The article puts forward a branching-style framework for the analysis of determinism and indeterminism of scientific theories, starting from the core idea that an indeterministic system is one whose present allows for more than one alternative possible future. We describe how a definition of determinism stated in terms of branching models supplements and improves current treatments of determinism of theories of physics. In these treatments, we identify three main approaches: one based on the study of equations, one based on mappings (...) between temporal realizations, and one based on branching models. We first give an overview of these approaches and show that current orthodoxy advocates a combination of the mapping- and the equations-based approaches. After giving a detailed formal explication of a branching-based definition of determinism, we consider three concrete applications and end with a formal comparison of the branching- and the mapping-based approach. We conclude that the branching-based definition of determinism most usefully combines formal clarity, connection with an underlying philosophical notion of determinism, and relevance for the practical assessment of theories. 1 Introduction2 Determinism in Philosophy of Science: Three Approaches2.1 Determinism: The core idea and how to spell it out2.2 The three approaches in more detail2.3 Representing indeterminism3 Orthodoxy: DMAP, with Invocations of DEQN4 Branching-Style Determinism 4.1 Models and realizations4.2 Faithfulness4.3 Two types of branching topologies 5 Comparing the Approaches5.1 Case studies5.2 Formal comparison of the DMAP and DBRN frameworks6 Conclusions. (shrink)

Since the validity of Bell's inequalities implies the existence of joint probabilities for non-commuting observables, there is no universal consensus as to what the violation of these inequalities signifies. While the majority view is that the violation teaches us an important lesson about the possibility of explanations, if not about metaphysical issues, there is also a minimalist position claiming that the violation is to be expected from simple facts about probability theory. This minimalist position is backed by theorems due to (...) A. Fine and I. Pitowsky.Our paper shows that the minimalist position cannot be sustained. To this end,we give a formally rigorous interpretation of joint probabilities in thecombined modal and spatiotemporal framework of `stochastic outcomes inbranching space-time' (SOBST) (Kowalski and Placek, 1999; Placek, 2000). We show in this framework that the claim that there can be no joint probabilities fornon-commuting observables is incorrect. The lesson from Fine's theorem is notthat Bell's inequalities will be violated anyhow, but that an adequate modelfor the Bell/Aspect experiment must not define global joint probabilities. Thus we investigate the class of stochastic hidden variable models, whichprima facie do not define such joint probabilities. The reasonwhy these models fail supports the majority view: Bell's inequalities are notjust a mathematical artifact. (shrink)

In their insightful article, Brent Kious and Margaret Battin (2019) correctly identify an inconsistency between an involuntary psychiatric commitment for suicide prevention and physician aid in dying (PAD). They declare that it may be possible to resolve the problem by articulating “objective standards for evaluating the severity of others’ suffering,” but ultimately they admit that this task is beyond the scope of their article since the solution depends on “a deep and difficult” question about comparing the worseness of two possible (...) scenarios: letting someone die (who could have been helped) with not letting someone die (whose suffering could only be alleviated by death). In our commentary, we argue that creating such standards is more difficult than the authors assume because of the many types of deep uncertainties we have to deal with: (1) diagnostic, (2) motivational, and (3) existential. (shrink)

While agreeing with the main conclusion of Dominic Wilkinson and colleagues (Wilkinson, Butcherine, and Savulescu 2019), namely, that there is no moral difference between treatment withholding and withdrawal as such, we wish to criticize their approach on the basis that it treats the widespread acceptance of withdrawal aversion (WA) as a cognitive bias. Wilkinson and colleagues understand WA as “a nonrational preference for withholding (WH) treatment over withdrawal (WD) of treatment” (22). They treat WA as a manifestation of loss aversion (...) and refer to Kahneman and colleagues (1991), which defined this effect as follows: “the disutility of giving up an object is greater that the utility associated with acquiring it” (194). In a previous work, Wilkinson and Savulescu understood nonequivalence between treatment withholding and withdrawal as a reflection of slightly different, although related, phenomena: status quo bias or omission bias (Wilkinson and Savulescu 2012, 130–131). In neither of these two papers do they describe precisely the relation between these well-known psychological effects and WA, nor do they explain why they treat these effects as examples of nonrational preferences, despite the fact that these issues have been the subject of wide-ranging discussions on the intersection of psychology, economy, and philosophy. (shrink)

In this interview, Tomasz Zarębski speaks with Allan Janik, co-author of _Wittgenstein’s Vienna_ (1973, with Stephen Toulmin), on the occasion of the 50 th anniversary of the publication of this pathbreaking book. The conversation concerns the circumstances, motivations and reasons for his undertaking the work on the book, as well as its reception and place in Wittgenstein scholarship. A large part of the discussion refers to his perspective of Wittgenstein, Toulmin’s philosophical writings, and Janik’s own vision of philosophy. The (...) interview took place in Innsbruck on 23 rd and 25 th August 2023. (shrink)

In "Variations on a theme of Curry," Humberstone conjectured that a certain logic, intermediate between BCI and BCK, is none other than monothetic BCI—the smallest extension of BCI in which all theorems are provably equivalent. In this note, we present a proof of this conjecture.

