Contra both phenomenalists and anti-phenomenalists, I defend the following thesis in this paper: the epistemic power of perceptual experience is grounded in its presentational property that is (i) uniquely possessed by the experience in the good case and (ii) essentially a phenomenal property. In §2, I set the ground for my argument by elaborating on the phenomenalist account of presentational phenomenology. In §3, I argue (against phenomenalism) for the first part of the phenomenal presentation thesis: (i) perceptual experience’s epistemic power (...) is grounded in instances of a presentational property possessed by perceptual experience in the good, but not in the bad case. In §4, I argue (against anti-phenomenalists) for the second part of the phenomenal presentation thesis: (ii) presentational property is essentially a phenomenal property. In §5, I address some potential objections to the phenomenal presentation thesis. §6 concludes. (shrink)

In philosophical aesthetics, discussions on design objects place the notion of Functional Beauty at the fore. Such a philosophical approach can be found in Jane Forsey’s book The Aesthetics of Design that focuses on the notion of function to promote the aesthetic value of design and develops an interpretation of Kantian Dependent Beauty around it. Lucía Jiménez Sánchez has recently put forward several flaws of Functional Beauty accounts. She presented several practical cases as evidence for the narrowness of Functional Beauty (...) accounts. Two cases are presented against Jane Forsey’s theory of Dependent Beauty, holding that it excludes other properties from appreciation that are not necessarily related to functionality, i.e., expres- sive properties. The purpose of this article is to show that these criticisms leveled at Jane Forsey’s proposal for an aesthetic theory of design are unfounded and are based on a misun- derstanding of the structure of judgments of beauty in her system. Despite this, these criticisms highlight the need to clarify the purpose of the aesthetics of design. (shrink)

According to Phillips, (1) genuine perception is attributable to the individual (i.e. it’s a personal state/event, as opposed to sub-personal states/events in the individual’s brain); (2) since unconscious perceptual representations are ill-suited to guide action, there’s no good reason to attribute them to the individual; (3) not being attributable to the individual, they don’t instantiate genuine perception, thereby failing to support the hypothesis that genuine perception can occur unconsciously. I argue that this reasoning is flawed and can’t be easily fixed. (...) Phillips contends that unconscious perceptual representations don’t guide action because they fail to meet certain conditions that are sufficient for action guidance. But those conditions may not be necessary for action guidance. Consequently, unconscious perceptual representations may guide action even if they don’t meet Phillips’ conditions. Furthermore, due to his commitment to the distinction between personal and sub-personal states/events, Phillips isn’t in a position to argue that his conditions are necessary for action guidance. For the distinction applies to action as well as to perception, and when genuine action is identified by personal-level criteria, Phillips’ conditions turn out unnecessary for action guidance. (shrink)

"Richard Burthogge's Conceptualism and Its Origins in the Medieval Perspectivist Optics" The paper aims to analyse the historical determinants of the conceptualist argument for epistemological idealism made by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Richard Burthogge. The crux of this argument, unprecedented in earlier philosophy, is an attempt to prove the inherent inadequacy of human cognition from the divergence between the general concepts and the extra-mental singulars. At the same time, Burthogge considers the relationship between the universal and the particular to be (...) analogous to the relation between the visual image and the thing. I argue that, as suggested by certain significant aspects of Burthogge’s theory, it was medieval perspectivist optics that had decisively influenced the conception of visual cognition, which provided the basis for this analogy and, consequently, for the conceptualist argument itself. (shrink)

"Semantic Aspects of Instrumentalism in the Philosophy of Science".

