Volume 42 (2015): Issue 1 (September 2015)

Moral Relativism can be considered an attractive alternative to realism because relativists can make good sense of cultural and societal disagreements by seeing them as faultless. However, we can show that this advantage is made possible by systematically disagreeing with moral phenomenology. Relativists make a substantial distinction between intercultural and intracultural discourses which turns out to be incoherent. This can be shown by making use of Crispin Wright’s notion of Cognitive Command.

Where do the rules of critical discussion get their normative force? What kinds of norms are involved? Unreasonable behaviour in the critical discussion - e.g., continuing to assert the contradictory of a proven standpoint, performing some action pragmatically inconsistent with a proven standpoint, or the same with regard to the starting-points agreed to in the opening stage - is liable to moral sanction. Thus, a moral/ethical norm is involved and the rules must have a moral force. Pragma-dialectics as it stands does not seem to account for this moral force. I will attempt to fill this gap in pragma-dialectical theory.

In this paper we prove the learnability of the classes of minimal grammars with respect to some linear preorderings on the set of categorial grammars. We give some examples of the linear preordering relations on the set of categorial grammars satisfying necessary conditions.

The aim of this paper is to characterise the manner in which onto- logical structures are created (at the level of text structure and the information layer thereof) in press discourse on the example of French newspaper editorials describing political, socio-economic conflicts between the public and the government. Ontological structures and their conceptualisation refer to one of the stages of development of global meaning in the discourse by journalists selecting and categorising the information they wish to provide to their addressees (gate- keeping). Therefore, according to the methodology proposed by Miczka (2002, 2007, 2009, 2011), connecting psycholinguistics (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) with the socio-cognitive perspective (Goffman 1974/1986; Langacker, 1987), this pa- per will attempt to describe the discursive mechanisms of creating a common horizon for interpretation in view of persuasive function of the media language (the media declaratives) (Nowak & Tokarski 2007, p. 12). The paper proceeds with analysis of editorials on the basis of the concept of Goffman’s framework teamed with Langacker’s cognitive event, as cognitive schemata organise the structure of the experimental frame. It should also be noted that the persuasiveness in the information layer of the utterance forces to ask the question of the responsibility of the media addresser towards the addressee.

This article is an attempt to recreate the intuitions which accompanied Leśniewski when he was creating his calculus of names called Ontology. Although every reconstruction is to some extent an interpretation, and as such may be defective, still, there are reasons justifying such reconstruction. The most important justification is the fact that both Leśniewski and his commentators stressed that ontology originated from reflections about ordinary language, in which sentences such as A is B appear in one of the meanings associated with them in Ontology, and that the users of the Polish language use such sentences accordingly and properly identify them. Assumed it is so, let us try, based on Leśniewski’s guidelines as well as comments and elaborations on Ontology (Leśniewski 1992: 364-382, 608-609; Kotarbiński 1929: 227-229; Rickey 1977: 414-229; Simons 1992: 244; Lejewski 1960: 14-29), to evaluate the accuracy of this approach, referring also to certain knowledge of the Polish language. To make it clear, this article is not about Ontology as a formal theory of language. It is solely an attempt to assess whether some syntactical constructs of the Polish language and this language’s properties are significant conditions of a proper understanding of Ontology, and whether Ontology is, in fact, in a relationship with the ethnic language of its author.

The paper presents a method of truth-graph by truth-tables. On the one hand, the truth-graph constituted by truth value coordinate and circumference displays a more visual representation of the different combinations of truth-values for the simple or complex propositions. Truth-graphs make sure that you don’t miss any of these combinations. On the other hand, they provide a more convenient tool to discern the validity of a complex proposition made up by simple compositions. The algorithm involving in setting up all the truth conditions is proposed to distinguish easily among tautologous, contradictory and consistent expressions. Furthermore, the paper discusses a certain connection between the truth graphs and the symbols for propositional connectives proposed by Stanisław Leśniewski.

The subject of the paper is a contemporary interpretation of J.S. Mill’s elimination method using selected concepts of Zdzisław Pawlak’s decision logic. The aim of the interpretation is to reformulate the original rules (canons) of Mill’s induction so that they correspond more precisely to his concept of cause as a complex sufficient condition. In the first part of the paper, we turn to Mill’s writings and justify the thesis that in his understanding the cause is an aggregation of circumstances, and not a single circumstance; next, we point out that Mill’s original canons (for example the canon of agreement and the canon of difference) do not allow causes-aggregations to be singled out from empirical data. In the second part of this paper, we present such aspects of Z. Pawlak’s decision logic that serve as the basis for the formalisation of the method of eliminative induction. We describe exhaustively the schema of induction that involves a gradual - divided into three stages - simplification of a set of implications corresponding to the observed dependencies [system of potential causes, effect]. The simplification is deductive because it maintains consistency within the set of implications. We show that such schema is ideal for isolating complex causes (aggregations of circumstances), ultimately described using complex conditional formulas of decision logic.

The questions od determinism, causality, and freedom have been the main philosophical problems debated since the beginning of temporal logic. The issue of the logical value of sentences about the future was stated by Aristotle in the famous tomorrow sea-battle passage. The question has inspired Łukasiewicz’s idea of many-valued logics and was a motive of A. N. Prior’s considerations about the logic of tenses. In the scheme of temporal logic there are different solutions to the problem. In the paper we consider indeterministic temporal logic based on the idea of temporal worlds and the relation of accessibility between them.

In this paper we consider the construction of a LAK system of temporal-epistemic logic which is used to formally describe algorithmic knowledge. We propose an axiom system of LAK and discuss the basic properties of this logic.

The aim of this paper is to present an algebraic approach to Jaśkowski’s paraconsistent logic D2. We present: a D2-discursive algebra, Lindenbaum- Tarski algebra for D2 and D2-matrices. The analysis is mainly based on the results obtained by Jerzy Kotas in the 70s.

The relationship between Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language (hereafter LSL) ([1934] 1937) and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) ([1921] 1922) has been interpreted in several ways during past decades. One of the interpretations has gained keen advocates among Carnap scholars. It was originally provoked by what Caranp said in LSL, and it consists of two parts. First, it indicates that in TLP the possibility of speaking about the logical form of a language within the same language (which happens to be the only language that there is) had been foresworn by Wittgenstein, but Carnap proved him wrong by producing a book (LSL) written exactly in the manner which had been proscribed by Wittgenstein. This is the debate about the possibility of speaking about logical form.

Second, Wittgenstein’s dogmatism with regard to the existence of a unique correct grammar at the foundation of the language has been contrasted with Carnap’s open-mindedness in conceiving a boundless ocean of possibilities for constructing logical systems.

Interestingly enough, Wittgenstein rambled with rage in reaction to Carnap’s view about the LSL-TLP relationship. But unlike Carnap’s view, which led to a dominant interpretation of the relationship, Wittgenstein’s testimony about the case has been strangely ignored in the history of analytic philosophy. In this paper, I try to make an inquiry about the grounds for Wittgenstein’s dissatisfaction with the Carnapian reading of the LSL-TLP relationship. I will show that Wittgenstein was not totally unfair in his judgment, and that some salient aspects of LSL (recognized as the anti-Tractarian aspects of the work) could be best understood in the light, or rather the gloom, of TLP, and bear a significant resemblance to it. This, however, does not need to diminish the logical and historical significance of LSL.