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In this paper the author deals with contemporary change of epistemological paradigm and elementary assumptions of establishing a constructionist paradigm. Following the stances taken by Ernest von Glasersfeld, the paper analyzes the basic normative and physiological, i.e. genetic assumptions of human thought as interpreted by Jean Piaget. Cognitive development is moving towards the higher and higher forms of the mental balance which represents a progressive adaptation to reality, motivated by genuine mental needs o f solving intellectual problems. Piaget presents a cognitive scheme by which the problem is destabilization of a previously achieved balance, and the solution restores the balance, but this time at a higher level, since that was not possible under previous circumstances. The mechanism by which this transition occurs Piaget calls reflective abstraction.
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Children's play is an important activity which benefits their normal development. There is small body of research that dealt with children’s developmental milestones of children’s play, especially those of children aged up to four years. Therefore, we conducted a study on 637 children aged one to four years. The main goal of our study was to conduct preliminary psychometric evaluation of the instrument constructed for this purpose. The instrument is called "Milestones Development of Children's Play" (MRDI), and it consists of three check-lists, suitable for the following age groups: 1-2 years (MRDI12), 2-3 years (MRDI23) and 3-4 years (MRDI34). The results show a satisfactory factor validity of all three parts of the MRDI, a solid reliability of the MRDI23, and somewhat lower reliability of the MRDI12 and the MRDI34. Lastly, we discussed on possible improvements of these instruments, through improving their discriminative properties, and the number of their items.
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The article reviews the freedom of oeuvre issue in the teaching of M. Heidegger, in particular according to his understanding of notions of tradition, free thinking, creative digestion, just and false, et cetera. Subjects of analysis include the philosopher’s approach to definition of being and matter, subjectivity and objectivity, and their relation with freedom of oeuvre.
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This paper concerns the human situation in the face of increasing significance of digital environments. As the starting point for my research I am adopting the embodied cognition paradigm, whose great precursors were Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Jerome Gibson. I use the conception of embodied cognition, especially enactivism, to analyze the human relation with interactive virtual environments. In addition, I classify virtual phenomena, due to the variety of their applications.
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Roger W. Sperry (1913–1994) received the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1981 for his outstanding scientific achievements in connection with the study of people with severed brain commissures. Sperry linked the results of his research to philosophical considerations pertaining to the conscious mind of human beings and its place in the natural sciences. He was interested in the philosophical question of whether or not the severing of the cerebral hemispheres constituted a violation of the unity of consciousness. Sperry’s explanatory account of mind-body (mind-brain) interaction forms part of a broadly construed theory of emergent interactionism – one that also purports to guarantee the unity of consciousness. In this article, I first present an intellectual profile of Sperry, outlining the evolution of his philosophical-scientific analyses. I then outline the emergence and flourishing of theories of emergence, along with the elements essentially associated with them. Using this as a basis, I go on to consider Sperry’s account of emergent interaction more closely, focusing on his understanding of downward causation. In conclusion, I show how his theory corresponds to a version of emergent interactionism, and seek to address some criticisms leveled against it. I also aim to establish how far this theory can be said to answer the question of the conscious character of mental states.
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Despite the criticism that substance dualism was an inadequate attitude towards mental activity and its relation to physical processes, it has supporters today. There is increasing discussion of the so-called “the Soul Hypothesis”, which purportedly allows the gaps in the current scientific description of the world to be filled in a meaningful way. This implies that there are certain assumptions, still not reflected properly, which serve dualists as a lifebuoy in the stormy seas of critique. The paper tries to show that dualists unjustly abuse the Cartesian idea of clara et distincta perceptio. The first conclusion of the paper is that the obvious existence of subjective consciousness does not necessarily count as the scientifically important fact. The second conclusion is as follows: “the soul hypothesis”, as a theoretical construct, which is intended to explain the existence of the subjective consciousness, does not inherit obviousness of the observational phenomena. While stressing the significance of their doctrine to the contemporary worldview, current dualists are reluctant to engage in analysis of these logical aspects.
