Michał Piekarski

In these reflections, we want to prove a thesis whereby normativity of rules and norms may be linked to the domain of artefacts which we understand as social things. We claim that some norms and rules are situated in human socio-material ecosystems especially when it comes to the role played by affordances. The thesis advanced in this article will also enable us to indicate one of the potential interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ concept, demonstrating that some solutions suggested by the author of Philosophical Investigations are still relevant today. We will relate the issue of the normativity of artefacts to the problem of rule recognition which Wittgenstein also raises in some of his later studies. We will demonstrate that the problem of normativity recognition is linked to relational properties of objects, that is affordances; structured nature of the world of human communities; and the ability to recognise affordances related to the ability to create predictions about future states of affairs. The analyses presented herein will show that it is possible to link the perspectives of cognitive ecology, design practice and philosophical analyses focused on the problem of normativity.

The dispute over the continuity of life and mind. Arguments for cognitivism: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the position of non-cognitivism on the issue of the so-called dispute over the continuity / discontinuity of life and mind. In discussing the views of Michael Kirchhoff and Tom Froese, I will point out some difficulties related to their position. Next, I will formulate three arguments in favor of the cognitive alternative, emphasizing the need to resort to semantic information in explaining these phenomena. According to noncognitivist position, there is a continuity in the life-mind line, which can be justified by referring to the concept of Shannon’s syntactic information. Opponents of this thesis, i.e. supporters of cognitivism, claim that the explanation of cognition requires the use of other tools than those used to explanation of life, because, first, the notion of syntactic information does not exhaust the complexity of these phenomena, and, second, the non-cognitive position raises many problems and ambiguities. According to cognitivists, when explaining life and mind, one should refer to the concept of semantic information that is rejected by noncognitivists. In the Conclusion I will analyze the ambiguities and assumptions related to the thesis about the continuity or discontinuity between life and cognitive processes.

This article is an attempt to identify the sources of normativity in virtue ethics. The starting point for the analyzes presented here is the book by Dominika Dzwonkowska Environmental virtue ethics. In § 1, I present the basic theses and assumptions of this approach to ethics. Then, with reference to the concept of the moral subject proposed by Dzwonkowska, I ask whether it constitutes the primary source of normativity (§ 2). I argue that environmental virtue ethics can be ascribed to arguments shared by supporters of the so-called constitutive arguments in metaethics (§ 3). Their position is based on the recognition that moral norms, obligations, etc., derive from the constitutive features of the subject. I call such an approach internalist and contrast it with the non-internalist approach, the outline of which I propose in § 4. In the Conclusion, I suggest that the pragmatic considerations and conservatism of researchers speak in favor of the internalist approach.