Pawel Grabarczyk

The phenomenon of context dependence is so multifaceted that it is tempting to classify it as hetergenous. It is especially evident in the case of the difference between context dependence as understood in the philosophy of language and context dependence as understood in the philosophy of mind. One of the aims of the present volume is to show that as varied as the phenomenon of context dependence is, the similarities between its different manifestations are profound and undeniable. More importantly, as evidenced in a number of papers presented on the subsequent pages of this volume, a broad perspective on the phenomenon of context dependence helps us to re-apply theories devised for one of the subfields of philosophy to the other subfields. Since the connections and analogies between many uses of contextualism may not be initially obvious, keeping an open perspective and the willingness to learn from the work of others may sometimes be crucial for finding new, satisfactory solutions.

The chapter consists of two main parts. In the first part I look at the DTM from a contemporary point of view and position it amongst other theories of meaning. I explain the reasons why I call it a “semantic” theory even though it does not tell us anything about the reference of terms and the reasons behind calling it a “pragmatic” theory. In the second part I introduce 18 desiderata for theories of meaning and suggest that the best way of evaluating theories of this type is to see, how many of these desiderata does a given theory fulfill.

In this chapter, I leave the historical perspective behind and start to develop the new version of the DTM (which I call simply the nDTM). The chapter starts by revisiting some of the unsolved problems discussed in Chap. 3, such as Alfred Tarski’s challenge and the criteria for choosing meaning directives. Next, we revisit the problem we left in Chap. 4, that is the question of how indeterminacy of translation affects the DTM. The chapter wraps up with the presentation of the new version of meaning directives.

The chapter consists of two main parts. The first one can be seen as a counterpart to Chap. 3 in which the original directival theory was compared to classic theories of language. In the current chapter I compare the nDTM to three contemporary functional role semantics: Ned Block’s conceptual role semantics, Robert Brandom’s inferential role semantics and Jaroslav Peregrin’s rule theory of language. Analogously to the role of Chap. 3, this comparison helps me to embellish some of the unique features of the nDTM and position the theory on the contemporary philosophical map. In the second part of this chapter I return to the list of eighteen desiderata introduced in Chap. 2 and evaluate the nDTM by looking at which of these desiderata does the new theory fulfill.

In this chapter I look at the original DTM from a critical perspective. Firstly, I closely analyze the way directives produce meanings of words. Secondly, I look at the consequences of the holistic nature of the DTM. Next, I expand on the pragmatic aspect of the theory and try to imagine how the process of gathering directives should look like. In the following subsection I inspect the reasons and consequences of the non-referential status of the DTM. In Sect. 3.6 I discuss Alfred Tarski’s counterexample which discouraged Ajdukiewicz from developing the theory further. Section 3.7 brings to light some of the non-obvious assumptions on syntax which are present in the DTM. The chapter closes with the examination of the most problematic aspect of the original theory – the fact it was originally restricted only to “closed” and “connected” languages. I explain Ajdukiewicz’s reasons for this restriction and prepare ground for its elimination.

Artykuł jest poświęcony Saula Kripkego teorii nazw przedmiotów fikcyjnych. Jak zauważam, teoria ta była dla autora istotna, ponieważ jego standardowa semantyka nazw własnych i gatunków naturalnych słabo nadaje się do opisu tych przypadków. Kripke proponuje rozwiązanie hybrydowe, które łączy trzy rozwijane później w filozofii fikcji idee: fikcjonalizm w stylu K. Waltona, operator „w powieści” w stylu D.K. Lewisa oraz ontologię bytów fikcyjnych jako abstraktów. W dalszej części artykułu wskazuję na usterki propozycji Kripkego i rozwijam alternatywną sugestię, opartą na metaforze gry zamiast wyjściowej metafory udawania. Jak argumentuję, alternatywa ta lepiej oddaje potoczny sposób mówienia o fikcji i daje się nadal pogodzić ze standardową semantyką Kripkego.

The paper discusses the thesis of virtual realism presented by David Chalmers in his paper “The Virtual and the Real” (2017). Here, I suggest an even stronger version of the claim that I call “virtual physicalism”. According to this view, virtual objects are not only real but physical as they are identical to the physical states of computers that run VR software. I suggest that virtual objects should have a similar ontological status to toys—they should be treated as models or simplifications of ordinary objects. Just like toys, virtual objects can sometimes be good enough to be used instead of their ordinary counterparts. In these cases, virtual objects start to be treated as instantiations of the same kind. In the last part of the paper, I use Johan Huizinga’s notion of a “magic circle” to suggest how different objects could be successfully “virtualized”, that is, moved into a digital realm while remaining objects of the same kind as their non-virtual counterparts. I suggest this will happen once virtual reality becomes permanent and causally connected with non-virtual reality. I finish the paper by looking at examples of natural kind objects and individuals, which seem to be the hardest cases for successful virtualization.

The paper aims to add contextual dependence to the new directival theory of meaning, a functional role semantics based on Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s directival theory of meaning. We show that the original formulation of the theory does not have a straight answer on how the meaning of indexicals and demonstratives is established. We illustrate it in the example of some problematic axiomatic and inferential directives containing indexicals. We show that the main reason why developing the new directival theory of meaning in this direction is difficult is that the theory focuses on the notion of a sentence (and not the notion of an utterance). To add the latter notion to the theory, we introduce the idea of admissible contextual distribution being an interpretation of the hybrid expression view on indexicals and demonstratives. We argue that this idea introduces a small but important modification to the concept of language matrix and gives way to define two distinct concepts of meaning: for an expression type and for a use of an expression type.

The paper analyses selected philosophical aspects of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. I argue that there is an interesting similarity between the history of “Solarist studies” –the fictional scientific discipline depicted by Lem and cognitive science. I show that both disciplines go through similar stages as they try to describe their main subject. In the further part of the paper, I focus on two problems identified in cognitive science that can be directly related to the themes found in Solaris: the problem of the detection of intelligence and the problem of the notion of mental representations. I finish the paper by looking at the mysterious guests that stalk the main protagonists and show that they can be understood as heuristic models that are taken into account in the theories of mind uploading.

The first aim of this paper is to remind the reader of a very original theory of meaning which in many aspects has not been surpassed by subsequent theories. The theory in question is Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s Directival Theory of Meaning. In the first section I present a version of this theory which, I trust, retains the gist of the original but loses its outdated language. In the second section I analyze some problematic consequences of the directival theory and show how they can be addressed. The second aim of this paper is exploiting some of the similarities between the directival theory and later theories of meaning. In the third section I argue that using the directival theory as an interpretative tool enables us to create explications of some of the notoriously vague notions which contemporary theories of meaning employ.

By looking at videogame production through a two-vector model of design – a practice determined by the interplay between economic and technological evolution – we argue that shared screen play, as both collaboration and competition, originally functioned as a desirable pattern in videogame design, but has since become problematic due to industry transformations. This is introduced as an example of what we call design vestigiality: momentary loss of a design pattern’s contextual function due to techno-economical evolution.

Celem artykułu jest wyróżnienie dwóch, funkcjonujących w języku potocznym sensów wyrażenia „widzieć” – obiektywnego i subiektywnego bez jednoczesnego przypisywania obserwatorom przekonań. Celem jest zatem ekstensjonalna eksplikacja. Pozwala to na opisywanie percepcji wzrokowej bez przesądzania o wyższych zdolnościach kognitywnych podmiotu percepcji. Wprowadzenie przekonań obserwatora pozwala następnie na wyrażenie większej ilości rozróżnień występujących w literaturze poświęconej filozoficznym zagadnieniom percepcji zmysłowej.