Here, we discuss historical, philosophical and technical problems associated with relating logic and relating semantics. To do so, we proceed in three steps. First, Section 1 is devoted to providing an introduction to both relating logic and relating semantics. Second, we address the history of relating semantics and some of the main research directions and their philosophical applications. Third, we discuss some technical problems related to relating semantics, particularly whether the direct incorporation of the relation into the language of relating (...) logic is needed. The starting point for our considerations presented here is the 1st Workshop On Relating Logic and the selected papers for this issue. (shrink)

We show that Pitts' modeling of propositional quantification in intuitionistic logic (as the appropriate interpolants) does not coincide with the topological interpretation. This contrasts with the case of the monadic language and the interpretation over sufficiently regular topological spaces. We also point to the difference between the topological interpretation over sufficiently regular spaces and the interpretation of propositional quantifiers in Kripke models.

Reclamation of a slur involves the creation of a new, positively-valenced meaning that gradually replaces the old pejorative meaning. This means that at a critical stage, the slur is ambiguous. It has been claimed that this ambiguity is polysemy. However, it is far from clear whether the view can explain why the introduction of the new meaning forces the old one out of existence. I argue that this datapoint can be explained by invoking the mechanism of homonymic conflict, and, therefore, (...) that the ambiguity involved in reclamation is homonymy. One generalization that follows from my account is that conventionalized verbal irony, unlike conventionalized metonymy and metaphor, begets homonymy. Along the way, I criticize the standard ways of drawing the distinction between polysemy and homonymy in terms of semantic and etymological relatedness. If the notions of polysemy and homonymy are to be invoked in explanations, they should be understood in terms of how meanings are stored in the mental lexicon. My account also provides an elegant way of conceptualizing the difference between two types of conceptual engineering, namely reclamation and amelioration. (shrink)

Three basic positions regarding the nature of fundamental properties are: dispositional monism, categorical monism and the mixed view. Dispositional monism apparently involves a regress or circularity, while an unpalatable consequence of categorical monism and the mixed view is that they are committed to quidditism. I discuss Alexander Bird's defence of dispositional monism based on the structuralist approach to identity. I argue that his solution does not help standard dispositional essentialism, as it admits the possibility that two distinct dispositional properties can (...) possess the same stimuli and manifestations. Moreover, Bird's argument can be used to support the mixed view by relieving it of its commitment to quidditism. I briefly analyse an alternative defence of dispositional essentialism based on Leon Horsten's approach to the problem of circularity and impredicativity. I conclude that the best option is to choose Bird's solution but amend the dispositional perspective on properties. According to my proposal, the essences of dispositions are determined not directly by their stimuli and manifestations but by the role each property plays in the structure formed by the stimulus/manifestation relations. (shrink)

A general theory of refutation systems is given. Some applications (concerning maximality and minimality in lattices of logics) are also discussed.

W artykule omówione zostały sprawy organizacyjne, przebieg i znaczenie polityczne pobytu elektora saskiego Fryderyka Augusta w Opolu w dniach 15 grudnia 1733 r. – 3 stycznia 1734 r. Jest to ważny epizod tak w dziejach miasta, jak i Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodów, pomijany jednak do tej pory w historiografii. Tymczasem na przełomie 1733 i 1734 r. o wizycie przyszłego króla polskiego w Opolu było stosunkowo głośno w Europie, a notatki informujące o tym publikowane były w prasie wydawanej w Austrii, Rzeszy Niemieckiej, (...) Rosji czy Wielkiej Brytanii. W artykule wykorzystano doniesienia gazetowe, a przede wszystkim relacje z podróży elektora, jego żony Marii Józefy i dworu saskiego, dokumenty logistyczne oraz korespondencję i rachunki przechowywane w archiwach saskich, austriackich oraz w Archiwum Państwowym w Opolu. (shrink)

