Zuzana Rybaříková

The paper focuses on Janina Hosiasson’s psychology of inductive reasoning. Hosiasson similarly to Frank P. Ramsey supported the theory of partial beliefs, which argues that a person’s subjective belief in probability may be measured by his or her actions. The theory suggests that people aim to do as much good as possible, and their behaviour is influenced by this goal. At the same time, Hosiasson claimed that Ramsey’s theory holds only if the person behaves rationally, and she demonstrated in experiments with her students that this was not always the case. For instance, although the students possessed a certain amount of information, they were not able to follow the most rational strategy when more complex calculations were required. Forty years later, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed a theory of cognitive bias, pointing out the limits of rationality. Their finding confirmed Hosiasson’s results, as the present study shows.

One of Pavel Tichý’s celebrated observations was that definite descriptions do not denote individuals but individual offices. In our paper, we compare Tichý’s concept of individual offices to the concept proposed by Arthur N. Prior, who differentiated between the strong and the weak “the”. The aim of our paper is to point out parallels and differences. The differences stem in particular from their different approaches to contingency given by their accepted ontology. In addition, we would like to enrich Tichý’s analysis of individual offices by including certain features of Prior’s concept. The proposed outline might provide a challenge for a more detailed analysis of definite descriptions in Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic.

AbstractŁukasiewicz introduced a new methodological approach to the history of logic. It consists of the use of modern formal logic in the research of the history of logic. Although he was not the first to use formal logic in his historical research, Łukasiewicz was the first who used it consistently and formulated it as a requirement for a historian of logic. The aim of this paper is to present Łukasiewicz's contribution and the history of its formulation. In addition, the paper will present its reception. There are two main themes in Łukasiewicz’s work on the history of logic. He discussed Stoic logic and Aristotle’s syllogistic. The second part of the paper focuses on current reception of Łukasiewicz’s contribution and on the question of whether there is a difference between knowledge about his contribution to Stoic logic and to Aristotle’s syllogistic, given that it has been hypothesised that Łukasiewicz’s contribution is currently more known among Aristotelian scholars than among those who focus on Stoic logic. Based on the papers that have appeared in the last five years at Web of Science and Scopus this hypothesis has not been confirmed.