"Berkeley’s Doctrine of Existence. A Linguistic Approach" The paper focuses on a linguistic analysis of Berkeley’s doctrine of existence. It has been shown that the traditional, relational-operational interpretation of Berkeley's existential claims must be expanded by adding a predicative element, which requires that they also be interpret as definitional copulas. The standard interpretation of Berkeley’s claims has been indicated as one of the main causes of misinterpretations of his metaphysics. The new, philosophically intriguing use of the verb ‘to be’, combining (...) features of the definitional copula and the auxiliary verb for the passive voice, is also described in this paper. (shrink)

Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it (...) is possible that what is currently advocated as unconscious perception of the stimulus is in fact momentaneous perceptual awareness (or residual perceptual awareness) of the stimulus making the subject prone to judge in some way rather than another, or to act in some way rather than another. As to the apodosis, I show that neither the core of naïve realism nor any of its main motivations is undermined if SFK is assumed. On the contrary, certain incentives for endorsing naïve realism become more tempting on this assumption. Since the main motivations for naïve realism retain force under SFK, intentionalism is neither compulsory nor the best available explanation of unconscious perception. (shrink)

"A Special Case of Logical Contradiction – Content Implication Approach" The difference between so-called performative/pragmatic and logical contradiction seems to be one of the most firmly established philosophical distinctions. There are, however, some utterances, which fall outside this classification in its current form. Moreover, they reveal that the expressive power of the language of classical logic is too weak to express some form of the logical contradiction. The main aim of this paper is to characterize this special case of the (...) contradiction. By extending classical logic with a new connective, i.e. content implication, it also provides tools needed for adequate formal representation of this phenomenon. (shrink)

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition , brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in (...) the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system. (shrink)

Are perceptual experiences epistemically appraisable? In this paper, I argue, contra Siegel (Rationality of perception, Oxford 2017) that they are not (§§ 2–3). I also show how the problem of hijacked experience can be solved without endorsing the view that perceptual experience is epistemically appraisable (§§ 4–5). A key idea behind my proposal is a disjunctivist view on rationalising and epistemic powers of perceptual experience.

"Realitas formalis/realitas obiectiva. The Paradox of Descartes’ Representationism" The paper discusses some aspects of the highly original theory of representation, developed by Descartes in his ‘Meditations’, and based on the ontological isomorphism of ideas and their material correlates. In the course of the analysis it is shown that the Cartesian theory involves unavoidable problems with discrimination or correlation of the objects in question, which is connected with the problem of constitutiveness of their modes of existence. Consequently, the conclusion of the (...) paper is that representationism based on the isomorphistic theory of representation turns out to be self-contradictory. (shrink)

Predictive Processing (PP) framework construes perception and action (and perhaps other cognitive phenomena) as a matter of minimizing prediction error, i.e. the mismatch between the sensory input and sensory predictions generated by a hierarchically organized statistical model. There is a question of how PP fits into the debate between traditional, neurocentric and representation-heavy approaches in cognitive science and those approaches that see cognition as embodied, environmentally embedded, extended and (largely) representation-free. In the present paper, I aim to investigate and clarify (...) the cognitivist or ‘conservative’ reading of PP. I argue that the conservative commitments of PP can be divided into three distinct categories: (1) representationalism, (2) inferentialism, and (3) internalism. I show how these commitments and their relations should be understood and argue for an interpretation of each that is both non-trivial and largely ecumenical towards the 4E literature. Conservative PP is as progressive as conservatism gets. (shrink)

"Theory of modus concipiendi in Richard Burthogge’s Epistemology" The paper focuses on the epistemology of Richard Burthogge, the lesser known seventeenth-century English philosopher and author, among other works, of the Organum Vetus & Novum (1678) and An Essay upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits (1694). Although his ideas had a minimal impact on the philosophy of his time, and have hitherto not been the subject of a detailed study, Burthogge’s writings contain a highly original concept of idealistic constructivism. The (...) most important claim of this approach is that the external objects are never presented to the mind directly, as they are in themselves, but always under the modus concipiendi, a particular form of conceiving or conceptualising, performed by the human cognitive powers (both intellectual and sensuous) in the manner and with the means determined by their structural and functional properties. Thus, Burthogge clearly anticipates Kant in claiming that the external world is unknowable in itself, being accessible to the human mind only through the phenomena that the mind itself co-produces. The paper provides an outline of the theory of modus concipiendi, including its historical context and idealistic consequences, preceded by the brief presentation of Burthogge’s epistemology. (shrink)

