. To realize this goals article shows how non-formal assumption about doxa affects on its formal construction. Then, logic of utterances—mainly based on Conversational Implicatures theory—and its relation to doxastic systems is discussed and, finally, article shows that more accurate description of these two notions needs broader perspective created by BIT system proposed by Ch-J. Liau.