Kamil Lemanek

Critical thinking is supported by a rich and diverse literature, with particularly close ties to argumentation theory and informal logic. It has often been presented in terms of a set of skills and dispositions, with the latter exemplified through the figure of an ideal critical thinker. These accounts of the relevant dispositions are intuitive and tend to emphasize openness, clarity, and a concern for truth. Seemingly running against this impression, it is argued here that an ideal critical thinker can willfully engage in fallacious argumentation. This surprising possibility is grounded in the distinction between thinking and arguing, with the literature on critical thinking being implicitly and rightly limited to the former. The argument draws on an established account of critical thinking dispositions, a simple supporting view of the nature of dispositions, and analogies to familiar phenomena like lying. The result complements existing work on the subject in terms of what a critical thinker should do, contributing to our understanding of the conceptual boundaries of critical thinking and argumentation proper.

This work advocates for an alternative to the principle of charity when teaching critical thinking or informal logic. It provides a brief reconstruction of the principle in the context of argumentation before moving to demonstrate some of the shortcomings associated with different approaches to it in the literature. It argues for placing emphasis not on charity but on the interpretative competence that underlies charity. Doing so avoids the difficulties associated with the principle as such while still fostering the conditions for exploring the kinds of advanced interpretations the pursuit of charity typically yields.

This short work is a contribution to the literature on practices involving artificial intelligence in the academic writing classroom. It presents a centerpiece exercise developed for philosophy and cognitive science students that introduces them to the publishing process. It makes use of artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) to generate reviews for short papers written by students, which can then be used as material for students to address—requiring them to make revisions and to reply to the review. It serves the dual purpose of engaging students with their own writing while exercising competences relating to the peer review process. The exercise itself is compelling, and importantly it is easy to execute. No special skills or resources are required on the part of the instructor, making it accessible irrespective of technical ability or institutional resources.

This paper examines the ontological status of possible words by reassessing Hawthorne and Lepore’s argument from morphological productivity, in particular their example involving iterated forms of ‘anti-missile.’ While their position has been challenged by Miller on the grounds that these are merely possible rather than actual words, I explore a deeper concern: that such iterated morphological constructions may not qualify as words in the first place. Drawing on work involving lexicalization and holistic processing, I argue that extreme cases of iterated expressions, like those involving numerous repetitions of ‘anti-’ in ‘anti-missile,’ fail to meet the cognitive and linguistic criteria for wordhood. Instead, they function more like phrases. I then propose an alternative, grounded in coining and modulating reference, which allows for an infinite set of possible words without appealing to problematic morphological recursion. This reframing salvages the philosophical intuition that there is a significant set of unarticulated words, while avoiding the issues inherent in Hawthorne and Lepore’s original formulation.

This short work sets out to argue that the set of simple expressions comprising the lexicon of a given individual and the lexis of a given community are not just contingently but necessarily finite at any given moment in time. Where the lexicon is concerned, this is done by adapting a very simple argument presented by Fred Dretske (1965) concerning whether an individual can count to infinity. This is extended to the more challenging case of the lexis of a community by introducing lexicalization as a condition, which facilitates the same sort of argument as presented for the lexicon. Though the lexicon and lexis are often implicitly assumed to be finite, with little need for further argumentation, there does appear to be grounds for the stronger and more interesting claim that they are necessarily finite at any given moment in time.

The inferentialism due to Robert Brandom presents a compelling normative-deontic picture of language and discursive practices, and as such it is well positioned to address phenomena like lying. This short work outlines a simple account of how lying can be conceptualized within that framework. To that end, the basic Brandomian position is extended to include a novel type of status – namely, pseudo-commitments, which are unique in their being non-binding. The traditional definition of lying is then given a status-oriented form, such that lying consists in presenting a pseudo-commitment with the intention for it to be attributed as a standard commitment. Importantly, this can be articulated in our scorekeeping practices, which is demonstrated with three example exchanges – one featuring an undetected lie, one featuring a detected lie, and one featuring a bald-faced lie. Though simple, the account works and invites extension to other similar phenomena, like sarcasm, acting, bullshit, etc. The notion of pseudo-commitment may also find application outside of the inferentialist context.