"Between Essence and Existence. Metatheoretical Analysis of the History of Metaphysics" Der Text ist eine synthetische Darstellung der Geschichte der Metaphysik des Westens, von den klassischen Gedanken der Antike und Scholastik, über die Kartesianische subjektivistische Reform, die Transzendentalkonzeption, Hegels Philosophie des Geistes, bis hin zur Phänomenologie und der analytischen Metaphysik. Der Fokus des Artikels liegt in der Darstellung der Entwicklung des westlichen metaphysischen Gedankens und in der Rekonstruktion der immanenten Logik dieses Prozesses.

In this paper, I identify the hard problem of access for epistemological disjunctivism (ED): given that perceptual experience E is opaque with respect to its own epistemic properties, subject S is not in a position to know epistemic proposition (i) (that E is factive with respect to empirical proposition p) just by having E and/or reflecting on E. This is the case even if (i) is true. I first motivate the hard problem of access (Section 2) and then reconstruct and (...) analyze three of the ways in which EDists have argued for the internal accessibility of the factive character of perceptual experience. These arguments explain internal access in terms of the unity of perceptual and rational capacities (Section 3), favoring support (Section 4), and the outward-looking model of self-knowledge (Section 5). My conclusion (Section 6) is that none of these responses works. I then suggest how ED might be modified to succeed as an access internalist epistemology. (shrink)

This paper controverts the ability of intentionalism about perception to account for unique epistemic significance of phenomenal consciousness. More specifically, the intentionalist cannot explain the latter without denying two well-founded claims: the transparency of experience, and the possibility of unconscious perception. If they are true, intentionality of perception entails that phenomenal consciousness has no special epistemic role to play. Although some intentionalists are ready to bite this bullet, by doing so they effectively undermine one of the standard motivations of their (...) view, i.e. the claim that perceptual experiences justify beliefs. Consequently, whatever reason might there be to think that phenomenal consciousness has unique epistemic import, it is also a reason to reject intentionalism. I recommend replacing the latter with an unorthodox formulation of relationalism about perception. (shrink)

