A less simplistic metaphysics: Peirce’s layered theory of meaning as a layered theory of being

Author(s): Marc Champagne / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2015

This article builds on C. S. Peirce’s suggestive blueprint for an inclusive outlook that grants reality to his three categories. Moving away from the usual focus on (contentious) cosmological forces, I use a modal principle to partition various ontological layers: regular sign-action (like coded language) subsumes actual signaction (like here-and-now events) which in turn subsumes possible sign-action (like qualities related to whatever would be similar to them). Once we realize that the triadic sign’s components are each answerable to this asymmetric subsumption, we obtain the means to track at which level of complexity semiosis finds itself, in a given case. Since the bulk of such a “trinitarian” metaphysics would be devoted to countenancing uninterpreted phenomena, I argue that current misgivings about sign-based ontologies are largely misplaced.

A philosophical investigation in machine understanding. The case of implicit meaning

Author(s): Maria Wilkowska / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2013

The question of machine thinking and understanding, once initiated by Alan Turing, has puzzled scholars from various disciplines. This paper aims at investigating some of the facets involved in the topic of machine language understanding with particular interest devoted to indirect meaning comprehension (more specifically, the implicature). So far as the subject under examination – the chatbot – manages to understand directly conveyed information, still much is to be done with respect to implicit data in which everyday messages (formulated in ordinary language) abound. This situation generates a number of not only hard-science questions but also, more importantly, given the viewpoint of this paper, it gives rise to a considerable amount of philosophically- oriented and frequently neglected issues and dilemmas too. This study is a brief investigation of exactly those phenomena.

ABOUT PRACTICAL PROBLEM SOLVING

Author(s): Arto Mutanen / Language(s): English / Issue: 89/2016

Knowledge is, by definition, reliable and, hence, it can be applied to a variety of different problems. Nevertheless, in practical problem solving, we do not rely on mere truthful knowledge, but also on information which frames the practical acceptability. We are not looking for truthful solution but an optimal solution. Optimal solution is found out by optimizing some given (practical) parameters. The optimization is both theory based and practice based process. That is, practical problem solving is a human deliberation that interconnects theoretical and practical knowledge. So, the philosophical foundation of practical problem solving interconnects theoretical and practical philosophy. Especially ethical deliberation plays – or should play – central role in practical problem solving. The complexity of the advanced scientific knowledge needed in solving present day practical problems separates the people who know, from the people who do (decide). The situation makes immediate that we need some deeper pedagogical conviction: we need ecological education.

Against the Frame

Author(s): Wojciech Kalaga / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2016

The paper explores theoretical foundations of the frame from two semiotic perspectives: that of the Saussurean dyadic sign dominant in the European tradition and that of the triadic sign of the Peircean/American descent. If – within the post- Saussurean agenda – meaning can be fairly easily “framed” and closed in the field of the signified, Peirce’s concepts of interpretant and infinite semiosis implement a mechanism which inherently obliterates the frame. Given this duality of approaches, the contention “No meaning without a frame” is thus true and paradoxical at the same time, and that paradox goes far beyond the Derridean concept of the parergon, which only belongs to both the inside and the outside. The frame, as construed in this paper, is not merely a material or imaginary, inactive partition, but is itself an operational agent which isolates and delineates a text ontologically as the other of the context, and simultaneously subverts that otherness by necessitating further semiosis and its own partial self-erasure. Regarding the interrelations amongst texts and between text and context, the frame is thus envisaged, and investigated in the paper, not so much as a factor of resistance or separation, but as an osmotic boundary facilitating rather than preventing a bi-directional flow of meanings. Putting this in epistemological terms, one may say that interpretation – paradoxically again –requires an enframing of its object, but at the same time it dissolves the stipulated frame and reaches beyond it.

All the Superhero’s Names

Author(s): Olga Poller / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2016

In this paper I concern myself with The Superman Puzzle (the phenomenon of the substitution failure of co-referential proper names in simple sentences). I argue that the descriptive content associated with proper names, besides determining the proper name’s reference, function as truth-conditionally relevant adjuncts which can be used to express a manner, reason, goal, time or purpose of action. In that way a sentence with a proper name “NN is doing something” could be understood as “NN is doing something as NN” (which means “as-soand-so”). I argue that the substitution of names can fail on modified readings because the different descriptive content of proper names modifies the main predicate differently. Here I present a formal representation of modified predicates which allows one to model intuitively the different truth-conditions of sentences from The Puzzle.

