This paper discusses three research perspectives on political culture, civic culture and citizenship: the classic approach of Almond and Verba; contemporary analyses of citizenship referring to the book Civic Culture by Almond and Verba and oriented to the empirical description of social reality; and theoretical analyses of new relational sociology, oriented to the ontology and epistemology of social reality. The authors’ analysis leads to two conclusions. Firstly, it is necessary to combine these three approaches – relational social theory with empirical (...) analyses departing from methodological individualism. This requires conducting an empirical analysis, where the basic ‘analytical units’ – of collection, interpretation and generalization of data – are not separate but combined by relations and networks within which people act. Secondly, Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński’s statements are the best starting point for conducting such a new research programme. What is decisive is his systematic, theoretical interest in contemporary agency theories and relationality of citizenship, combined with innovative application of quantitative methods. (shrink)

Eliminativism assumes that commonsense psychology describes and explains the mind in terms of the internal design and operation of the mind. If this assumption is invalidated, so is eliminativism. The same conditional is true of intentional realism. Elsewhere (Bogdan 1991) I have argued against this 'folk- theory-theory' assumption by showing that commonsense psychology is not an empirical prototheory of the mind but a biosocially motivated practice of coding, utilizing, and sharing information from and about conspecifics. Here, without presupposing a (...) specific analysis of commonsense psychology, I want to challenge a key implication of the 'folk-theory-theory' assumption to the effect that commonsense psychology is committed to a definite architecture of the mind. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume examine recent controversies about the importance of common sense psychology for our understanding of the human mind. Common sense provides a familiar and friendly psychological scheme by which to talk about the mind. Its categories tend to portray the mind as quite different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matters and its laws. In this volume a variety of positions on common sense psychology from critical to supportive, from exegetical to speculative, (...) are represented. Among the questions posed are: Is common sense psychology an empirical theory, a body of analytic knowledge, a practice or a strategy? If it is a legitimate enterprise can it be naturalized or not? If it is not legitimate can it be eliminated? Is its fate tied to our understanding of consciousness? Should we approach its concepts and generalizations from the standpoint of conceptual analysis or from the philosophy of science? (shrink)

In this paper I analyse the claim according to which law is objective. After clarifying the philosophically relevant meaning of this claim , I distinguish several aspects of the thesis, concerning, respectively legal truth , legal error , legal determinacy and the metaphysical status of legal entities . Then, I take into consideration the phenomenology of our legal practice and the apparent support it gives to claims of legal objectivity. Finally, I stress the connection between legal objectivity and normativity and (...) suggest that legal objectivity reduces to the conclusiveness of legal reasoning. (shrink)

The present study aims to provide a critical analysis of the account of modernity and modern thinkers done by the Austrian philosopher Eric Voegelin, arguably one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century. Eric Voegelin is a leading figure among those who considered it pertinent to speak about a crisis of modernity, primarily seen as a crisis of the spirit. The present study stresses Voegelin’s original analysis of “the ideological soul” of modern thinkers, his effort to go (...) beyond a merely descriptive approach, and to define ideological thinking as a spiritually diseased pattern of thought rooted in an existential attitude. At the same time, I critically discuss some problematic consequences of Voegelin’s position, the possible flaws in his treatment of modern philosophers, perhaps too harshly seen as “intellectual swindlers” whose main concern was the distortion of fundamental experiences. (shrink)

A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant‐directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult‐directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learning: hyperarticulation, which makes the categories more separable, and variability, which makes the generalization more robust. Here, we test the separability and robustness of vowel category learning on acoustic representations of speech uttered by Japanese adults in ADS, IDS (addressed to 18‐ to 24‐month olds), or (...) read speech (RS). Separability is determined by means of a distance measure computed between the five short vowel categories of Japanese, while robustness is assessed by testing the ability of six different machine learning algorithms trained to classify vowels to generalize on stimuli spoken by a novel speaker in ADS. Using two different speech representations, we find that hyperarticulated speech, in the case of RS, can yield better separability, and that increased between‐speaker variability in ADS can yield, for some algorithms, more robust categories. However, these conclusions do not apply to IDS, which turned out to yield neither more separable nor more robust categories compared to ADS inputs. We discuss the usefulness of machine learning algorithms run on real data to test hypotheses about the functional role of IDS. (shrink)