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In response to Stephen Neale (2016), I argue that aphonic expressions, such as PRO, are intentionally uttered by normal speakers of natural language, either by acts of omitting to say something explicitly, or by acts of giving phonetic realization to aphonics. I argue, also, that Gricean intention-based semantics should seek divorce from Cartesian assumptions of transparent access to propositional attitudes and, consequently, that Stephen Schiffer’s so-called meaning-intention problem is not powerful enough to banish alleged cases of over-intellectualization in contemporary philosophy of language and mind.
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Social reality is semiotically constructed through a sign and sign relations as the mechanism of mediation and creation of “being together”. Social reality is in a constant creative process of dynamic change. It is provided by an intellectual interpretation of the mechanism itself, the real world, the being of other, signs and sign relations, through which a person finds the meaning of his/her being and is included in the overall construction of social reality. Therefore, the dynamic movement of thought to knowledge, to sense, to the joy of everyday life is made through an interpretation as a communicative and semiotic process of searching and involving the general community to another being. Historically, the most important models of signs and sign mediation is the sign model by F. de Saussure and Ch.S. Peirce. These models have long been criticized, but remained fundamental in the socio-semiotic mechanism of mediation between subject and object of knowledge and the construction of social reality. Following the publication of Ch. Taylor’s book “Sources of the self”, the concept of F. de Saussure and Ch.S. Peirce clearly gained social significance, in light of which many hidden mechanisms of semiotic construction of social reality become clear. Open-mindedness, which is the core process of semiosis, has a great importance for the construction of social reality. Basically, thinking is directed at the construction of a new body, the interpretant is directed at constructing a new interpreter. Of course, the construction of the body and physicality is not core one, but a peripheral process. However, it is not devoid of social value and also has potential in the construction of social community “being together”. Intelligent processes are rooted in the daily functioning of the body as their carrier, and the interpretant therefore provides an essential concrete interpreter. If the interpretant aimed against the interpreter as its carrier, then the question arises about “mechanism of truth” of the interpretant.
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This paper provides moderate criticism of so-called normative theories of thinking and reasoning. The discussion focuses on the problems of idealization, adequacy, inconsistent yet non-trivial logics, logical omniscience etc. I called them “internal” to the normative approach, because they stem from the very properties of formal systems used to model these two human activities. Some arguments, however, refer to the current theories in cognitive science, including those which are developed within “descriptive” framework.
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Trying to describe the activity of Aristotle’s active intellect, we will sooner or later realize that we cannot find its right description, because Aristotle did not provide for one. He left us with many irreconcilable statements and questions with no answers. In the famous text Aristotle’s Two Intellects: a Modest Proposal Victor Caston claims that Aristotle did not describe the activity, because there simply is no such activity and we should therefore identify nous poietikos with God, because God too does nothing. Trying to find this lacking description is like going on a wild goose chase – Caston argues. In my text I will show that his solution, albeit tempting, is in fact a kind of “dissolution” and that a wild goose chase, although for many doomed to failure, can be fruitful. I will do so by presenting three groups or clusters of views on active intellect which – I believe – are philosophically significant. Caston’s proposal will be one of them, but not the privileged one. These three types of interpretations will hopefully provide us with an imagery that will help us somewhat come to terms with Aristotle’s succinctness.
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New worldview that arose from a number of important findings of science, including the Darwinian theory of evolution as well as the Big Bang theory, calls for a redefinition of the human place in the world of nature. Human mind, with its characteristic self-consciousness, is facing a difficult problem of understanding of his own nature as well as clarifying its relationship with the realm of the physical world. According to Philip Clayton, the correct answer to the question of the relation of mind to body (mind-body problem) is given by the concept of emergentism. While taking his arguments from modern science and philosophy, Clayton claims that the mind – causally active mental properties – is a valuable result of the evolution that has occurred through the emergence, and its special feature, i.e. rationality, sheds new light on attempts of the ultimate understanding of reality.
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This article has an introductory character and systematizes the topic. It introduces the idea of emergence which is currently enjoying something of a renaissance and aims to bring order to the terminology associated with this idea. The article concerns the very beginning of the formation of emergentism and its intuitive understanding. It also presents the main concepts of representative authors of emergentism (S. Alexander, CL Morgan, Ch. D. Broad) as well as the numerous characteristics of emergence (synchronic and diachronic emergence, weak and strong emergence). The article concludes with a systematization of meanings and contexts in which the concept of emergence occurs.