Antiteologija novoga događaja

Alain Badiou i kontingencija politike

Author(s): Žarko Paic / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 10-12/2015

Jezici u kojima je riječ »novo« sinonimom bezuvjetnoga raskida s tradicijom u metafizičkim su temeljima dovoljno »stari« da bi imali mogućnosti istinskoga kazivanja tog imperativa vremena. Kao da umjesto njih o našem vremenu bolje govori ono neljudsko iz sklopa kibernetičke tehnologije. Programski jezici računalstva zasnovani na binarnome kôdu postali su nadmoćni simboličkoj snazi »prirodnih« jezika. Štoviše, čini se da su u svojoj zastarjelosti osuđeni na ono isto što je suvremeni francuski filozof Alain Badiou namijenio filozofiji. Da je, naime, njezina sudbina postati izložbenim »predmetom« u muzeju ukoliko ne uspije otvoriti mogućnosti nadilaženja ove epohe. A ta epoha od 19. Stoljeća za svoje presudne pojmove ima znanost, politiku i umjetnost.

ARGUMENTATION, R. PAVILIONIS’S MEANING CONTINUUM AND THE KITCHEN DEBATE

Author(s): Elena Lisanyuk / Language(s): English / Issue: 88/2015

In this paper, I propose a logical-cognitive approach to argumentation and advocate an idea that argumentation presupposes that intelligent agents engaged in it are cognitively diverse. My approach to argumentation allows drawing distinctions between justification, conviction and persuasion as its different kinds. In justification agents seek to verify weak or strong coherency of an agent’s position in a dialogue. In conviction they argue to modify their partner’s position by means of demonstrating weak or strong cogency of their positions before a ‘rational judge’. My approach to argumentation employs a ‘light’ version of Dung’s abstract argumentative frameworks. It is based on Stich’s idea of agents’ cognitive diversity the epistemic aspect of which is argued to be close to Pavilionis’s conception of meaning continuum. To illustrate my contributions I use an example based on the Kitchen Debate (1959) between Khrushchev and Nixon.

ARISTOTLE AND WESTERN RATIONALITY

Author(s): Christos C. Evangeliou / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

In order to make Aristotle’s philosophy better understood, I would like to provide here a brief but accurate account of the concepts of logos (discursive reason) and nous (intuitive mind), and their respective functions in his method of dialectic. Dialectic was used in all the major works of the corpus Aristotelicum, in the philosopher’s great effort to noetically grasp and philosophically explain the place of man in the cosmic order of things, and his search for eudaimonia (well-being). Since Aristotle’s conception of human nature and its potential for virtuous activity, at the ethical and political or at the intellectual levels of excellence, has deeper roots in his ontology and ousiology, such a synoptic account will be useful, for it will provide an appropriate context for the correct evaluation of the ethical and political views of this philosopher. It will become clear from our analysis that he is misunderstood by scholars in the West and in the East for different historical reasons, which will be elucidated as we proceed further into the discussion of our theme in this essay.

Arkadiusza Żychlińskiego laboratoria antropofikcji

Author(s): Lukasz Musial / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 6/2015

This article polemicizes with Arkadiusz Żychliński’s book Laboratoria antropofikcji: Dociekania filologiczne [Laboratories of Anthropofiction: Philological Investigations], but Musiał also departs from Żychliński’s key concepts. First, he reconstructs the book’s main points, especially Żychliński’s claim that a person’s natural way of interacting with themselves, others and the world is so-called fabulation (i.e. creating a story), which is why homo sapiens as a species was able to surpass the role of being an object in the evolutionary experiment and instead became a conscious subject in it. Żychliński also makes an innovative contribution to traditional philology in that he brings it into conversation with analytical philosophy and the philosophy of language (Donald Davidson), philosophy of mind (Daniel C. Dennett), developmental and evolutionary psychology (Michael Tomasello), and ethology. In the second part of the article Musiał polemicizes with Żychliński’s main points, pointing out – with reference to contemporary cognitivistic theory and the theory of the ‘embodied mind’ – the non-communicative nature of his concept of philology (in broader terms: the notion of fiction).

Avangarda i politika

Istočno evropska paradigma i rat na Balkanu

Author(s): Marina Gržinic / Language(s): Serbian / Publication Year: 2005

One always searches for some symbolic point from which one can claim that something ended and something else began, even though there are no beginnings and no endings.