What is it that one thinks or believes when one thinks or believes something? A mental formula? A sentence in some natural language? Its truth conditions? Or perhaps an abstract proposition? The current story of content is fairly ecumenical. It says that a number of aspects, some mental, other semantic, go into our understanding of content. Yet the current story is incomplete. It leaves out a very important aspect of content, one which I call incremental information. It is information in (...) a specific format, information as a limited or local increment, structured by a number of underlying parameters. It is in the form of such increments that information drives cognition and behavior. This is why, perhaps of all aspects of content, it is incremental information which matters most when we want to understand cognitive attitudes and performances. This in turn must have an impact on our philosophical notions of content, propositional attitudes, inference, justification and knowledge. (shrink)

A substantial amount of research showed that agency and communion are two basic dimensions of content in social cognition. Based on the well-supported idea that people typically think about themselves and close others in agentic rather than communal terms, we tested the hypothesis that agentic thinking about unknown others makes them subjectively closer. This hypothesis was confirmed in four experiments differently priming agentic versus communal thinking on others. As predicted, increases in closeness resulting from the agentic thinking about others were (...) constrained to cognitive load conditions where participants were occupied with a parallel task. We conclude that the agentic content of thoughts about others serves as an intuitive, heuristic cue of their psychological closeness. (shrink)

Previous studies showed that self-interest biases moral perception of others’ unethical actions. Moreover, affective changes in attitudinal responses towards the perpetrator of an immoral act drives the bias. In the present studies, we attempted to answer the question whether people are aware of the self-interest bias in their judgments of others’ behavior. We conducted two experiments showing that moral judgments of verbally described and imagined actions were dominated by norms rather than self-interest and that people were not aware that self-interest (...) distorted their moral judgment. The unawareness of the self-interest bias among the participants was attributable to omission of their own emotional responses when forecasting their moral judgments. We discuss the importance of emotions presence in studies on moral judgments as well as contribution of the present research to the intuitionist approach to moral judgment. (shrink)

Communication by shared meaning, themastery of word semantics,metarepresentation and metamentation aremental abilities, uniquely human, that share a sense ofintentionality or reference. The latteris developed by a naive psychology or interpretation – acompetence dedicated to representingintentional relations between conspecifics and the world. Theidea that interpretation builds new mentalabilities around a sense of reference is based on three linesof analysis – conceptual, psychological andevolutionary. The conceptual analysis reveals that a senseof reference is at the heart of the abilitiesin question. Psychological data track (...) tight developmentalcorrelations between interpretation and theabilities it designs. Finally, an evolutionary hypothesislooks at why interpretation designed thosenew abilities around a sense of reference. (shrink)

Стаття продовжує серію публікацій про вчених Львівської політехніки, репресованих радянською владою за надуманими звинуваченнями в 1944-1945 роках. Розглянуто перебіг слідчої справи № 1271 Бужинського Володимира Мар'яновича, доктора технічних наук, завідувача кафедри опору матеріалів та гідромеханіки Львівського політехнічного інституту. Поряд з аналізом документів слідчої справи наведені маловідомі й невідомі факти з життя професора, його ставлення до роботи у вищому навчальному закладі та мотиви, якими він керувався, працюючи у виші за німецької окупації. Показано, що скасування звинувачень щодо вченого пов'язано не стільки з (...) доведенням його невинуватості, скільки зі зміною політики радянської влади щодо поляків, яких вона примусила покидати Львів за програмою репатріації на підставі "Угоди про взаємний обмін населенням у прикордонних районах" 1944 року. (shrink)

The statistical interpretation of the quantum mechanical wave packet contains a gap. The author outlines the problem without offering a solution.

Collana «Nuovo Prisma», Sellerio editore, Palermo, 2002, 212 p.

This paper presents the first purely algebraic characterization of classes of partial algebras definable by a set of strong equations. This result was posible due to new tools such as invariant congruences, i.e. a generalization of the notion of a fully invariant congruence, and extension of algebras, specific for strong equations.

Proof-theoretic semantics is an alternative to model-theoretic semantics. It aims at explaining the meaning of the logical constants in terms of the inference rules that govern their behaviour in proofs. We argue that this must be construed as the task of explaining these meanings relative to a logic, i.e., to a consequence relation. Alas, there is no agreed set of properties that a relation must have in order to qualify as a consequence relation. Moreover, the association of a consequence relation (...) to a logical calculus is not as straightforward as it may seem. We show that these facts are problematic for the proof-theoretic project but the problems can be solved. Our thesis is that the consequence relation relevant for proof-theoretic semantics is the one given by the sequent-to-sequent derivability relation in Gentzen systems. (shrink)

I have a confession to make. In general, I do not like discussions concerning folk psychology. I have never quite understood what the fuss was about. Radu Bogdan has changed my mind. His recent book, Interpreting Minds, explains why folk psychology is important and how we should understand it and does so in a plausible way. For these two reasons, philosophy should welcome his monograph wholeheartedly.

