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)

The European bison is one of the last remnants of the megafauna that once roamed through Europe. By the early modern period, it had already disappeared from most of its former range and had become a coveted natural curiosity as well as been designated as royal game. In the 18th century, the last population of lowland European bison surviving in the Białowieża Forest became an object of study for naturalists. When the forest became a part of the Russian Empire during (...) the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the Russian Imperial family's attention to the species that ensured its survival. In the same period, the European bison was of the utmost importance to the scientific community—as a research subject (on the taxonomic position of the species, its relation to extinct Bovidae, etc.) and as a museum exhibit (to attract audiences interested in seeing the largest European mammal). Obtaining such a specimen demanded the scientific community's adept maneuvering through diplomatic and bureaucratic channels and depended on the Russian monarch's goodwill.The tsar's permission was only a start, as naturalists themselves had to organize hunts, process the pelt and bones, and deliver them to museums. Despite the considerable organizational and logistical difficulties, by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many museums were displaying the European bison, which succeeded in making the species well known to the wider public. In 1919, the last wild Białowieża bison was killed, but the popularity of this species helped the reintroduction of the animal a decade later. Today, the historical specimens are a source of samples for both genetic and molecular research. (shrink)

Artykuł, opublikowany po raz pierwszy w 1979 r., jest jednym z najczęściej cytowanych tekstów filozoficznych z drugiej połowy XX wieku. Tekst Bernarda Williamsa zainicjował kilka ważnych debat, toczących się do dziś w etyce i filozofii działania. Zaproponowana przez niego interpretacja pojęcia racji działania jest, z jednej strony, niezwykle wpływowa, ale z drugiej bardzo niejednoznaczna i często krytykowana. Williams broni stanowiska, które z czasem zaczęto określać jako internalizm racji: pewne względy są racjami działania dla danego podmiotu tylko wtedy, gdy mają ścisły (...) związek z "subiektywnym układem motywacyjnym" tego podmiotu, czyli z jakimiś aspektami jego psychiki, charakteru, celów, pragnień, planów, relacji z innymi itd. Stwierdzenie, że ktoś ma rację, by coś zrobić (a jeśli uznajemy, że jest to racja przeważająca - to, że powinien to coś zrobić), znaczy więc wedle tego stanowiska tyle, że ten ktoś jest w stanie być motywowany, by to coś zrobić. W przeciwieństwie do tego stanowisko określane obecnie ako eksternalizm racji głosi, że pewne względy mogą być racjami działania dla danego podmiotu także wtedy, gdy odwołują się do niezależnych od jego układu motywacyjnego własności świata. Williams wychodzi od modelu działania nawiązującego do koncepcji Hume'owskiej, następnie przedstawia jego bardziej rozbudowaną wersję, omawia rolę namysłu, naturę potrzeb, a także przedstawia argument za internalizmem racji, określany jako argument z wyjaśniania działania. Głosi on, że nawet gdyby istniały zewnętrzne racje działania, niezwiązane z subiektywnym układem motywacyjnym danego podmiotu, to odwołanie się do nich nie byłoby w stanie wyjaśnić, dlaczego dany podmiot postąpił tak, a nie inaczej, gdyż "nic nie jest w stanie wyjaśnić (zamierzonych) działań podmiotu za wyjątkiem czegoś, co motywuje go działania". (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)

My paper builds on the conceptual tools from three interrelated philosophical debates that—as I believe—may help structure important if chaotic discussions about surrogates for living human brains and resolve some practical issues related to regulatory matters. In particular, I refer to the discussions about the “moral precautionary principle” in research ethics (Koplin and Wilkinson 2019); about normative uncertainty in ethics (MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord 2020), and about the inductive risk problem for animal welfare scientists (Birch 2018). I elucidate upon the (...) possible meanings of the phrase “a too good human brain surrogate” used by Henry T. Greely (2021), and I demonstrate that the evaluation of the practical and regulatory implications of the “goodness” of such surrogates created for research purposes should be sensitive to the possible consequences of two types of errors: the under-attribution and over-attribution of moral status to such beings. Many authors writing about this topic (including Greely 2021, but see also, e.g., Koplin and Savulescu 2019) concentrate only on the first type of error, neglecting the negative consequences of the second type, i.e., over-attribution. (shrink)