Bachtin raz jeszcze

Author(s): Zofia Mitosek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 5/2015

Danuta Ulicka, Słowa i ludzie [Words and People], Warsaw 2014

Becker, Ramsey, and Hi-world Semantics. Toward a Unified Account of Conditionals

Author(s): Cheng-Chih Tsai / Language(s): English / Issue: 46/2016

In Lowe (1995), instead of endorsing a Stalnaker/Lewis-style account of counterfactuals, E. J. Lowe claims that a variation of C. I. Lewis’s strict implication alone captures the essence of everyday conditionals and avoids the paradoxes of strict implication. However, Lowe’s approach fails to account for the validity of simple and straightforward arguments such as ‘if 2=3 then 2+1=3+1’, and Heylen & Horsten (2006) even claims that no variation of strict implication can successfully describe the logical behavior of natural language conditionals. By incorporating the German logician O. Becker’s modal intuition with the insight of Ramsey’s Test, we show that there does exist a unified, strict-conditional based account of everyday conditionals, which withstands all attacks previously raised against truth-conditional accounts of conditionals. Furthermore, a subtle distinction between autistic and realistic readings of the indexical ‘I’ involved in a conditional helps us resolve a recent debate concerning the Thomason conditionals.

Blocking evil infinites: A note on a note on a Peircean strategy

Author(s): Frederik Stjernfelt / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2015

This brief note considers Peirce’s strategy of terminating potentially evil infinities – concerning relations, continuous predicates, leading principles, habits – by appeal to the Nota Notae principle.

Bolest u procjepu biologije i kulture

Postmoderno shvaćanje bolesti kao biokulturne pojave

Author(s): Darija Rupcic / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 03/143/2016

The intention of this paper is to highlight and reflect on the development of a tradition that considers the importance of cultural influences on health and illness. Delicate balance between illness and culture is what constitutes the elusive truth of illness and post-modern understanding of the illness as biocultural phenomenon in biocultural model. Using authors such as Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ivan Illich, David B. Morris and others helps to bring out the intricate, complex and subtle link between illness and culture. Scientifically based biomedical model, outdated in its Cartesian-mehanicistic conceptual scheme but growing in popularity at enormous speed, considers illness as an object and body as a mechanical machine. Although it did bring prosperity and eradicated many diseases, it offers us an alternative path to a new and still uncertain understanding of illness as transformable process, resulting as the intertwining of culture and biology. By putting an emphasis on this narrative, we will critically overview the existing dominant biomedical model of illness and we will consider the possibility of introducing a new biocultural model of illness expanding the existing biomedical model. The expected contribution of this work will go towards the possibilities of theoretical and practical foundation and a search for the possibility of the different pluriperspective and multidimensional approach to illness and health.

C. S. Peirce on the dynamic object of a sign: From ontology to semiotics and back

Author(s): Helmut Pape / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2015

That reality, and in particular the (dynamic) objects of signs, are independent of our thoughts or other representations is a crucial thesis of Peirce’s realism. On the other hand, his semiotics implies the claim that all reality and all real objects are real for us only because of the signs we use. Do these two claims contradict, even exclude, eachother? I will argue that both Peirce’s metaphysics and his semiotics provide a natural via media: a structural account of the openness of processes, featuring transitive relations, connects process ontology implicit in his evolutionary metaphysics and the relational, quasi-inferential features embodied in interpretational sequences of signs. It is shown that Peirce’s notion of a sign, its normative role and his account of the directional force of objects implies a sort of logical causality that supports the unity of objects. In this way sign sequences are able to relate flexibly sign use with contextually specified independent objects. That is to say, relational properties of object-oriented chains of interpretations provide sign users with a flexible, fallibilistic instrument able to capture by contingent identity relations (teridentity) of the identity of objects in changing situations.

Co czyni zdanie prawdziwym?

Author(s): Adam Nowaczyk / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2016

W artykule rozważane jest zagadnienie związku między własnościami jednostkowymi i abstrakcyjnymi w kontekście problematyki uprawdziwiania (truthmaking). Proponowane jest pewne aksjomatyczne uogólnienie pojęcia konkretyzacji własności w postaci pojęcia konkretyzacji relacji. ===== The paper discusses an issue of the relation between particular and abstract properties in the context of truthmaking. It proposes an axiomatic generalization of the concept of concretization of properties on the concept of concretization of relations.

Czy istnieją niezdaniowe akty mowy?

