Mieszko Tałasiewicz

The paper presents a novel approach to the study of organized groups. It introduces a simple and well-defined—though idealized—model designed to highlight and facilitate discussion of the central features of such groups. On the basis of this model, labelled constituted groups, several important notions and problems are reopened and reassessed, including the indispensability of the group level in social explanations, the supervenience of group outcomes on individual inputs, the notions of group agency and rationality, and the attribution of responsibility for group actions. Despite the familiarity of these issues, the model’s distinctive contribution lies in its ability to integrate a wide range of non-reductive claims within a conceptually simple and fundamentally individualistic framework.

This article examines potential approaches to the Commandment of Love, a central ethical principle in Christianity, assessing how plausibly these approaches explain its adoption and enactment as the patient-universal foundation for moral attitudes. Three approaches are distinguished: a top-down approach and two varieties of bottom-up approaches: logical and psychological. It is argued that the psychological bottom-up approach finds support in the textual evidence from Scripture and aligns more closely with the natural mechanisms underlying moral judgments, as identified by social psychologists and evolutionary biologists. This approach suggests that the natural moral sense serves as a prerequisite for recognizing and internalizing the Commandment of Love—an instinct that is refined and elevated through a person's love for God, rather than being suppressed or abandoned. In this context, disciplines such as psychology, biology, anthropology, etc., are rendered as auxiliary branches of moral theology.

The article distinguishes between logico-psychological and socio-linguistic perspectives on proper names. On the basis of the latter, it argues for allowing for different semantic mechanisms of reference of proper names in different contexts, societies and cultures. It outlines a metaphilosophical position, according to which the task of philosophy is to identify and discriminate possible mechanisms and modes of reference, while determining which of them are appropriate in specific contexts, societies or cultures is a matter for special sciences: linguistics, sociology or anthropology. Against this background, a project of another approach to proper names, termed ‘Genealogical Descriptivism’, is presented and confronted with several classical as well as recent approaches. It is argued that this approach deserves to be accepted alongside others, as plausible in certain contexts, without claiming to dominate in every context.

According to the standard characterization, the method of cases involves eliciting judgments about particular cases and using these judgments as evidence for or against philosophical theories—much like the way empirical theories are tested. Understood in this way, the method has been criticized as unreliable, posing a serious challenge to “armchair” philosophy. The most robust defense so far has been the argument-based mischaracterization objection. However, this objection retains the quasi-empirical dialectic of the standard view and therefore may not be sufficient to deflect the charge of unreliability. The aim of this paper is to introduce a fundamentally different approach, which conceives of the method as sharing a form of reasoning with formal rather than empirical disciplines. On this alternative view, the method does not elicit case judgments but instead demonstrates certain quasi-logical facts. It is argued that while this approach is somewhat revisionary, it is nonetheless legitimate and preserves the method’s role in the advancement of philosophical knowledge.

The paper is a rejoinder to a challenge against the particularist version of the mental files framework posed by the relationist approach based on the notion of content coordination [such as recent attempt by Rachel Goodman and Aidan Gray in ]. Relationists argue that important explanatory goals of MFF: could be achieved without positing files as mental particulars, as there is a relationist notion of content coordination at hand that can be aptly used for “filing without files”; and should be so achieved, as there are difficulties that afflict the particularist approach to MFF and the relationist account is simply better. However, both claims should be rejected. The particularist approach to MFF, properly interpreted, would not get into the troubles it is accused of generating. Indeed, it is the relationist approach that gets in trouble. Specifically, it lacks resources for explanation of nuances, which can be easily accounted for in terms of particularist interpretation, and, furthermore, it lowers the interdisciplinary standing of the whole framework. The particularist version is therefore better.