"Galileo on the Distinction between Primary and Secondary Qualities (I). A Superessentialist Argument" Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities has hitherto been examined almost exclusively from a contextual, historical perspective. This paper, the first of two planned, aims to fill this gap by providing a systematic, theoretical analysis of his principal argument for the distinction, as advanced in "The Assayer". I begin with a reconstruction of the key steps in the argument, and then proceed to identify and discuss the (...) epistemological and ontological presuppositions underpinning it. I argue that the most crucial and original assumption behind Galileo’s reasoning is the superessentialist principle, implying the mutual conditionality of the essentiality and reality of a material body’s properties. An in-depth analysis of the assumptions underlying Galileo’s reasoning paves the way for further examination of the most controversial aspect of his theory, that is, the ontological status of the secondary qualities. This issue will be addressed in the second forthcoming paper. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the epistemology developed by Richard Burthogge, the lesser-known seventeenth-century English philosopher, and author, among other works, of Organum Vetus & Novum (1678) and An Essay upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits (1694). Although his ideas had a minimal impact on the philosophy of his time, and have hitherto not been the subject of a detailed study, Burthogge’s writings contain a highly original concept of idealistic constructivism, anticipating (relatively speaking) Kant’s idealism. At the same time, some (...) interesting implications for the issue of self-interpretation and self-identity can be derived from his account of the mind. At the core of Burthogge’s epistemological position is a remarkable idea of structural and functional similarity between the three human cognitive faculties, that is between reasoning, sensation and imagination. Accordingly, every cognition, intellectual as well as sensuous, contains in its structure an object-directed operation of apprehending and thus can be viewed as an intentional act in a broad sense of the term. An immediate consequence of this claim for both mind and object is that they cannot be reduced to a pure stream of sense data, but on the contrary are to be considered ontologically independent from the content of a cognitive act. Furthermore, an object of cognition is never presented to the mind directly, as it is in itself, but always under the modus concipiendi, a particular form or manner of conceiving, specific to human cognitive powers due to their internal structure. As a result, Burthogge clearly anticipates Kant in claiming that it is impossible to know reality in itself, and in situating human consciousness as if in between two unknowable spheres: the external and internal one. Since these restrictions are imposed not only on external, but also on internal cognition, that is on self-knowledge, they lead to considerable difficulties regarding the mind’s identity. Basically, two principal strategies to address this issue are available in the post-Cartesian framework of seeing the mind as an ontologically independent entity, and both of them appear to be ineffective when employed in Burthogge’s epistemology. First, the mind identity can be grounded in some extra-mental factors, preferably in matter. However, with no access to the external world in itself, and with the scope of knowledge restricted to mental phenomena, the mind’s identity cannot be defined in terms of relationship with the reality of which it knows nothing except that it exits. The second option is to explain personal identity by referring it to the intrinsic properties of the mind. Nevertheless, this strategy also faces insuperable obstacles, and for the same reasons as the former does. Since self-knowledge is no exception to the structural-functional principles imposed on cognition, the mind can also be known only under the subjective conditions of conceiving. It is, therefore, just as unknowable in itself as the external things are. The main purpose of the paper is to explore this aspect of Burthogge’s philosophy. (shrink)

"Metaphysical Conditions of the Berkeleian Immaterialism" This paper discusses metaphysical conditions of the Berkeleian immaterialism. First, the abstract concept of existence is demonstrated to be inadequate for Berkeley’s metaphysics. The core of the argumentation involves showing that any attempt to establish immaterialism on the basis of the theory of existence cannot succeed without accepting the constitutiveness of idea’s mode of existence and rejecting the autonomy of an object in relation to its mode of existence. Second, it is shown that Berkeley’s (...) metaphysics demands a mono-existential theory of an object. Consequently, this paper shows that since Berkeley’s idea cannot have more than one mode of existence (i.e. in the human mind perceiving it), metaphysical analysis of Berkeleian philosophy allows one to refute all its multi-existential interpretations. (shrink)

"Nietzsche - Extreme Philosophy of Language?" The coherence of the Nietzschean conception of language is discussed in the article. First, Nietzsche's critique of the referential semantics and the correspondence theory of truth implied by the so-called "tropological" linguistic theory as well as the doctrine of perspectivism is questioned. Consequently, the core of the argumentation is to reveal the naturalistic and metaphysical assumptions of Nietzsche's strict relativistic philosophy of language and interpretation. The conclusiveness of the Nietzschean deconstruction of metaphysics as a (...) pure language creation seems to be doubtful with regard to his construction of the 'will-to-power metaphysics'. Moreover, the reception of the Nietzsche’s philosophy as deconstructivistic after the II World War has to be revised while confronted with his hermeneutical philology. Finally, the status of the Nietzschean affirmation of reality as a play of interpretations in accordance with Paul de Man can be recognized as purely rhetorical. (shrink)

'Culture’. The Work for Choir and Orchestra. Music as an Organon for the Structural Analysis of Myth.