Author(s): Joanna Odrowaz-Sypniewska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2016

W artykule krytycznie omawiam główne stanowiska filozoficzne dotyczące domniemanych niezdaniowych aktów mowy, takich jak „Ładna sukienka”, „Pod stołem”, „Gdzie?” itp. Filozofów zajmujących się takimi wypowiedziami można podzielić na dwie grupy: tych, którzy (jak m.in. Stanley, Merchant i Devitt) uważają, że albo są one zakamuflowanymi wypowiedziami zdaniowymi, albo nie są pełnoprawnymi aktami mowy, oraz tych, którzy (jak m.in. Stainton i Corazza) uznają, że chociaż nie są to zdania ani w sensie syntaktycznym, ani w sensie semantycznym, to jednak można za ich pomocą dokonać aktu mowy. Opowiadam się za twierdzącą odpowiedzią na tytułowe pytanie i proponuję analizę takich aktów w ramach relatywizmu umiarkowanego Recanatiego. Dziękuję anonimowym recenzentom „Studiów Semiotycznych”, których krytyczne uwagi pozwoliły mi ulepszyć tekst. ===== In this paper I critically examine the main philosophical standpoints concerning apparent sub-sentential speech acts, such as “Nice dress”, “Under the table”, “Where?”. The opponents of such speech acts (such as e.g. Stanley, Merchant and Devitt) argue that the utterances in question are either ellipses (i.e. sentential) or do not have determinate content and/or illocutionary force. The defenders of sub-sentential speech acts (such as e.g. Stainton and Corazza) argue that in the right circumstances a sub-sentential utterance may constitute a speech act even though it cannot be regarded as a case of ellipsis. I argue for the affirmative answer to the title question and claim that the best framework in which such acts should be analyzed is Recanati’s moderate relativism.

Disagreements about Taste as Metalinguistic Negotiations — Some Critical Remarks

Author(s): Natalia Karczewska / Language(s): English / Issue: 1 (93)/2016

Disagreements about taste are often considered a problematic case for contextualism. The contextualist is committed to the claim that when a person A says: “This is tasty”, and a person B replies: “No, it’s not tasty”, they are not really disagreeing since the semantic content of A’s utterance is This is tasty to A, while the content of B’s utterance is This is tasty to B. Thus the contextualist is forced to admit that whenever people seem to disagree about taste, they are in fact just talking past each other. In this paper, I examine a solution to the “lost disagreement” problem which is supposed to be consistent with contextualism. It is an analysis proposed by Timothy Sundell and David Plunkett (2013), according to which when people take themselves to be disagreeing about whether some food has the quality of tastiness, they are in fact disputing whether the term “tasty” is applicable in the given context. I take this analysis to be insightful, but I also argue that it is not an adequate solution to the “lost disagreement” problem. I point to a non-negotiable subjective semantic component of “tasty” and put forward the idea of a “personal algorithm” to illustrate where this subjectivity of taste predicates might come from.

Documentary and ecosemiotics: Frames and faces in the work of Johan van der Keuken

Author(s): Hing Tsang / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2016

This article argues that the work of the late Johan van der Keuken offers a contribution to ecological semiotics, and that it also defines the relationship between the semiotic animal and nature in ways that avoid glottocentricism. Taking from the recent work of Kalevi Kull, Jesper Hoffmeyer, and John Deely amongst others, I will argue that van der Keuken’s documentaries offer a view of ecology that is broader than a study of bio-physical processes that might reduce ecology to a narrow political issue. In order to support this argument, I will be looking at two contrasting films from van der Keuken – Flat Jungle (1978) and Face Value (1991). The first film examines natural habitats within a confined coastal area in Western Europe, while the second film looks at human beings in the different urban environments of late-20th-century Europe. I will then argue that van der Keuken does not collapse the vital distinctions between umwelt and Lebenswelt, yet his films also succeed at reminding us of their constant interdependence.

Dwa modele struktury sądu

Author(s): Filip Kawczynski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2016

Artykuł stanowi porównanie dwóch strukturalnych teorii sądów logicznych: teorii Kazimierza Ajdukiewicza z lat sześćdziesiątych XX wieku oraz teorii Jeffreya Kinga z początku XXI wieku. Pierwsza część artykułu zawiera charakterystykę obu teorii. W części drugiej szczegółowo omówione zostają istotne podobieństwa pomiędzy stanowiskami. Następnie identyfikowane są różnice między nimi i przeprowadzona jest analiza mająca doprowadzić do uzyskania odpowiedzi na pytanie o to, czy różnice te są istotne, czy pozorne. Część trzecia dotyczy tego, czy możliwe jest uodpornienie omawianych teorii na tzw. problem Benacerrafa. ===== This paper consists of a comparison of two theories of structured propositions: firstly, the theory proposed by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz in the 1960s and secondly, the theory developed by Jeffrey King in the beginning of the 21st century. The first section of the paper includes an overview of the two accounts in question. In the second part I discuss, in detail, the significant similarities between the theories. Following this I recognise and analyse how these theories differ and then attempt to determine if these differences are substantial. The last part is an attempt to answer the question of whether discussed theories can deal with the ‘so called’ Benacerraf ’s problem.