In September 2018, the ArgDiaP association, along with colleagues from Germany and the UK, organised one of the longest and most interdisciplinary series of events ever dedicated to argumentation - Warsaw Argumentation Week, WAW 2018. The eleven-day ‘week’ featured a five day graduate school on computational and linguistic perspectives on argumentation (3rd SSA school); five workshops: on systems and algorithms for formal argumentation (2nd SAFA), argumentation in relation to society (1st ArgSoc), philosophical approaches to argumentation (1st ArgPhil), legal argumentation (2ndMET-ARG) (...) and argumentation in rhetoric (1st MET-RhET); and two conferences: on computational models of argumentation (7th COMMA conference) and on argumentation and corpus linguistics (16th ArgDiaP conference). WAW hosted twelve tutorials and eight invited talks as well as welcoming over 130 participants. All the conferences and workshops publish pre- or post-proceedings in the top journals and book series in the field. (shrink)

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 prove that all semisimple varieties of FL ew-algebras are discriminator varieties. A characterisation of discriminator and EDPC varieties of FL ew-algebras follows. It matches exactly a natural classification of logics over FL ew proposed by H. Ono.

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)

Objective: While behavioral recommendations regarding physical activity commonly focus on reaching demanding goals by proposing ‘thresholds’, little attention has been paid to the question of how much of a behavioral change is needed to make people feel that they have changed. The present research investigated this relation between actual and felt behavior change. Design: Using data from two longitudinal community samples, Study 1 and 2 comprised 614 (63 % women) and 398 participants (61 % women) with a mean age of (...) 40.9 years (SD = 13.6) and 42.5 years (SD = 13.4), respectively. Using a stage-approach, participants were classified into four groups by asking them at the respective second measurement to indicate whether they had become more physically active since their last participation six months ago (“Changers”), had tried but did not succeed in becoming more physically active (“Attempters”), were already physically active on a regular basis (“Regular Actives”), or had not tried to become more physically active (“Non-Attempters”). Physical activity was measured using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ), and fitness level was assessed as physical working capacity (PWC) via bicycle ergometry. Mixed ANOVAs including Time and Perceived Change as within and between factors were conducted, followed up by simple effect analyses. Results: Participants stating to have become more active in the past six months (Changers) showed a significant increase in vigorous physical activity but not in moderate physical activity, with an average of 6.8 (Study 1) and 10.6 (Study 2) MET-h per week in vigorous activity. Corroborating these findings, objective fitness also significantly increased in the group of Changers. No systematic change in moderate or vigorous physical activity was observed for the three other ‘non-changer’ groups (regular actives, attempters, non-attempters). Conclusion: The intensity of physical activity is the crucial variable for people’s perception of change in physical activity. Moderate physical activity seems not to be perceived as an effective means for behavior change. It thus might fail to unfold sufficient motivational impact, despite its known positive effects on health. (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 development of innovative biomedical technologies that use gene editing tools opens up new possibilities in the treatment of rare diseases, as well as diseases that were not previously treated...

This book uses the formal semantics of counterfactual conditionals to analyze the problem of non-locality in quantum mechanics. Counterfactual conditionals enter the analysis of quantum entangled systems in that they enable us to precisely formulate the locality condition that purports to exclude the existence of causal interactions between spatially separated parts of a system. They also make it possible to speak consistently about alternative measuring settings, and to explicate what is meant by quantum property attributions. The book develops the possible-world (...) semantics of quantum counterfactuals using David Lewis's famous approach as a starting point but modifying it significantly in order to achieve compatibility with the demands of the special theory of relativity as well as quantum mechanics. There have been several attempts to use counterfactuals semantics to strengthen Bell's theorem and its cognates such as the GHZ and Hardy theorems. These are critically evaluated in the book. Finally, a counterfactual reconstruction of the EPR argument and Bell's theorem is proposed that sheds a new light on their philosophical consequences regarding the relations between realism and local causation. (shrink)

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)

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)

The traditional divisions in the methodology of educational research include two types of methods: quantitative and qualitative. These comprise e.g. quasi-experiment, comparative research, observat...