The aim of this paper is to suggest how the internal logic and dynamics of the development of Cartesian philosophy can be reconstructed by means of the historical-theoretical analysis of one of the most forgotten lines of reception of Cartesianism, leading through the philosophy of British thinkers minorum gentium: Arthur Collier, John Norris, Richard Burthogge etc. Such analysis of the particular stages of the evolution of post-Cartesian thought – within one intellectual-cultural context, makes it possible to situate Berkeley’s system (considered (...) as a culminating point of the development of post-Cartesian British idealism) in the stream of the widely understood Cartesian thought. At the same time the analysis provides sufficient data to draw some general conclusions regarding the logic of the development of Cartesian-inspired philosophical systems. (shrink)

Brandom (Citation1994) made inferentialism an intensely debated idea in the philosophy of language in the last three decades. Inferentialism is a view that associates the meaning of linguistic expression with the role said expression plays in inferences. It seems rather uncontroversial that the correct theory of meaning should distinguish between linguistic correctness and factual correctness. For instance, speaker S can be wrong in saying ‘I have arthritis’ in two distinct ways: (i) S fails to apply a word correctly to make (...) a true statement due to having made a factual error, and (ii) S uses an expression incorrectly because they are wrong about its meaning. In this paper, I show that properly understood normative inferentialism can make room for such a distinction. I propose that linguistic correctness is a structural issue: linguistic mistakes stem from the improper or insufficient acquisition of an inferential role. Factual correctness, on the other hand, is a one-off issue of the correct application of inferential rules to a particular situation. I argue that, by tying the issue of correctness to the game of giving and asking for reasons, inferentialism can establish a reliable method for distinguishing between two types of correctness (and mistakes). (shrink)

It has been objected recently that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported hypothesis that unconscious perception is possible. Because epistemological disjunctivism is plausible only in conjunction with naïve realism (for a reason I provide), the objection reaches it too. In response, I show that the unconscious perception hypothesis can be changed from a problem into an advantage of epistemological disjunctivism. I do this by suggesting that: (i) naïve realism is consistent with the hypothesis; (ii) the contrast between epistemological (...) disjunctivism and epistemic externalism explains the difference in epistemic import between conscious and unconscious perception. (shrink)

Brain activity determines which relations between objects in the environment are perceived as differences and similarities in colour, smell, sound, etc. According to selectionism, brain activity does not create those relations; it only selects which of them are perceptually available to the subject on a given occasion. In effect, selectionism entails that perceptual experience is diaphanous, i.e. that sameness and difference in the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by sameness and difference in the perceived items. It has been argued (...) that diaphaneity is undermined by phenomenological considerations and empirical evidence. This paper considers five prominent arguments of this sort and shows that none of them succeeds. (shrink)

This article is an overview of the philosophy of informatics with a special regard to some Polish philosophers. It juxtaposes the informationistic worldview with the long-prevailing mechanical conceptualization of nature before introducing the metaphysical perspective of the information revolution in sciences. The article shows also how ontic pancomputationalism – regarded as an update to structural realism – could enrich the philosophical research in some classical topics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the philosophy of Jan Salamucha, a philosopher from (...) the Cracow Circle whose ideas could be inspiring for today’s philosophy of informatics in Cracow. (shrink)

The idea that concepts play a significant role in some perceptions is widespread but everybody seems to differ as to where to draw the line. Some researchers say that the difference between direct and indirect, concept driven acts of perception manifests itself whenever we perceive abstract or general properties. Others point at second order properties or causal properties. I call this inability to precisely differentiate between acts of direct and indirect perception “The Division Problem”. Furthermore there is always a question (...) as to how widespread indirect perceptions are. Can we attribute them to prelingual cognitive systems? I call this second problem “The Distribution Problem”. -/- The main aim of the paper is providing a solution to both problems by proposing a naturalistic explication of the notion of “concept”. -/- I propose to identify the role concepts were supposed to play in perception with a mechanism of “soft detection”. Unlike hard detectors which react to a specific target in virtue of their constitution and placement in the system, soft detectors are understood as dynamic categorization devices enabling the cognitive system to selectively react to an undetectable property via flexible exploitation of data from hard detectors. -/- I conclude by showing how the notion of soft detection retains some of the aspects traditionally attributed to concepts and how does it differ from similar accounts known from contemporary literature. (shrink)

