Maciej Witek

The aim of this paper is to resist four arguments, originally developed by Mark Siebel, that seem to support scepticism about reflexive communicative intentions. I argue, first, that despite their complexity reflexive intentions are thinkable mental representations. To justify this claim, I offer an account of the cognitive mechanism that is capable of producing an intention whose content refers to the intention itself. Second, I claim that reflexive intentions can be individuated in terms of their contents. Third, I argue that the explanatory power of the theory of illocutionary reflexive intentions is not as limited as it would initially seem. Finally, I reject the suggestion that the conception of reflexive communicative intentions ascribes to a language user more cognitive abilities than he or she really has.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims at developing a preliminary typology of subconscious, tacit mechanisms that underlie the conscious exercise of practical skills as well as the formation and functioning of conscious mental representations such as perceptual experiences, mental images, explicitly held beliefs and explanatory hypotheses. Second, it employs the typology to consider whether these tacit mechanisms can be examined and explicated by what Ryszard Wójcicki calls heuristic theorizing or heuristic reasoning , i.e., by a cognitive procedure whose job is to study one\'s tacit or personal knowledge.

Celem artykułu jest obrona tezy o izolacji informacyjnej systemu wczesnego widzenia przed zarzutami odwołującymi się do eksperymentów świadczących rzekomo o wpływie przekonań o typowych barwach przedmiotów na budowę płytkich reprezentacji wzrokowych. Przez płytkie reprezentacje wzrokowe rozumiem doznania percepcyjne reprezentujące bodźce zewnętrzne wyłącznie za pomocą takich własności, jak kształt, wielkość, położenie i barwa. Twierdzę, że doniesienia eksperymentalne przytaczane przez przeciwników tezy o izolacji informacyjnej można wyjaśnić za pomocą hipotezy, w myśl której system wczesnego widzenia tworzy płytkie reprezentacje wzrokowe korzystając z lokalnej bazy informacji o typowych barwach określonych kształtów, przy czym baza ta ma postać modyfikowanej przez doświadczenie sieci związków asocjacyjnych. Opisuję też eksperymenty, za pomocą których można by powyższą hipotezę testować.

Normativity and Variety of Speech Actions embraces papers focused on the performative dimension of language. While all texts in the volume recognize speech primarily as a type of action, the collection is indicative of the multifaceted nature of J.L. Austin’s original reflection, which invited many varied research programmes. The problems addressed in the volume are discussed with reference to data culled from natural conversation, mediated political discourse, law, and literary language, and include normativity, e.g. types of norms operative in speech acts, speaker’s intentions and commitments, speaker-addressee coordination, but also speech actions in discursive practice, in literal and non-literal language, performance of irony, presupposition, and meaningful significant silence. Contributors are: Brian Ball, Cristina Corredor, Anita Fetzer, Milada Hirschová, Dennis Kurzon, Marcin Matczak, Marina Sbisà, Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, Maciej Witek, and Mateusz Włodarczyk.

My aim in this paper is to defend the view that the processes underlying early vision are informationally encapsulated. Following Marr (1982) and Pylyshyn (1999) I take early vision to be a cognitive process that takes sensory information as its input and produces the so-called primal sketches or shallow visual outputs: informational states that represent visual objects in terms of their shape, location, size, colour and luminosity. Recently, some researchers (Schirillo 1999, Macpherson 2012) have attempted to undermine the idea of the informational encapsulation of early vision by referring to experiments that seem to show that colour recognition is affected by the subject's beliefs about the typical colour of objects. In my view, however, one can reconcile the results of these experiments with the position that early vision is informationally encapsulated. Namely, I put fort a hypothesis according to which the early vision system has access to a local database that I call the mental palette and define as a network of associative links whose nodes stands for shapes and colours. The function of the palette is to facilitate colour recognition without employing central processes. I also describe two experiments by which the mental palette hypothesis can be tested.

In this paper, I develop a speech-act based account of presumptions. Using a score-keeping model of illocutionary games, I argue that presumptions construed as speech acts can be grouped into three illocutionary act types defined by reference to how they affect the state of a conversation. The paper is organized into two parts. In the first one, I present the score-keeping model of speech act dynamics; in particular, I distinguish between two types of mechanisms—the direct mechanism of illocution and the indirect one of accommodation—that underlie the functioning of illocutionary acts. In the second part, I use the presented model to distinguish between the unilateral act of individual presumption, the point of which is to shift the burden of proof by making the hearer committed to justifying his refusal to endorse the proposition communicated by the speaker, whenever he refuses to endorse it, the bilateral act of joint presumption—‘bilateral’ in that it is performed jointly by at least two conversing agents—the function of which is to confer on the proposition endorsed by the speaker the normative status of jointly recognized though tentative acceptability, and the indirect or back-door act of collective presumption, the purpose of which is to sustain rules and practices to which the conversing agents defer the felicity of their conversational moves.

The paper develops a non-Gricean account of accommodation: a contextadjusting process guided by the assumption that the speaker’s utterance constitutes an appropriate conversational move. The paper is organized into three parts. The first one reconstructs the basic tenets of Lepore and Stone's non-Gricean model of meaningmaking, which results from integrating direct intentionalism and extended semantics. The second part discusses the phenomenon of accommodation as it occurs in conversational practice. The third part uses the tenets of the non-Gricean model of meaning-making to account for the discursive mechanisms underlying accommodation; the proposed account relies on a distinction between the rules of appropriateness, which form part of extendedgrammar, and the Maxim of Appropriateness, which functions as a discursive norm guiding our conversational practice.

The author offers a critical analysis of so called deflationary conception of truth. According to the conception in question an adequate theory of truth contains nothing more than instances of a schema: „p” is true iff p. In short, truth is a disquotation. After giving a brief presentation of main deflationary ideas, the author argues that deflationism conflicts with normative epistemology. In other words, being a form of naturalism it leads to elimination of so called normative element from the philosophy of science. For example deflationary conception of truth is not able to account for constitutive connections between normative ideas of truth and reliability

The paper aims to develop an interactional account of illocutionary practice, which results from integrating elements of Millikan's biological model of language within the framework of Austin's theory of speech acts. The proposed account rests on the assumption that the force of an act depends on what counts as its interactional effect or, in other words, on the response that it conventionally invites or attempts to elicit. The discussion is divided into two parts. The first one reconsiders Austin's and Millikan's contributions to the study of linguistic practice. The second part presents the main tenets of the interactional account. In particular, it draws a distinction between primary and secondary conventional patterns of interaction and argues that they make up coherent systems representing different language games or activity types; it is also argued that the proposed account is not subject to the massive ambiguity problem.