Foundational theories of meaning, and the broader metasemantic projects they contribute to, promise to answer that seemingly simple yet intractable question of what meaning consists in and where it comes from. Naturally, they build upon expressions that we already know and recognize to develop their positions. This focus on language as we know it, however, leaves aside the no less significant matter of language in terms of possible expressions - the strange and distant expanses of language beyond our everyday stock of expressions. This work sets out to explore possibility in the context of the meaning of simple expressions. In the process, words, phrases, and sentences are thoroughly explicated as types of expressions before being leveraged to engineer unique and unusual possible words. These exotic possibilities are then confronted with two major positions on meaning in philosophy, introducing novel difficulties and suggesting the significance of this otherwise neglected perspective on language.

This work sets out to present how the notion of delusion may be understood (and extended) within the semantic framework of Robert Brandom's inferentialism. The mechanisms of reliability and community‐oriented proprieties, among others, provide inferentialists with effective tools for understanding commitments (and so beliefs) in communities. These tools may be used to describe and assess both commitments that we might consider sound and commitments that we might consider delusional, both in terms of how they arise and in terms of how they may be reinforced. Delusions are accordingly rendered in perspectival and normative terms, which is elaborated through a number of examples. The picture of how a delusional commitment may be understood, how it may be reinforced, and its character as community internal or external provide some interesting perspectives on delusions in shared social contexts, as well as how they may originate intractable conflicts and disconnects between sub‐groups within a broader linguistic community.

The aim of this paper is to examine the theoretical architecture of semantic atomism and its consequences with respect to natural language. In particular, it looks to explore the notion of possible concepts using the fundamental distinction between simple and complex concepts and expressions in Jerry Fodor’s atomism. The distinction is exploited to produce an unusual type of concept referred to as a correlate, which effectively mirrors complex concepts while maintaining a distinct underlying structure. Though harmless in and of themselves, their presence in the context of polymorphemic expressions suggests that atomism harbors a tacit and unintuitive form of polysemy that is problematic in its own right and that leads to other complications, some of which may be demonstrated on the example of communication. These issues are tied to the way atomism is structured, and although they seem to have gone largely unnoticed, they appear to bear negatively on the adequacy of atomism where natural language is concerned.

The paper examines the theoretical merit of “semantic molecules” in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Although semantic molecules are said to trace semantic dependence and necessity, compress complexity, and to account for what I call its productivity, that doesn't appear to be the case. This can be illustrated on the basis of a comparison of two explications for the same complex meaning—one containing a molecule and the other its decomposed elements. Counterfactual considerations suggest that the latter is not semantically dependent on the lexicalized molecule and that it is, in turn, not necessary. The other side of the comparison cements the point. This leaves the issue of compression, complexity, and productivity—none of which are helped by semantic molecules, as they appear to do little more than conceal complexity. Meanwhile, they are not required to account for productivity. It seems that molecules may need to be rethought.

This short work presents a popular fringe theory as a source of case studies for use in teaching informal logic in an introductory course. It puts forward ancient astronaut theory as the candidate source, together with a characterization of why it fits the bill. The televised material associated with that theory is well suited to being used as case studies given that they are easy to follow, contain a surprising number of arguments and fallacies, and keep students reliably engaged. The paper includes an overview of the forms of argumentation and fallacies that these cases may be used to teach, along with a sketch of how to best implement them in the classroom.

The phenomenal body is an intriguing concept, and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of habit, coupled with motor intentionality, provides a novel perspective on its inner workings. I contend that his portrayal of habit tacitly bears two faces – motoric habit and instrumental habit respectively. The former is an attunement to some bodily possibilities that are already at our disposal while the latter is an explicit relation to external objects and a process of incorporating those objects into our own bodies. These two notions play into each other, creating a mechanism that offers an intuitive illustration and simple productive definition for a dynamic picture of bodyhood. Furthermore, it carries an internal delimitation that marks the boundaries of its application. The result is a view that provides something new to current interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, as well as potential applications in areas that derived from his appeals to motor intentionality.