In this paper, we investigate the effect described in the literature as the Group Knobe Effect, which is an asymmetry in ascription of intentionality of negative and positive side-effects of an action performed by a group agent. We successfully replicate two studies originally conducted by Michael and Szigeti, who observed this effect and provide empirical evidence of the existence of two related effects—Group Epistemic and Doxastic Knobe Effects—which show analogous asymmetry with respect to knowledge and belief ascriptions. We explain how the existence of the Group Knobe Effect and its epistemic and doxastic counterparts affects the philosophical debate on collective agency and intentionality and supports the intuitiveness of realism about collective agency among laypeople. We also critically assess the reasoning presented by Michael and Szigeti in favor of the realist-collectivist interpretation of their results. We argue that a thorough analysis of both their data and our new findings shows a rather wide range of differing intuitions among laypeople regarding the status of groups as agents. These results show that while some laypeople may have realist-collectivist intuitions, the contrary realist-distrubutivist intuitions are also widespread and the claim that the majority of laypeople hold collectivist intuitions regarding group agency is unjustified.

This paper initially follows the final part of the debate between singularism and descriptivism to the point of convergence, and discusses the notion of acquaintanceless singular thought. Then a sketch of a mental files model is presented. Firstly, the triggering mechanisms for opening files are discussed. Two kinds of discourse situations, acquaintance-situations and decoding-situations, are identified and different triggering mechanisms are postulated for each. Secondly, a bipartite structure of a file is introduced, combining an objectual part, encompassing what traditionally has been associated with the notion of a mental file, serving the purpose of storing information about the referent of the file, and a metadata part, serving the purpose of storing information about the file itself. Being capable of encoding a variety of types of mental files, this structure is then employed to illustrate how singularity/descriptivity of the files can be manipulated and how we can account for the cognitive discernibility of files containing identical objectual information and grounded with the same acquaintance relations.

The claim of this paper is that theism and atheism as beliefs about the nature of the universe are equally distant from any sort of proper justification by reasoning, but that faith cannot be reduced to any sort of belief. This claim is illustrated by a survey of several case-studies, including the case of moral sense, the so-called “God gene” and discoveries of Benjamin Libet on “free” movement. The illustrations attempt to show that only some imagerial associations connected with these cases, and respectively with religious beliefs, would make an impression of incoherence, not their actual content. The conclusion of the paper would echo the statements of Cardinal John Henry Newman, who said in his Oxford University Sermons: “Faith is an instrument of knowledge and action, unknown to the world before, a principle sui generis, distinct from those which nature supplies, and independent of what is commonly understood by Reason”. Some implications of this conclusion, such as the notion of the rationality of faith, an account of the relation between science and theology, or the problem of agnosticism, are discussed, too.

Since 1970-ties in the theory of syntax of natural language quite a number of competing, incommensurable theoretic frameworks have emerged. Today the lack of a leading paradigm and kaleidoscope of perspectives deprives our general understanding of syntax and its relation to semantics and pragmatics. The present book is an attempt to reestablish the most fundamental ideas and intuitions of syntactic well-formedness within a new general account. The account is not supposed to compete with any of today’s syntactic frameworks, but to provide a deeper understanding of why these frameworks succeed or fail when they do and to show a new way for cooperation between logicians and linguists which may lead in future to a unified, yet more specific account.

In the paper the author tries to show that semantico-categorial analysis in the traditional Ajdukiewiczian application as a tool of evaluating semantic completeness of complex expressions is ineffective. There is, however, another application, to which the analysis is much better fitted. Namely, it allows to precisify the actual uses of natural language - in all those cases in which on the one hand precision is a superior value, and on the other hand, the formalisation is not possible and one has to stay within natural language. Obviously, in order to achieve this aim many particular problems, sometimes not at all trivial, have to be solved. Amongst the most important the author sees determining a binding canon of the rules of analysis and determining pragmatic criteria of the admissibility of paraphrases and of filling in ellipses

The starting point of my considerations is the idea that the criteria of rationality should be distinguished from the essence of rationality (in linguistic formulation: from a non-criterional connotative definition) and that the question of the universality of rationality arises separately for the criteria and for the essence. I notice that a similar distinction between the essence (or a definition) and the criteria applies to the notion of truth. The thesis which constitutes ny standpoint is a compromising one: the criteria (the sets of criteria) of rationality change in time and in space, the essence of rationality is universal and unchangeable. Therefore, the principal challenge for the comprehensional conception of rationality, which is to back up my standpoint, is a formulation of a good, non-criterional connotative definition of the rationality of science. My definition is the following: „Science is rational” means „the consecutive stages of its development allow us to better understand (in an identificatory sense) the world”