Sekcja Gości Zagranicznych/Foreign Guest Section

In 1900 Kazimierz Twardowski published a paper „On So-Called Relative Truths”. He argued that the concept of relative truth is not acceptable. Twardowski’s paper became one of the most influential contributions in contemporary Polish philosophy. For instance, it initiated a discussion between Kotarbiński and Leśniewski concerning the temporality of truth. According to the latter, truth is eternal as well as sempiternal, but Kotarbiński accepted only eternality (what is true now, is true for ever, but not since ever) – the same position was taken by Łukasiewicz in his many-valued logic. Leśniewski pointed out that the proper absolutism must accept his position, but Kotarbiński’s approach implies a kind of relativism (the latter changed his mind after criticism of the former). An important outcome of the entire discussion consisted in clarification that absolutism is closely related to the principle of bivalence.

When Tarski formulated his semantic definition of truth (SDT for brevity), the question of its relation to absolutism and relativism immediately arose. For the first sight, SDT as relativised to a language L and a model M (the second relativisation was later introduced) appeared as relative. This issue was carefully examined by Maria Kokoszyńska in a series of papers published before 1939 and after 1945. She combined ideas of Twardowski and Tarski as well as defended SDT as an absolute definition of truth. According to Kokoszyńska, SDT is a good formalization of the absolute concept of truth. Looking at the problem from the contemporary perspective, one can see that SDT implies bivalence. In other words, if a sentence A expressed in a language L is true in a model M under Tarski’s definition (A is true iff A is satisfied by all infinite sequences of objects), this assertion entails bivalence (A is true or false in M).

Metaphysics is supposed to be concerned with the real world, not with our impressions thereof. This emphasis on Real World Metaphysics (RWM) usually extends to truthmaking: “The idea of a truthmaker for a particular truth… is… some portion of reality, in virtue of which that truth is true” (Armstrong 2004: 5). Howeover, “if our aim is to understand language, then our focus should be on the immediate truthmakers, not the ultimate truthmakers… For the metaphysical project, we may wish to give an account of the truthmakers for the statement in terms of elementary particles… But for the semantical project, we can rest content with specifying the truthmakers in terms of ordinary macroscopic objects…” (Fine 2017b: 557).

The main point of this talk is to demonstrate that Kit Fine\’s ‘immediate truthmakers’ should be understood as objects of Cognitive Metaphysics (CM) – a term (re-)introduced recently “for the study of the basic categories in the human mind that structure the representation of the environment” (Decock 2018: 2). I argue that CM encompasses important aspects of Strawson\’s Descriptive Metaphysics, late Quine\’s Epistemology of Ontology and Fine\’s Naïve Metaphysics within philosophical literature, as well as linguists\’ Natural Language Metaphysics (e.g., Bach 1986). I also show how the existence of two cognitive systems for individuating objects and states of affairs – spatiotemporal and property-based (Xu and Carey 1996, Goldman 2007) – makes it possible to make ontological sense of (our talk of) negative state of affairs, controversial in philosophy and linguistics (Przepiórkowski 1999, Varzi 2006, 2008).

(1) I kept the child awake [by not turning out the light].
(2) The policeman saw [Andrew not stop for the traffic light].
(3) Whenever [nobody showed up], we canceled the class.

More generally, I argue that such considerations call for closer links between philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science in the study of metaphysics and ontology.

[CHARACTER COUNT: 1988 (without this character count and the references below). Note: the title and the abstract are in English, but I may deliver the talk either in English or in Polish, depending on the wishes of the PZF Organisers.]

