Maciej Głowacki

Halbach and Fujimoto have formulated an axiomatic theory of truth and determinateness, CD. They asked whether the theory can be augmented with a principle saying that all determinateness ascriptions are themselves determinate. We answer their question in the negative. In order to put the problem in a more abstract framework, we introduce the notion of `admissibility', and we obtain a general impossibility result for the class of admissible sentences. In particular, we show that under mild assumptions on the notion of admissibility, the principle that admissibility ascriptions are themselves admissible entails triviality over Strong Kleene logic, even without assuming the transparency of truth.

The Implicit Commitments Thesis (ICT) states that in accepting a formal theory S, one is implicitly committed to additional statements, such as S’s consistency. ICT aligns with the intuition that accepting S without acknowledging its consistency is epistemically problematic. However, there is ongoing debate over ICT’s validity in all cases. Dean (2015) argued that ICT should be rejected because it clashes with the idea of epistemic stability. Additionally, the epistemological basis for considering consistency statements as implicit commitments remains underexplored. This paper addresses these issues by analyzing ICT’s epistemological and conceptual underpinnings. First, it examines putative counterexamples, such as finitism and first-orderism, and argues that they do not undermine ICT’s general applicability. Then, it introduces an intuitive epistemic norm that supports the implicit acceptance of consistency within ICT’s framework.

By definition, the implicit commitment of a formal theory $$\textrm{Th}$$ Th consists of sentences that are independent of the axioms of $$\textrm{Th}$$ Th, but their acceptance is implicit in the acceptance of $$\textrm{Th}$$ Th. In Cieśliński (2017, 2018), the phenomenon of implicit commitments was studied from the epistemological perspective through the lenses of the formal theory of believability. The current paper provides a comprehensive proof-theoretic analysis of this approach and compares it to other main theories of implicit commitments. We argue that the formal results presented in the paper favour the believability theory over its main competitors. However, there is still a fly in the ointment. We argue that in its current formulation, the theory cannot deliver all the goods for which it was defined. In particular, being amenable to a generalised conservativeness argument, it does not support the view that the notion of truth is epistemically light. At the end of the paper, we discuss possible ways out of the problem.

When accepting an axiomatic theory S, we are implicitly committed to various statements that are independent of its axioms. Examples of such implicit commitments include consistency statements and reflection principles for S. While foundational acceptance has received considerable attention in this context, the study of implicit commitments triggered by weaker notions remains underdeveloped. This article extends the analysis investigating implicit commitments inherent in instrumental acceptance, comparing them with the implicit commitments involved in foundational acceptance. Concentrating on Reinhardt’s instrumentalism vis-à-vis Kripke–Feferman theory of truth as a case study, we present a number of formal theories of acceptance motivated by Reinhardt’s program and we analyze their properties. We argue that, under reasonable assumptions, instrumental acceptance does entail non-trivial implicit commitments, yet weaker than those associated with foundational acceptance.

In this paper, I critically examine Kurt Gödel’s argument against the syntactic interpretation of mathematics. While the main aim is to analyze the argument, I also wish to underscore the relevance of the original elements of Gödel’s philosophical thought. The paper consists of four parts. In the first part, I introduce the reader to Gödel’s philosophy. In the second part, I reconstruct the formalist stance in the philosophy of mathematics, which is the object of Gödel’s criticism. In the third part, I sketch his argument against the syntactic interpretation of mathematics. Finally, I discuss some controversies regarding the argument.

In this paper, I analyze the semantics of the first person pronoun “I” from the perspective of the user/producer distinction. In the first part of the paper, I describe the Simple View and propose three interpretations of its thesis. In the second part, I analyze the notions of use and production of a linguistic token. In the next part, I show that all of the interpretations of SV are sensitive to counterexamples. In the end, I discuss possible answers of the proponents of SV and argue against them. The first aim of this paper is to show that SV is wrong, and the second is to convince the reader that the user/producer distinction is of high importance in the philosophy of language.

In this paper we present a solution to Saul Kripke’s Puzzle About Belief Meaning and use, Dordrecht, 1979) based on Kaplan’s metaphysical picture of words. Although it is widely accepted that providing such a solution was one of the main incentives for the development of Kaplan’s theory, it was never presented by Kaplan in a systematic manner and was regarded by many as unsatisfactory. We agree with these critiques, and develop an extension of Kaplan’s theory by introducing the notion of “conservative” word uses, as well as arguing for the restriction of Kripke’s Disquotational Principle only to such uses. This restriction allows us to solve Kripke’s Puzzle by arguing that the assent of the puzzle’s protagonist does not allow disquotation and ascription of corresponding inconsistent belief, as it contains the non-conservative use of a proper name. At the end of the paper, we defend two of Kaplan’s theses that we find essential for our argument to work: that individuation of word tokens involves taking into account the intention of the speaker, and that different uniquely referring proper names of the same shape should be regarded as different homonymous words.