According to unconscious perception hypothesis (UP), mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously. The proponents of UP often support it with empirical evidence for a more specific hypothesis, according to which colours can be seen unconsciously (UPC). However, UPC is a general claim that admits of many interpretations. The main aim of this paper is to determine which of them is the most plausible. To this end, I investigate how adopting various conceptions of (...) colour and perceptual phenomenal character affects UPC’s resilience to objections. This brings me to the conclusion that the most plausible reading of UPC is the one according to which the phenomenal character of colour perception (i) is constituted by colours qua primitive mind-independent qualities of the environment and (ii) is not essentially tied to consciousness. My conclusion not only identifies the most plausible interpretation of UPC, but also highlights and supports an unorthodox version of the relational theory of perception, which is a perfectly viable yet so far overlooked stance in the debate about unconscious perception. (shrink)

The book "Unnoticed Revolution. Richard Burthogge's Constructivist Idealism" focuses on the theory of cognition developed by Richard Burthogge, the seventeenth-century English philosopher and author, among other works, of the "Organum Vetus & Novum" (1678) and "An Essay upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits" (1694). Burthogge’s ideas had a minimal impact on the philosophy of his time and have hitherto not been the subject of a detailed study. Nevertheless, his writings contain a highly original concept of constructivist idealism, which, when (...) seen from a historical perspective, turns out to have anticipated the crucial points of that proposed a century later by Kant. It is because at the core of Burthogge’s epistemological position lies the claim that the external object of cognition is never presented to the mind directly, but always under the 'modus concipiendi', a particular form of conceptualisation of the external reality, performed in the manner and with the means determined by the structural and functional properties of the human cognitive powers. As a result, Burthogge clearly anticipates Kant in claiming that the external world is unknowable in itself, being accessible to the human mind only through the ‘phenomena’ that the mind itself co-produces. The need for deeper analysis of the works by the ‘forgotten’ philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been recognised for at least ninety years. The discussed book tries to meet these expectations. Its direct aim is to increase our knowledge of early modern British philosophy. At the same time, the restoration of the memory of the idealist doctrine, anticipating by almost a century that of Kant, should enable us to draw some new conclusions about the internal logic and immanent dynamic of the development of the whole post-Cartesian thought. (shrink)

Modelowanie komputerowe odgrywa istotną rolę we współczesnej nauce. Epistemologiczna rola, jaką odgrywają takie modele oraz prowadzone na ich bazie symulacje skłaniają do postawienia pytań o możliwe użycie podobnych metod w filozofii. Pomysły wykorzystania narzędzi matematycznych do sformułowania koncepcji filozoficznych sięgają czasów Barucha Spinozy i Isaaca Newtona. Newtonowska filozofia przyrody stała się przykładem udanego zastosowania matematycznych rozważań do opisu przyrody na poziomie fundamentalnym. Oczywiście podejście Newtona otworzyło zarówno nowe obszary badań w fizyce, jak i stało się źródłem dla nowych rozważań o (...) rzeczywistości fizycznej. Według Michała Hellera niektóre teorie fizyczne można traktować jako specyficzne formalizacje koncepcji filozoficznych. Modelowanie komputerowe w filozofii może być traktowane jako rozszerzenie tej idei, co będę starał się ukazać w niniejszym artykule. Będę również rozważał rolę modelowania komputerowego jako źródła nowych metafor filozoficznych zgodnie z koncepcją technologii definiującej D. J. Boltera. Rozważania te wiodą do konkluzji mówiącej, że w metodologii filozofii zachodzą istotne zmiany. Nowe podejście nie sugeruje odrzucenia bądź zanegowania dotychczasowych metod, a wskazuje raczej nowe narzędzie analityczne filozofii i źródło inspirujących metafor. (shrink)

Recenzja książki: Andrzej Pelczar, Czas i dynamika. O czasie w równaniach różniczkowych i układach dynamicznych, OBI--Kraków, Biblos-Tarnów 2003, ss. 117.