The paper extends the framework of outcomes in branching space-time (Kowalski and Placek [1999]) by assigning probabilities to outcomes of events, where these probabilities are interpreted either epistemically or as weighted possibilities. In resulting models I define the notion of common cause of correlated outcomes of a single event, and investigate which setups allow for the introduction of common causes. It turns out that a deterministic common cause can always be introduced, but (surprisingly) only special setups permit the introduction of (...) truly stochastic common causes. I analyse next the Bell-Aspect experiment and derive the Bell-CH inequalities. I observe that we postulate there not a common cause for outcomes of a single event but rather a common common cause that accounts for outcomes of many events, where 'events' mean 'measurements with (different) directions of polarization'. Since the inequalities are violated, I claim that no causal story can be told about the Bell correlations, where causality is subliminal and restricted by screening-off condition. Similarly, given certain intuitive principles, no deterministic story can be told about these correlations. (shrink)

In this paper we show that a variety of modal algebras of finite type is semisimple iff it is discriminator iff it is both weakly transitive and cyclic. This fact has been claimed already in [4] (based on joint work by the two authors) but the proof was fatally flawed.

We show that truth conditions for counterfactuals need not always be given in terms of a vague notion of similarity. To this end, we single out the important class of historical counterfactuals and give formally rigorous truth conditions for these counterfactuals, employing a partial ordering relation called "comparative closeness" that is defined in the framework of branching space-times. Among other applications, we provide a detailed analysis of counterfactuals uttered in the context of lost bets. In an appendix we compare our (...) theory with the branching space-times based reading of counterfactuals recently proposed by Belnap. (shrink)

Artykuł prezentuje wyniki analizy ilościowej i jakościowej zawiadomień o retrakcji w publikacjach z zakresu filozofii (o zasięgu globalnym) zawartych w Retraction Watch Database, z punktu widzenia zaleceń Komisji Etyki Publikacji. Pod względem ilościowym próba wynosi jedynie 0,48% rekordów w całej bazie, przez co trudno uznać ją za reprezentatywną dla dyscypliny, a tym bardziej niemożliwe jest uogólnienia wniosków na całą aktywność naukową. Statystyka wycofań publikacji może być jednak podstawą do studium przypadków. Treść zawiadomień jest często niekompletna lub niejednoznaczna. Normatywne uregulowania retrakcji (...) publikacji w odniesieniu do przedmiotu badań należy uznać za nie w pełni adekwatne do specyfiki praktyki wydawniczej w filozofii. (shrink)

Deutsch 2010 (The Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1: 447–460) claims that hypothetical scenarios are evaluated using arguments, not intuitions, and therefore experiments on intuitions are philosophically inconsequential. Using the Gettier case as an example, he identifies three arguments that are supposed to point to the right response to the case. In the paper, I present the results of studies ran on Polish, Indian, Spanish, and American participants that suggest that there’s no deep difference between evaluating the Gettier case with (...) intuitions and evaluating it with Deutsch’s arguments. Specifically, I argue that one would find these arguments persuasive if and only if one is already disposed to exhibit the relevant intuition. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the question of whether absolute discernibility is attainable in symmetric languages. Simon Saunders has proven that all facts expressible in first-order language with identity can be equivalently stated within its symmetric sublanguage. I use this result to show specifically how particles of the same type can be absolutely discerned in the permutation-invariant language of the quantum theory of many particles.

The debate between individualism and generalism (qualitativism) concerns the status of individualistic facts and their relations with qualitative facts. It is argued that a proper definition of individualistic facts should be a modal one, and moreover that it requires the assumption of haecceitism for its adequacy, contrary to the common belief. Consequently, the positions of individualism and generalism are dependent upon the more fundamental stances of haecceitism and anti-haecceitism in the metaphysics of modality de re.

Das vorliegende Buch unternimmt den Versuch, die polnische Platon-Rezeption einem breiten Publikum zugänglich zu machen. Die Jahre 1800–1950 umfassen die Schwerpunkte der Geschichte der polnischen Philosophie: Die Rezeption westlicher philosophischer Strömungen, die Entwicklung der Lemberg-Warschauer Schule, des Neo-Messianismus und der Neo-Scholastik. Das Buch erörtert, wie diese Phänomene in der modernen polnischen Philosophie zur Interpretation von Platon beigetragen haben.