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The article presents the mutual translatability problems existing between the functional theory in the philosophy of mind and some models of the theory of truth in a language based on article Willfrida Sellars Truth and "correspondence". Work Sellarsa gives you the opportunity to reflect on the classical model of the theory of correspondence of truth, which is the classic source of the theory team. Sellars criticizes the classical correlation imaging, which is the starting point for reflection on the language of the one, and the mind on the other side.
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The article shows a differentiation of the concept of truth in Wittgenstein’s investigations, especially main factors playing decisive role for use of the concept of truth in logic, mathematics, psychology and religion. These specific meanings of the concept of truth are presented on the background of the „observational” use of truth, which in grammatical interpretation is equivalent to truth as correspondence.
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In addition to being uncertain about what the world is like, one can also be uncertain about one’s own spatial or temporal location in the world. The aim of the paper is to pose a problem arising from the interaction between these two sorts of uncertainty, solve the problem, and draw two lessons from the solution.
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Rougly speaking, panpsychism is the view, that everything is mind or have consciousness. Although the view has a long and venerable tradition, and becomes more and more popular in the contemporary debate, it still has many opponents. The aim of this article is to prove that panpsychism is the best metaphysical account of the nature of the ultimate stuff of reality. At the same time, it is a kind of physicalism, according to which experience (experientiality) is the fundamental stuff of all concrete objects.
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The field of language evolution has recently made Gricean pragmatics central to its task, particularly within comparative studies between human and non-human primate communication. The standard model of Gricean communication requires a set of complex cognitive abilities, such as belief attribution and understanding nested higher-order mental states. On this model, non-human primate communication is then of a radically different kind to ours. Moreover, the cognitive demands in the standard view are also too high for human infants, who nevertheless do engage in communication. In this paper I critically assess the standard view and contrast it with an alternative, minimal model of Gricean communication recently advanced by Richard Moore. I then raise two objections to the minimal model. The upshot is that this model is conceptually unstable and fails to constitute a suitable alternative as a middle ground between full-fledged human communication and simpler forms of non-human animal communication.
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The paper investigates some mechanisms of thought-experimenting, and explores the role of perspective taking, in particular of mental simulation, in political thought-experiments, focusing for the most part on contractualist ones. It thus brings together two blossoming traditions: the study of perspective taking and methodology of thought-experiments. How do contractualist thought-experiments work? Our moderately in- flationist mental modelling proposal is that they mobilize our imaginative capacity for perspective taking, most probably perspective taking through simulation. The framework suggests the answers to questions that are often raised for other kinds of thought-experiments as well, concerning their source of data, heuristic superiority to deduction, experiential, qualitative character and ease in eliminating alternatives. In the case of contractualist political thought-experiments, the data come from perspective taking and the capacity to simulate. Mental simulation is way more accessible to subjects than abstract political reasoning from principles and facts. There is a new experience for the subject, the one of simulating. Simulation normally is quick and effortless; the simulator does not go through alternatives, but is constrained in an unconscious way. We distinguish two kinds of political thought-experiments and two manners of imagining political arrangements, building third-person mental models, and first-person perspective taking. The two mechanisms, the first of inductive model building, the second for simulation, and their combination(s), exhaust the range of cognitive mechanism underlying political thought-experimenting.
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In this paper I analyse realist, eliminativist, and instrumentalist approach towards mental discourse on folk psychology. The basic idea is to examine folk psychology as a theory which explains and predicts behaviour. If folk psychology is a theory, then it must be reducible to or incorporated into a well-founded scientific physical theory, neuroscience foremost. The question is, is such a thing, even in principle, possible? Should we expect the scientific reduction of the entity of folk psychology or is it realistic to expect its elimination from scientific explanation and prediction of behaviour insofar as it is not possible to establish a connection with physical sciences? Or are we perhaps supposed to treat folk psychology as an abstract theory which is justified in its application, but has no scientific physical relations between its entities and the entities of physical sciences? I begin this paper with the everyday, common sense use of folk psychology in explaining and predicting behaviour, and I follow up with a brief presentation of realist perspective and its issues. Afterwards, I lay out eliminativist perspective and its reach in the debate, and pass on to the promising perspective of instrumentalism. Finally, I endorse a transformation of the perspective of instrumentalism into a milder form of realism by introducing the notion of scattered causality.
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