This paper surveys selected (though arguably representative) versions of metaphysical and epistemological disjunctivism. Although they share a common logical structure, it is hard to find a further common denominator among them. Two main conclusions are: (1) a specific standpoint on the nature of perceptual relation is not such a common denominator, which means that it is very unlikely that all of these views could be refuted with a single objection; (2) contrary to what its name suggests, disjunctivism can be correctly (...) expressed without the employment of disjunction. (shrink)

"Principles of So-Called 'Material' and 'Formal' Truth. A Logical, Philosophical and Juridical Analysis" Concepts of material and formal truth have a long and well-grounded tradition in the doctrine of law. It seems, however, that they need some clarification and conceptualisation in purely philosophical and logical terms. In this paper, we propose such a theoretical analysis. These considerations are followed by a review of the key aspects of the current Polish legislation, which is written from the point of view of the (...) conclusions reached through the first level of analysis. (shrink)

"Subjectivisation of Sense Perception and Two Models of Early Modern Idealism" The distinction between primary and secondary qualities, most famously outlined by Galileo, and subsequently supported, inter alia, by Descartes and by Locke has widely been considered one of the crucial factors in the development of modern idealism. In its contemporary form, the distinction identifies some of the perceived properties as mental phenomena due to their content and structural dependence on the mind. However, this account of the primary/secondary distinction is (...) largely different from its original version developed by the above-mentioned philosophers, within whose work the mental being of the perceived qualities was demonstrated objectively, from the conceptually-derived nature of matter, and not subjectively, by referring to the mind’s participation in the cognitive process. It was only at the next stage of the early modern subjectivisation of sense perception, best exemplified by such philosophers as Arnold Geulincx and Richard Burthogge, that the creative role played by the mind in sensation and, consequently, the mind-dependency of the sensible qualities was recognised – a turn influenced by the reinterpretation of Aristotelian philosophy offered by Jacopo Zabarella and Paduan school as well as by Anti-Aristotelianism of the kind developed in Netherlands. Furthermore, the two different approaches to the primary/secondary distinction can be linked with two main types of post-Cartesian idealism, i.e. Berkeleian and Kantian – a claim for which illustrative evidence from British philosophy, namely from Berkeley’s and Burthogge’s respective theories, can be drawn. (shrink)

Abstract The opening section outlines probabilism in the 20th century philosophy and shortly discusses the major accomplishments of Polish probabilist thinkers. A concise characterization of Bayesianism as the major recent form of probabilism follows. It builds upon the core personalist version of Bayesianism towards more objectively oriented versions thereof. The problem of a priori probability is shortly discussed. A tentative characterization of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s standpoint regarding the inductive inference is cast in Bayesian terms. His objections against it presented in Pragmatic (...) Logic are presented. His 1958 paper on justification of non-deductive inference, as amply demonstrated by K. Szaniawski and I. Niiniluoto, extends his earlier Baysian position from 1928 monograph. In the closing section Ajdukiewicz’s standpoint is presented as a characteristically pragmatist and empiricist version of Bayesianism, which remains an unexplored and stimulating position. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the theory of cognition developed by Richard Burthogge, the lesser known seventeenth-century English philosopher, and author, among other works, of Organum Vetus & Novum (1678) and An Essay upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits (1694). Although his ideas had a minimal impact on the philosophy of his time, and have hitherto not been the subject of a detailed study, Burthogge’s writings contain a highly original concept of idealistic constructivism, anticipating Kant’s idealism. Therefore, a closer examination (...) of his philosophy can not only deepen our understanding of early modern British thought, but may also shed new light on the internal dynamics of the development of the whole post-Cartesian epistemology. (shrink)