We argue that there are neither scientific nor social reasons to require gathering ethno-racial data, as defined in the US legal regulations if researchers have no prior hypotheses as to how to connect this type of categorisation of human participants of clinical trials with any mechanisms that could explain alleged interracial health differences and guide treatment choice. Although we agree with the normative perspective embedded in the calls for the fair selection of participants for biomedical research, we demonstrate that current (...) attempts to provide and elucidate the criteria for the fair selection of participants, in particular, taking into account ethno-racial categories, overlook important epistemic and normative challenges to implement the results of such race-sorting requirements. We discuss existing arguments for and against gathering ethno-racial statistics for biomedical research and present a new one that refers to the assumption that prediction is epistemically superior to accommodation. We also underline the importance of closer interaction between research ethics and the methodology of biomedicine in the case of population stratifications for medical research, which requires weighing non-epistemic values with methodological constraints. (shrink)

In the paper we study the method of Socratic proofs in the intuitionistic propositional logic as a reduction procedure. Our approach consists in constructing for a given sequent α a finite tree of sets of sequents by using invertible reduction rules of the kind: ? is valid if and only if ?1 is valid or... or ?n is valid. From such a tree either a Gentzen-style proof of α or an Aristotle-style refutation of α can also be extracted.

In this paper we investigate Boolean connexive logics in a language with modal operators: □, ◊. In such logics, negation, conjunction, and disjunction behave in a classical, Boolean way. Only implication is non-classical. We construct these logics by mixing relating semantics with possible worlds. This way, we obtain connexive counterparts of basic normal modal logics. However, most of their traditional axioms formulated in terms of modalities and implication do not hold anymore without additional constraints, since our implication is weaker than (...) the material one. In the final section, we present a tableau approach to the discussed modal logics. (shrink)

Keith DeRose zauważył, że niezmienności kontekstowej atrybucji wiedzy można bronić za pomocą tzw. manewru z zasadnej stwierdzalności. Stosujący ten manewr inwariantyści (jak np. Tim Black) utrzymują, że wartość logiczna określonej atrybucji wiedzy nie zmienia się wraz ze zmianą kontekstu jej asercji; może się jednak zmieniać to, co takie asercje konwersacyjnie implikują, skutkując poczuciem, że zmienia się wartość logiczna samej atrybucji. Z podobnym manewrem mamy do czynienia w innych sporach filozoficznych. Niektórzy autorzy (m.in. Fred Adams) utrzymują, że zdania fikcjonalne pozbawione są (...) wartości logicznej; jeżeli zdania takie wydają się ją mieć, to tylko za sprawą tego, że wypowiadając takie zdania, implikuje się konwersacyjnie sądy logiczne. Inni badacze (Emery i Hill) argumentują, że za poczucie fałszywości nierzeczywistych okresów warunkowych z niemożliwym poprzednikiem odpowiedzialne są fałszywe implikatury konwersacyjne generowane przez asercje trywialnie prawdziwych zdań tego typu. Z kolei niektórzy, jak Alan Hazlett, twierdzą, że z éA wie, że pù nie wynika to, że p; ale to, że p jest jedynie implikaturą konwersacyjną takiej atrybucji wiedzy. Merytoryczna wartość tego rodzaju argumentacji zależy więc od tego, czy asercje rozważanych zdań rzeczywiście generują określone implikatury konwersacyjne. W pracy wykazałem, że można mieć co do tego wątpliwości. W tym celu identyfikuję i opisuję własność implikatur konwersacyjnych, której – jak pokazuję – nie mają jednak sądy mające być w opinii wspomnianych badaczy implikaturami konwersacyjnymi asercji rozważanych zdań. Własność ta polega na tym, że implikatura konwersacyjna jest wrażliwa na tzw. dociekliwe pytania rozstrzygnięcia – odpowiedź twierdząca na takie pytanie nie generuje implikatury konwersacyjnej, którą asercja takiego zdania mogłaby mieć w innym kontekście. (shrink)

Author: Kupś Tomasz Title: ELEMENTS OF TRANSCENDENTAL THEOLOGY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION OF IMMANUEL KANT (Elementy teologii transcendentalnej w filozofii religii Immanuela Kanta) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2005, vol:.5, number: 2005/1, pages: 91-103 Keywords: TRANSCENDENTAL THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, KANT Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:In Kantian philosophical system transcendental theology is a part of cognition of pre-being educed only from transcendental notions. Nevertheless any attempts of speculative cognition of (...) pre-being are futile. The value of the transcendental theology is thus merely negative as it shows the bounds of theoretical use of the reason. The idea of the pre-being gains its reality only in the practical use of the reason. In this way transcendental theology becomes the first premise of religion. (shrink)

In Section 2 I give a criterion of decidability that can be applied to logics (i.e. Tarski consequence operators) without the finite model property. In Section 3 I study ukasiewicz-style refutation procedures as a method of obtaining decidability results.This method also proves to be more general than Harrop's criterion.