References

• Armstrong, D. M. 2004. Truth and Truthmakers. Cambridge University Press.
• Bach, E. 1986. Natural language metaphysics. In R. Barcan Marcus, G. J. W. Dorn, and P. Weingartner, eds., Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science VII, pp. 573–595. Elsevier.
• Decock, L. 2018. Cognitive metaphysics. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(1700), 1–11.
• Fine, K. 2017a. Naive metaphysics. Philosophical Issues, 27, 98–113.
• Fine, K. 2017b. Truthmaker semantics. In B. Hale, C. Wright, and A. Miller, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, chapter 22, pp. 556–577. John Wiley, 2nd edition.
• Goldman, A. I. 2007. A program for “naturalizing” metaphysics, with application to the ontology of events. The Monist, 90(3), 457–479.
• Moltmann, F. 2018. Natural language and its ontology. In A. Goldman and B. P. McLaughlin, eds., Metaphysics and Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.
• Przepiórkowski, A. 1999. On negative eventualities, negative concord, and negative yes/no questions. In T. Matthews and D. Strolovitch, eds., Proceeding of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 9, pp. 237–254. CLC Publications.
• Varzi, A. C. 2006. The talk I was supposed to give…. In A. Bottani and R. Davies, eds., Modes of Existence: Papers in Ontology and Philosophical Logic, pp. 131–151. Ontos Verlag.
• Varzi, A. C. 2008. Failures, omissions, and negative descriptions. In K. Korta and J. Garmendia, eds., Meaning, Intentions, and Argumentation, pp. 61–75. CSLI Publications.
• Xu, F. and Carey, S. 1996. Infants’ metaphysics: The case of numerical identity. Cognitive Psychology, 30, 111–153.””

My presentation focuses on the possibility of moral perception. The difficulty is that moral facts seem different from all the usual things that we see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. Objects detected by usual perception seem to be somewhat more real, out there, waiting to be touched or smelled while things like moral goodness or evilness are somewhat queer, hard to be identified within our sight, or hearing experience, even though we have (at least some of us sometimes do) this irresistible impression that we are witnessing something of moral value.
To answer the question of the possibility of moral perception, I will take the following steps. I will firstly present a paradigmatic example of moral perception; then, shortly, outline essential characteristics of perception in general. My next step will be to compare the example with the list of these essential elements. It will allow me to identify certain difficulties the advocates of moral perception need to overcome. I will then present what I believe to be the most sophisticated proposal of moral perception. Such view is based on the assumption that the reality contains more than just mere physical facts. They are the most fundamental facts but not the only ones. Reality is composed of various ontological layers, where lower layers constitute higher ones. Higher level properties (including moral properties) can be perceptually perceived in virtue of the perception of the lower-layer entities.
This idea of more sophisticated moral perception seems to overcome most objections. I am going, however, to formulate another, new objection, called here second life objection, which shows, as I believe, that moral facts are not observable from the third person’s perspective. I do not want to claim, however, that moral perception is not possible at all. The last section of the presentation offers something which could be called moral perception. It would be possible, however, merely from a first person perspective.

Having analysed in a previous paper (2015, unpublished) how Ludwik Fleck’s stance against absolute truths appears to be similar to the position held by Karl Popper in his analysis of scientific discovery and progress I argued that the writings of both Fleck and Popper can be described as an analysis how knowledge is possible without relying upon absolute certainty. However, despite this similarity, it should be kept in mind that the respective argumentations of both philosophers are structured in a distinct manner. I, therefore, argued in 2015 that a common ground enabling a comparison of both concepts could be gained by focussing upon the respective temporal structures of the arguments Fleck and Popper rely upon. Extending my analysis (as previously presented in 2015) I would now add two additional steps of analysis. In a first step I would extend the temporal approach by not merely focussing on the theories of knowledge as developed by Fleck and Popper but by including as well other epistemological approaches, such as for example Thomas Kuhn’s. Having gained a common ground for comparison within a temporal framework I would then, in a second step, attempt to reassess the respective theories of knowledge of the individual philosophers by undertaking steps of abstracting from the temporal framework (thereby, however, keeping the results of the achieved comparison in mind). I argue that the temporal framework used to enable a comparison of the respective epistemological theories (having achieved their task) ought to be set aside, namely in order to further develop epistemological insights without being somehow restricted by concepts which rely upon time-related frameworks, as I argue that the different theories of knowledge have their respective distinct epistemological benefits which should and can be related to one another in a fruitful manner for further epistemological advances.