This chapter provides the teleological foundations for our analysis of guidance to goal. Its objective is to ground goal-directedness genetically. The basic suggestion is this. Organisms are small things, with few energy resources and puny physical means, battling a ruthless physical and biological nature. How do they manage to survive and multiply? CLEVERLY, BY ORGANIZING.

The strict-tolerant approach to paradox promises to erect theories of naïve truth and tolerant vagueness on the firm bedrock of classical logic. We assess the extent to which this claim is founded. Building on some results by Girard we show that the usual proof-theoretic formulation of propositional ST in terms of the classical sequent calculus without primitive Cut is incomplete with respect to ST-valid metainferences, and exhibit a complete calculus for the same class of metainferences. We also argue that the (...) latter calculus, far from coinciding with classical logic, is a close kin of Priest’s LP. (shrink)

A distinguished wise man, Emil Cioran, with whom I share a country of birth and the thought that follows, said once that the two most interesting things in life are gossip and metaphysics. I can hardly think of a more self evident and enjoyable truth, if wisely construed. This volume combines the two pleasures, for it is an exercise in the metaphysics of wise gossip, of how we make sense of each other, and how, as a result we interpret, explain, (...) rationalize and evaluate our representations and actions. The body of wisdom which allows us to do all this is currently currently called folk or common sense psychology. I will also call it psychofolklore or the folklore of the mind. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay is an extension of Bogdan's article, "The Shiver-Shimmer Factor: Musical Spirituality, Emotion, and Education" in Philosophy of Music Education Review, which elaborates "shiver" and "shimmer" as two kinds of emotional response to music, with "shiver" defined as a sensate surface aesthetic, considered subordinate to "shimmer," a meditational state aspiring to the condition of musical spirituality. "Incarnating the Shiver-Shimmer Factor" reverses the relationship between "shiver" and "shimmer" by regarding "shiver" as logically prior to "shimmer." Within this context, the (...) roles of both performer and listener are re-imagined through the tradition of Longinian and Romanticist aesthetics, wherein "shiver" is re-conceptualized as grounding musical spirituality, not as instrumental to it. Here the added dimension of what the performer brings to the musical experience is seen as key to creating the possibility of performers and listeners/audience as coequal participants in musical experience within a dialogical sublime based on an ethics of embodied listening. (shrink)

In spite of of its name, cognitive science is not yet a fully coherent and integrated science but rather a fairly loose coalition of largely independent disciplines, some descriptive and empirical (cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive anthropology), some speculative and foundational (philosophy), others both speculative and applied (artificial intelligence). What brought these disciplines together and still sustains their interdisciplinary cooperation is the dedication to explain, simulate and technically reproduce the workings of the human mind according to a distinct and rather (...) well defined research program. This program has been so far the animating spirit and the integrative force in the formation and development of cognitive science. I will call it the 'core program.' Around the core program there is a much looser and less coherent outer paradigm, or set of paradigms, which historically has prepared the ground for the core program, to which the participating disciplines have contributed their insights, results and methods, and still do, and from which challenges to the core program have emerged and are likely to do so in the future. (shrink)

This argument explores the pivotal role of cinema in shaping and reflecting the sociopolitical landscape of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Under Stalin, Soviet cinema evolved into a state-controlled instrument of socialist realism, influencing cultural production throughout the Eastern Bloc. While some countries with established cinematic traditions adapted to or resisted the Soviet model, others adopted it wholesale, leading to varying degrees of creative expression and control. Through interdisciplinary contribu­tions, the latest issue of HCE highlights the duality of cinema as (...) both a tool for ideological control and a medium for dissent and creative resistance, revealing the complex interplay between art and politics in communist societies. (shrink)