O pewnym językowym rozszerzeniu logiki MR: podejście semantyczne i tabelau W artykule przedstawiamy rozszerzenie minimalnej, normalnej logiki pozycyjnej, czyli logiki z operatorem realizacji. Logika pozycyjna to logika filozoficzna, która umożliwia odniesienie zdań do kontekstów, które można rozumieć na wiele sposobów. Wzbogacamy podstawowy język minimalnej logiki pozycyjnej o dodatkowe wyrażenia zbudowane z predykatów i stałych pozycyjnych. Akceptujemy również wyrażenia zbudowane z operatorem realizacji oraz wiele pozycji, takich jak: Dzięki temu zwiększyliśmy wyrazistość minimalnej logiki pozycyjnej. W artykule wskazujemy na wiele przykładów na (...) to, że dzięki tej niewielkiej zmianie mogą powstać złożone teorie oparte na proponowanym rozszerzeniu. Jako teorię dowodu dla naszej logiki zakładamy metody tableau, pokazujące twierdzenia o poprawności i zupełności. Na koniec jednak pokazujemy, że badana tutaj logika jest tylko rozszerzeniem językowym MR: wszystkie twierdzenia o przedłużeniu mają swoje odpowiedniki w czystych twierdzeniach MR. Jednak teorie oparte na proponowanym rozszerzeniu mogą wyrazić znacznie więcej niż teorie oparte na czystej MR. (shrink)

Its interpretation, however, is as unsettled now as in the heroic days of Einstein and Bohr.This book focuses on quantum non-locality, the curious quantum ...

In the article "Podstawy analizy metodologicznej kanonów Milla" [2] Jerzy Łoś proposed an operator that refered sentences to temporal moments. Let us look, for example, at a sentence ‘It is raining in Toruń’. From a logical point of view it is a propositional function, which does not have any logical value, unless we point at a temporal context from a fixed set of such contexts. If the sentence was considered today as a description of a state of affairs, it could (...) be true. If it was considered yesterday, it could be false. 1 The operator enables us to connect any sentence p with any temporal context t. Such a complex sentence we read as: a sentence p is realized at a temporal context t (a point of time, an interval of some kind, etc). (shrink)

Consider how we evaluate how normal an object is. On the dual-nature hypothesis, a normality evaluation depends on the object’s goodness and frequency. On the single-nature hypothesis, the evaluation depends solely on either frequency or goodness. To assess these hypotheses, I ran four experiments. Study 1 shows that normality evaluations vary with both the goodness and the frequency assessment of the object. Study 2 shows that manipulating the goodness and the frequency dimension changes the normality evaluation. Yet, neither experiment rules (...) out that some people evaluate normality solely based on frequency, and the rest evaluate normality solely based on goodness. Whence two more experiments. Study 3 reveals that when scenarios are contrasted—presented one after another—only frequency matters. But, as study 4 shows, when scenarios are evaluated alone, both frequency and goodness influence normality evaluations in a single person, although the more a person is sensitive to one dimension, the less she’s sensitive to the other. The dual-nature hypothesis seems thus true of uncontrasted applications of the concept of normality, whereas the single-nature hypothesis seems true of contrasted applications. (shrink)

The article discusses the issue of the departure from examining real behaviours in a real environment, a trend in social psychology which has been observed going back several years, and the impact of this phenomenon for social psychology as a scientific discipline. The article presents two studies on the well-known and explored “bystander effect”. This phenomenon is examined in two ways – once by way of a “traditional” field experiment conducted in natural conditions, and once through a survey. As it (...) turned out, the results generated by the two studies were diametrically opposite, and only in the field experiment were we able to achieve a pattern of results consistent with those in the original studies. (shrink)

The paper develops a theory of branching spatiotemporal histories that accommodates indeterminism and the insights of general relativity. A model of this theory can be viewed as a collection of overlapping histories, where histories are defined as maximal consistent subsets of the model's base set. Subsequently, generalized manifolds are constructed on the theory's models, and the manifold topology is introduced. The set of histories in a model turns out to be identical with the set of maximal subsets of the model's (...) base set with respect to being Hausdorff and downward closed. Further postulates ensure that the topology is connected, locally Euclidean, and satisfies the countable sub-cover condition. (shrink)