The paper develops my evolutionary approach (Kawalec 2018a, 2018b, 2019) to study research routines in order to identify some general patterns in this prevalent area of social practice. Three mechanisms underlying cognitive dynamics of research routines are identified and examined using the case of microRNAs research in molecular biology. The interaction of the three mechanisms is attributed to propagation of shock impulses. Some inherent limitations of alternative scientometric approaches (stemming from the work of Solla de Price), such as the gradient of flow vergence, are examined from this philosophically informed account of science dynamics. Those limitations presumably arise because of the particularistic (in philosophical sense) orientation of the dominant scientometric approaches. The paper concludes by advocating processualist approach to dynamics of scientific research and suggesting a more detailed examination of the nature of shock impulses.

Some sixty years ago, after the second world war, the need to respond to one of many anthropological reductionisms arose in the communist-controlled People’s Republic of Poland. Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec rose to the challenge of researching for the metaphysical foundations of the considerations of the philosophy of man which will be adequate to enter into dialogue with the materialistic, positivistic, and phenomenological reductionism of the human being, as promoted by the prevalent Marxist ideologies in the then post-world war II Poland.
His efforts paid off and fruits of his research project were already being harvested as far back as the 1979, when the first edition of Krąpiec’s “Ja-Człowiek. Zarys antropologii filozoficznej” was published in Polish. Four years later, M. Lescoe, A. Woznicki and T. Sandok had translated this work into English under the title “I-Man: An Outline of Philosophical Anthropology”.
This paper demonstrates that the need for a retrieval of the transcendence of human person in opposition to the Marxists materialistic reductionisms was at the canter of the new philosophical response of the Lublin School of Philosophy to the cultural-ideological propaganda launched by the Marxist-oriented educational policies of the government of Republic of Poland after the Second World War.

In social reality, despite all the changes, man remains the only entity that is never totally changeable. This is a problem, but also most remote possibility. Man is a presupposition of a historical continuum that connects the idea of the human and what can be – transhuman. This is now out of the question, as we live and die in a highly rational world without often weighing the price of technological progress. Time is not simply changed, but the man who has changed over time. Man is the time he takes with him. Yet the man of today, of technology, lives anyway, without the configuration of a future. Yet the future is a problematization par excellence for man. It does not belong to philosophy, but to man. In the future the things that are – those in fact think, dreamy, imagine, set – are not yet. And the man, however, is exposed to it. He is exposed without pretense. Man is therefore his future. But if the transhuman already has free space to reflect on the transformation of the future events of the world recalling to itself the man of the future, of history, of spiritual abode, where will we actually arrive? Actually, the man of the posthuman would like to forget, to go beyond himself to the extent of eternal technocrats. Man in this way would no longer be his time, but his eternal scientificization; that is to say a circumstantial world, confined to itself, and boundless in the territory of ethics; suffering, to rationality, to the immense techno-vital force that flanks the premature extinction of creativity, of the spirit of adventure.

“In Karol Wojtyla’s magnus opus The Acting Person, the author presents a term that is unique to both his anthrolopoligical and social philosophy, the term “community.” With this term, Karol Wojtyla creates a system for describing the transcendent relationship between individual human persons, and goes further to describe how this concept of “community” should be the basis of all human relations, both of those on the micro and macro levels.
This puts the thought of Wojtyla at odds with many other “social” philosophers who develop their concept of inter-human relationships upon a myriad set of concepts that either put the inter-human relationship before the human person, or deny transcendence as having a part to any kind of inter-human action. The origin of society as proposed by Hobbes and Rosseau both give evidence to this.
This paper presents the dichotomy found between Wojtyla’s concept of “communty” and the concept of “society” as presented by other philosophers, particularly Hobbes, Rosseau, and Marx. This paper achieves this through an analyses of where the respective philosopher places the origin and nature of human relations, and argues the superiority of the transcendent relations of community as proposed by Karol Wojtyla. From this, the paper concludes that any human society should be based on a “community” similar to that of Karol Wojtyla, and that the absence of such an orientation leads to subsequent anthropological mistakes.”