Nowoczesne przedsiębiorstwa są bytami w szczególny sposób narażonymi na cyberzagrożenia powiązane z _metodami _inżynierii społecznej, szeroko wykorzystywanymi przez cyberkryminalistów. Dziś środowiska firmowe muszą niemalże na co dzień mierzyć się z próbami kradzieży danych opartymi na wielu pochodnych współczesnych odmian phishingu, a jednym z głównych sposobów walki z tego rodzaju zagrożeniami pozostaje w dalszym ciągu edukacja pracownicza, która przyjmować może różne formy. Człowiek z reguły określany jest jako najsłabszy element „łańcucha bezpieczeństwa” danego poprawnie skonfigurowanego systemu informatycznego. Ten stan rzeczy biorą pod (...) uwagę zarówno spółki samodzielnie przygotowujące programy edukacyjne i szkolenia dla swoich pracowników, jak i te, które przeprowadzanie tego rodzaju działań zlecają firmom zewnętrznym. Skuteczne kreowanie tzw. kultury bezpieczeństwa danej korporacji jest zadaniem niezwykle odpowiedzialnym, a przy tym wysoce nietrywialnym, a temat ten stosunkowo rzadko poruszany jest w literaturze przedmiotu. Ciągła rewizja środków i metod prowadzenia programowych szkoleń i symulacji oraz zarządzanie działaniami przyczyniającymi się do współtworzenia zdrowego środowiska firmowego w zadowalającym stopniu odpornego na zagrożenia zewnętrzne powinny zatem stanowić jeden z głównych priorytetów jednostek administrujących lokalnymi instrumentami prewencji incydentów, które mają miejsce w danej spółce. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to make a few remarks on the following aspects of refutation rules: a characteristic property of a logic, elegant and constructive completeness proofs. In particular a new constructive completeness proof for the provability logic G is given.

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct and correct one argument in support of the symmetrization postulate in quantum mechanics. I identify the central premise of the argument as a thesis specifying a particular ontic property of quantum superpositions. The precise form of this thesis depends on some underlying assumptions of a metaphysical character. I compare the exchange degeneracy argument with alternative formal arguments for the symmetrization postulate, and I discuss the role and meaning of labels in the symmetric/antisymmetric (...) representations of the states of many particles. (shrink)

We show that the variety of residuated lattices is generated by its finite simple members, improving upon a finite model property result of Okada and Terui. The reasoning is a blend of proof-theoretic and algebraic arguments.

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)

In this commentary paper, we are taking one step further in questioning the central assumptions in the bioethical debates about reproductive technologies. We argue that the very distinction between “person affecting” and “identity affecting” interventions is based on a questionable form of material-origin essentialism. Questioning of this form of essentialist approach to human identity allows treating genome editing and genetic selection as more similar than they are taken to be in the standard approaches. It would also challenge the idea that (...) normative reasons we have in these two types of cases markedly differ in strength. (shrink)

Hutto and Myin famously argue that basic minds are not contentful and content exists only as far as it is scaffolded with social and linguistic practices. This view, however, rests on a troublesome distinction between basic and scaffolded minds. Since Hutto and Myin have to account for language purely in terms of joint action guidance, there is no reason why simpler communication systems, such as cellular signaling pathways, should not give rise to scaffolded content as well. This conclusion remains valid (...) even if one rejects the view of language as mediated through public symbols and embraces global antirepresentationalism. Content evolves spontaneously in complex regulatory systems, such as human, animal, and cellular communication. (shrink)

In this paper we look at the relations between knowledge and thinking through the lens of ignorance. In relation to knowledge, ignorance becomes its “constitutive outside,” and as such it may be politically organised in order to delimit the borders of the right to knowledge [the “ignorance economy,” see Roberts and Armitage : 335–354, 2008)]. In this light, the notion of a knowledge-based society should be understood as a society structured along the lines of knowledge distribution: the rights of possession (...) of and access to knowledge demand that ignorance is planned and executed as the condition of their establishment. In relation to thinking, ignorance appears differently. According to Rancière, the teacher's ignorance conditions the student's appearance as Anthropos, a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? Hence, we are dealing with the ambiguity of ignorance which seems to be both the criterion of social exclusion, and the condition of emancipation. Following this thread with reference to Heidegger's discourse on thinking, we would like to explore the possibility of comprehending knowledge and education beyond the relations of ownership and demands of productivity. Following Rancière, we may say that thinking—as displacing the notion of ignorance—stands in the position of “politics” and questions the ways knowledge societies are structured as “police orders” along the lines of knowledge possession and exclusion. (shrink)