W artykule dokonuję krytycznej analizy dotychczasowych ujęć filozoficznych aspektów psychiatrii Antoniego Kępińskiego ze szczególnym zwróceniem uwagi na dyskusję wokół jej etycznych i aksjologicznych implikacji. Analiza ujawnia wiele rozbieżnych inter­pretacji wyrażających się przypisywaniem tym samym terminom stosowanym, przez Kępiń­skiego nieco odmiennych lub całkowicie róż­nych znaczeń podkreślaniem ważności jed­nych zagadnień a pomijaniem innych, równie intensywnie występujących w pismach anali­zowanego autora; wreszcie istotne różnice wy­nikają z nakładania przez komentatorów na poglądy Kępińskiego własnych inklinacji filo­zoficznych. Istotne różnice interpretacyjne pojawiły się w takich zagadnieniach jak: (...) miejsce i rola koncepcji metabolizmu informacyjnego, w psy­chiatrii i antropologii Kępińskiego, w Proble­matyce świata aksjologicznego jako szczegól­nej modalności egzystencji człowieka oraz su­mieniu i jego roli w strukturze wewnętrznej człowieka. Wskazane zagadnienia, w ujęciu najważniejszych znawców i komentatorów myśli Kępińskiego, podejmowane są w różnym stopniu i uzyskują w poszczególnych opracowaniach odmienne rozumienie. Uwzględniając poczynione przy okazji analizy poszczególnych zagadnień uwagi i zastrzeżenia co do właściwego rozumienia tekstów Kępińskiego proponuję przyjęcie, jako głównej kategorii interpretacyjnej, pojęcia „Podmiotowość moralna”. Pozwoli to, mam nadzieję, na szerszą analizę filozoficznych implikacji psychiatrii Kępińskiego. (shrink)

We describe here a special subdirect decomposition of algebras with modular congruence lattice. Such a decomposition is based on the properties of the congruence lattices of algebras. We consider four properties of lattices: atomic, atomless, locally uniform and anti-uniform. In effect, we describe a star-decomposition of a given algebra with modular congruence lattice into two or three parts associated to these properties.

Based on the balance theory, we hypothesized that emotions induced by other person’s outcomes function as responses restoring balance within cognitive units consisting of the perceiver, other persons and their outcomes. As a consequence, emotional reactions towards others’ outcomes depend on the perceiver’s attitudes in such a way that outcomes of a well-liked person rise congruous responses, while outcomes of a disliked other lead to incongruous responses. Our participants recalled a situation from their past in which somebody they liked or (...) disliked had succeed or failed. Additionally, we manipulated whether the outcome referred to a domain where participants’ self-interest was involved or not. We analyzed the participants’ average emotional state as well as specific emotions induced by the recalled events. Consistently with expectations we found that balancing principles played a major role in shaping emotional responses to successes and failures of person who were well-liked or disliked. (shrink)

This article examines Erich Przywara‘s conceptual understanding of the proofs for the existence of God. It also interprets the proofs of God’s existence. Тhe concept of God in the philosophy of Przywara is considered by exploring the nature of the relations between the transcendent sphere of God and the spiritual world of the human person. From the point of view of historiography, the role of the book “The Analogia entis” by Przywara is highlighted.

In this original and provocative book, Bogdan proposes that the ability to interpret others' mental states should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation.

The theme of this essay is rather simple, though its demonstration is not. It is that humans think reflexively or metamentally because -- and often in the forms in which -- they interpret each other. In this essay ‘metamental’ means ‘about mental’ and ‘reflexive mind’ means ‘a mind thinking about its own thoughts.’ To think reflexively or metamentally is to think about thoughts deliberately and explicitly, as in thinking that my current thoughts about metamentation are right. Thinking about thoughts requires (...) understanding thoughts as thoughts, as mental structures that represent; it also requires an ability to relate thoughts to other thoughts and to recognize such inter-thought relations. Since metamentation is essential to and uniquely distinctive of human minds, the idea that it originates in interpreting other minds can be encapsulated in the slogan that minds are minded because minds mind minds. This word play translates as: minds evolve into reflexive minds because they mind other minds -- where ‘minding other minds’ means interacting and bonding with other minds, being concerned or curious about them, representing their relations to the world, manipulating and using these relations for some purpose, and the like. All of this amounts (in my terminology) to interpreting other minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, education, politics, and so on. It follows that intermental relations among individuals, handled by a distinct competence for interpretation, are essential to the evolution of abilities to represent intramental relations among thoughts, typical of a reflexive mind. I take ‘interpretation’ to be a convenient, short, and grammatically flexible label for what is known in philosophy as commonsense or folk psychology and in psychology as theory of mind, mindreading, or naive psychology. Interpretation is a cognitive rapport between an interpreter (she, in this book) and a subject (he), whereby she represents his mind-world relations, from the simplest, such as seeing.... (shrink)