The problem of compatibility/incompatibility between the possibility of meaningful deliberation and necessitarianism (the view that everything happens of necessity) has long been a topic of discussion, and it is well known that Aristotle is concerned with the problem in De Interpretatione 9. He thinks that if everything happens of necessity (18b30-31), then ‘there would be no need to deliberate or to take trouble, thinking that if we do this, this will happen, but if we do not, it will not’ (18b31-33). In this paper, I argue that Aristotle is a deliberation incompatibilist, and consider why he thinks that it is reasonable to endorse this position.

First, while interpreting his presentation of the necessitarian argument (18a34-18b16) as a reductio (pace Bobzien 2011; Nielsen 2011), I show that Aristotle thinks that deliberation is inefficacious if the future is necessary (in the sense of being fixed/irrevocable) in the way the past and present are.

Second, I argue that the necessitarian conclusion that ‘everything is and happens of necessity’ (18b30-31), which is considered to be incompatible with deliberation, should be distinguished from the view that everything that happens happens of necessity, independently of antecedent conditions (pace Nielsen 2011). Further, I also show that Aristotle’s argument on the inefficaciousness of deliberation is not a sort of ‘Lazy Argument’ (pace Sorabji 1980).

Third, I argue that, in Aristotle’s view, the principle that ‘if we do this, this will happen, but if we do not, it will not’ (18b32-33) would hold even if everything happens of necessity. By pointing out that Aristotle accepts that one could still ‘causally affect some future events’ even if everything happens of necessity, I show that Fine’s (1984) contention that ‘since one can causally affect some future events, one can deliberate about them’ misses the point.

“Plato, as it appears from his “Cratylus”, was convinced that language is a way to cognition. Several issues on the interpretation and reading of the dialogue are to be addressed here. In my opinion, the dialogue can not be translated, but it can be interpreted only. By establishing this sort of terminology, I would like to emphasize difficulties in understanding of the dialogue as well as significant complications in its rendering into various languages due to numerous examples which resemble etymology of Greek words quite precisely. So we cannot translate the dialogue, it is possible just to interpret it in our own way. This occurs due to the fact that Plato never expresses his exact position on the discussed issue, namely the correlation between two opposite views on the nature of language, which are represented by contemporary notions of conventionalism and naturalism.
The most striking and obviously case of so-called “untranslatability” is the one with Greek word “anthropos” explained in terms of its etymology. According to Plato’s analysis, the word is compiled of the prefix “ana-” followed by the root “opos”, which mean “the one who looks up”. For Plato, as well as for Socrates, the unique feature of human being is stargazing, which is entirely missing in all the rest creatures. Unfortunately, the plain and smooth structure of the dialogue should be disturbed in the process of its interpretation into any language, as well as there is no direct correspondence between the meaning of vocabulary and its components, e.g. prefixes. Neither Polish, nor English, nor Ukrainian languages possess anything similar to the example provided here by Plato.
The second, more obscure issue enlightened in the dialogue, is the controversy between conventionalism and naturalism, two opposite streams, which since have been represented during all four ages of understanding in the European thought and acquired their development in various fields.”

“My presentation focuses on the possibility of moral perception. The difficulty is that moral facts seem different from all the usual things that we see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. Objects detected by usual perception seem to be somewhat more real, out there, waiting to be touched or smelled while things like moral goodness or evilness are somewhat queer, hard to be identified within our sight, or hearing experience, even though we have (at least some of us sometimes do) this irresistible impression that we are witnessing something of moral value.
To answer the question of the possibility of moral perception, I will take the following steps. I will firstly present a paradigmatic example of moral perception; then, shortly, outline essential characteristics of perception in general. My next step will be to compare the example with the list of these essential elements. It will allow me to identify certain difficulties the advocates of moral perception need to overcome. I will then present what I believe to be the most sophisticated proposal of moral perception. Such view is based on the assumption that the reality contains more than just mere physical facts. They are the most fundamental facts but not the only ones. Reality is composed of various ontological layers, where lower layers constitute higher ones. Higher level properties (including moral properties) can be perceptually perceived in virtue of the perception of the lower-layer entities.
This idea of more sophisticated moral perception seems to overcome most objections. I am going, however, to formulate another, new objection, called here second life objection, which shows, as I believe, that moral facts are not observable from the third person’s perspective. I do not want to claim, however, that moral perception is not possible at all. The last section of the presentation offers something which could be called moral perception. It would be possible, however, merely from a first person perspective.