“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”. Intralinguistic Semantics and Its Philosophical and Cognitive Consequences The aim of this paper is to present and metatheoretically analyse the model of intralinguistic semantics as set forth by Umberto Eco in his Theory of Semiotics. The distinctive feature of this system is the rejection of the realistic category of reference, understood as a correspondence of meaningful units with the extralinguistic domain of interpretation, i.e., with a class of extralinguistic semantic correlates. As a result, the (...) main idea of Eco’s theory is to replace the traditional extralinguistic semantics with the new one, in which the meaning of each unit is determined solely by its relations with the other elements of the system. Language formed in this way is semantically autonomous, intralinguistically closed and self-explaining. Analysis of Eco’s theory by means of the appropriate conceptual apparatus reveals the far-reaching philosophical and cognitive implications of his approach in studies on language, meaning and truth. (shrink)

"The Essence of Tradition. A Structural-Logical Approach" The concept of tradition is not unambiguous – the same word can be defined differently within different theoretical contexts. Fortunately there is a formal theory, i.e. speech act theory, that allows us to conduct a systematic structural linguistic analysis of the category in question. At the same time, speech-theoretical approach to the concept of “tradition” provides an universal method for expressing the results obtained in different conceptual systems. The subject of this paper is (...) a preliminary analysis of various benefits of applying the speech-theoretical framework to the research on tradition. (shrink)

"The Problem of Intersubjectivity in Berkeley’s Immaterialism" The paper discusses the issue of intersubjectivity in Berkeley’s early philosophy. In the course of metaphysical analysis I argue that it is not possible to save within Berkeleian metaphysics intersubjectivity of the object of cognition and the unity of the world of experience, either in version of its strict identity or by taking perfect likeness as a criterion of its identity.

The aim of this article is to critically examine what I call Action-Centric Theories of Representation (ACToRs). I include in this category theories of representation that (1) reject construing representation in terms of a relation that holds between representation itself (the representational vehicle) and what is represented, and instead (2) try to bring the function that representations play for cognitive systems to the center stage. Roughly speaking, according to proponents of ACToRs, what makes a representation (that is, what is constitutive (...) of it being a representation) is its being functionally involved in preselecting or guiding the actions of cognitive systems. I intend to argue that while definitely valuable, ACToRs are underconstrained and thus not entirely satisfying, since there exist structures that would count as representations according to ACToRs, but which do not play functional roles that could be nontrivially or in an explanatorily valuable way classified as representing something for a cognitive system. I outline a remedy for this theoretical situation by postulating that a fully satisfying theory of representation in cognitive science should have two factors; i.e., it should combine the pragmatic, action-oriented aspect present in ACToRs with an element that emphasizes the importance of the relation holding between a representational vehicle and what is represented. (shrink)

"Post-Structural Anthropology" Review of Michel Foucault. Słowa i rzeczy. Archeologia nauk humanistycznych. Trans. T. Komendant. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo słowo/obraz terytoria, 2005.

"Galileo on the Distinction between Primary and Secondary Qualities (II). The Problem of the Ontological Status of Sensations" The article is a continuation of the paper in which a theoretical analysis of Galileo’s principal argument for the distinction between primary and secondary qualities was provided. It focuses on the problem of the ontological status of secondary qualities/sensations. I discuss three main interpretative approaches to the issue, considered in light of the findings obtained in the first paper. In the first part (...) of the article, I address the mentalist interpretation of Galileo’s secondary qualities. Additionally, I explore the mechanistic rationale behind his account, in virtue of which it may be called ‘the dustbin theory of the sensorium’. In the second part, I examine the arguments for the materialist reading of the secondary qualities and, by contrasting it with the results obtained in the first article, the theoretical problems inherent in it. In the third part of the paper, I discuss the hermeneutical advantages and theoretical disadvantages of interpreting Galileo’s secondary qualities in Aristotelian terms. I conclude the study by indicating the textual basis and historical significance of the interpretative difficulties discussed. (shrink)