“

The problem of personal well-being is widely discussed in today’s normative ethics. Objective list of theorists, subjectivists, desire satisfaction theorists, and hybrid theorists, among others, try to determine what is good for a person—and whether and to what extent it’s determined by a person and her own values. It is important to remember that most of philosophers do not equate prudential goods (what’s good for a person) and moral goods (what’s good per se), and so the issue of well-being can be analyzed apart from moral considerations. Nonetheless, there are those who argue that living morally and living well –i.e. in a manner which is good for a person – is one and the same thing. Today’s neo-Aristotelians claim that each person’s goal is (her own) eudaimonia, i.e. flourishing; apart from that, they accept the necessity of virtues thesis, according to which in order to flourish a person needs to be virtuous. Flourishing, it is said, is partly constituted by living virtuously.
Virtually every advocate of eudaimonism accepts that justice is one of the main virtues. However, there are philosophers who worry that sometimes – under given circumstances – being just isn’t good for a person; it can be against her self-interest. The goal of my paper is to defend a thesis that being just is always in person’s self-interest and is a constitutive part of her flourishing. I will thus (i) explain what flourishing is; (ii) briefly present an alternative definition of virtue and (iii) definition of justice as pertaining to judging others in accordance with their character, behavior and values. The main part of my paper will be focused on showing (iv) how treating others justly is good for our flourishing and self-interest and is consistent with a rational hierarchy of values which are sine qua non of happiness. I will argue that the opposite “policy” – being unjust when it allegedly fits our purposes – can never be good for our lives taken as a whole.

Some philosophers claim to show that religious diversity should lead rational beings to find some conciliation between them.  Let us call this claim the Principle of Intellectual Conciliation. I will show that the Principle has serious flaws, especially with regard to the philosophical psychology of religious faith. My conclusion will be that it is wrong that we should suspend any religious belief that an alleged epistemic peer does not share as soon as we become aware that he does not share it. It is not true that it is rational in any case to respect the Principle of Intellectual Conciliation, and that another attitude would always be irrational and morally disgusting. And it warrants the right to believe that only religion is true.

This paper sides with those authors who propose that the Trolley Problem (TP) cannot be solved only with arguments, but requires thorough empirical investigation. The reason why we side with the latter claim is that arguments seem to decontextualise TP from human impulsivity in decisions under uncertainty. That is, we believe that it cannot be easily argued that there exists an argument or a moral theory, which fits all the possible cases TP applies to.

In order to prove our claim, we take great inspiration from the existing literature on the empirical investigations of TP. In particular, our paper sides with those authors who claim that cognitive biases might spoil individual moral evaluations in defined contexts. Thus, we devise and implement surveys focused on showing that the individual evaluations of the TP are affected by at least three factors: by the fact that the consequences for decision-makers are clearly stated; by the fact that outcomes might be only probable; and by the presence of stereotypes that trigger emotional arousals.

In the very same way, we show that the Knobe Effect (KE) does not hold in contexts with probable outcomes and is highly sensitive to the availability heuristic bias. More specifically, we present two main findings from three empirical tests carried out between 2016 and 2018: the first finding concerns the fact that if the issuer of a decision with consequences on third parties is unlikely to be perceived as unfriendly, then KE is reduced or absent; the second finding regards instead the fact that if an action has two possible outcomes (one likely to obtain with strong intensity and one likely to obtain with less intensity), then KE does not obtain for decisions whose side-effects have limited consequences on third parties.

On this basis, we conclude that neither philosophical dilemmas like TP nor the findings of experimental philosophy like KE survive the test for biased judgement because context unavoidably affects judgement.