TARUFFO AND THE PRAGMATIST PHILOSOPHY OF SUSAN HAACK

In this essay, I defend the compatibility of actualism – i.e., the view that there neither are, nor could have been, any nonexistent objects – and possible worlds. I begin by demonstrating how on the Canonical Conception of possible worlds one is committed to the idea that there are, or could have been, nonexistent objects. I then develop an actualist conception of possible worlds, properties, and essences. In particular, I deny that properties are set theoretical entities; something that the Canonical Conception endorses. Finally, I provide an actualist understanding of propositions such as there could have an object distinct from each object that actually exists – an understanding that does not commit one to belief in nonexistent objects.

A paradox of our time is identified: on the one hand – the development of one global system (ecological, technological and social), on the other hand – the still increasing “balkanization” of science. The dynamics of this systems is a source of well-known numerous global problems. Its possibly effective solution needs adequate knowledge about the system. For this reason, counteraction to “balkanization” of science is of great practical importance. And this counteraction should comprise not only development of “transboundary” sciences (such as biochemistry or social psychology) but also establishing and developing links between very distant disciplines. This text is intended as a contribution to linking social and engineering sciences. The notion of design plays the central role in this text. Its meaning in the engineering sciences. The notion of utopia has been chosen as a partial counterpart to the term of engineering design. This notion was defined using a concept of possible world – taken from modal logic. It encompasses two ideas: this of design and that of prediction, It is claimed that we need many utopias and that their plurality is of fundamental importance for protecting us against the threats of utopianism. The paper suggests that social utopias can play a heuristic role in engineering design (particularly in the initial phase of defining technological problems), and – on the other hand – that the theory of engineering design can be supportive for, badly needed, development of methodology of utopias creation.

The progress of the social science disciplines depends on conducting relevant research. However, research methodology adopted and choices made during the course of the research project are underpinned by varying ontological, epistemological and axiological positions that may be known or unknown to the researcher. This paper sought to critically explore the philosophical underpinnings of the social science research. It was suggested that a “multiversal” ontological position, positivist-hermeneutic epistemological position and value-laden axiological position should be adopted for social science research by non-western scholars as alternative to the dominant naïve realist, positivist, and value-free orientation. Against the backdrop of producing context-relevant knowledge, non-western scholars are encouraged to re-examine their philosophical positions in the conduct of social science research.

Background: This article presents a critical reflection on the application of the ‘researcher as instrument’ concept within a study employing the nominal group technique. Twelve community-dwelling older adults were recruited to generate a list of items for a new patient-reported outcome measure on perceived ability to recover balance. The ontological position and epistemological stance of the first author are presented to provide a philosophical context of his lens and biases of his reflection. Aim: The article aims to share reflective insights into the process of taking the role of researcher as instrument, to highlight the concept’s strengths and limitations for other researchers and demonstrate how it is applied from the perspectives of a physiotherapist conducting person-centred research with older clients. Conclusions: Essential practice skills such as reflectivity and reflexivity are necessary for a researcher as an instrument to build a trusting relationship with participants in person-centred research. Novice researchers should explore their philosophical orientation to develop their research methodology and methods. Implications for practice: Researcher as instrument can be applied to conduct the nominal group technique In person-centred research, researchers need to critically reflect on their roles to build trust with participants during the planning and delivery of their methods, being reflective and reflexive Consideration of one’s ontological and epistemological position allows growth in research learning

The paper presents the current transformations of media culture in the conditions of crucial digitalization of society. Everyday life is fundamentally mediatized and this process is beyond the control and understanding, both by an individual, and by the professional community and society as a whole. Rather, we observe a general disturbing sense of violation of the usual boundaries of definitions and norms. In response to the crisis of comprehension and understanding, philosophy of language and communication turns back to the idea of discursivity of human civilization and proposes to adapt and rethink the concept of possible worlds and its descriptions in the aim to renew social strategies and communications. The increasing demand for methodological support of communication activities indicates the growing significance of cabinet philosophy, in particular philosophy of language and communication. This strategy of the scientific approach will allow us to build a research relevant to the subject-transdisciplinary. Based on an analysis of history of ideas and modern Russian methodology of transdisciplinarity, the authors put forward a hypothesis in terms of the philosophy of language on the development of digital mediated discourse in a transdimensional unity and the generation of different discourses.

The article examines the history and development of the concept of possible worlds, originating from G. Leibniz, and fictionality, which is an analytical tool of logic and other branches of philosophy today. The author analyses how attitudes towards fictionality have changed in philosophy and literary criticism, and how this has influenced the emergence of possible worlds as an interdisciplinary problem. Particular attention is paid to the types of fiction that emerged as a result of interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy and literary studies.

The challenge of Gilbert Harman that there are no moral facts is robust, to an extent extreme and counts most for the realists underline moral facts and moral explanations. The paper begins with the absorbing challenge posed by Harman that ends in some sort of skepticism. After a brief exposition of nature of moral facts, the paper focuses on another interesting squabble whether or not we conceive of serious moral explanation that bridges the gap between theories/ principles, and our moral observations. In a separate section it has been shown that moral explanations are far too necessary for moral facts because moral facts need to have explanatory potency. Moral facts need to explain our observations of moral phenomena. The contentious issue has been addressed remarkably well by Nicholas Sturgeon and Brad Majors. I have a suggestion that cogency of ideas of moral facts and moral explanations depend among other things, on the conception of possible worlds.

difficult. An easy way out of this difficulty is to interpret the problems of other disciplines in terms of one's own. This practice is typical of quite a few humanists and theorists of literature. While claiming to cultivate interdisciplinarity, they give philosophy, history, and even natural sci ences a treatment; their complex and diverse problems are reduced to concepts current in contemporary literary writing, such as subject, discourse, narrative, metaphor, semantic indeterminacy, and ambiguity. The universal literariness of knowledge acquisition and representation is then hailed as an interdisciplinary confirmation of epistemological relativism and indeterminism, to which contemporary literati subscribe. Interdisciplinarity dominated by the principles of literary writing, while posing as a definitive divorce from positivism, presupposes, in fact, the positivistic principle, that is, the division of cognitive activities into a hierarchy of specialized disciplines. Yet contemporary interdisciplinarity is part and parcel of new cognitive strategies tran scending the traditional territorial division. While specialized fields continue their empirical research, most advances in theory are achieved in transdisciplinary frameworks, in hyphenated sciences (such as psycholinguistics or biochemistry) and in covering macrosciences (semiotics, cybernetics, ecological science). Interdisciplinarity is now primarily the positing and testing of higher-order theoretical and conceptual systems that illuminate problems cutting across traditional disciplines. One of such irradiating centers is the conceptual system of possible worlds. 1. Possible worlds. The reemergence of the concept of possible worlds from a long-lasting dormancy can be dated quite exactly: to the classic paper of Saul A. Kripke.1 Kripke proposed a model structure for modal logic and interpreted it semantically in terms of possible worlds.

Artur Prior byl jednim z logiků, kteři se podileli na vzniku semantiky pro moderni modalni logiku. Ontologie, ktera se poji s jeho systemy modalni logiky, je do znacne miry unikatni. Prior se snažil zredukovat pocet abstraktnich entit, jak jen to bylo možne. Proto do sve ontologie nevpoustěl možne světy a possibilia. Zastaval take redukcionistický postoj, ktere Fine nazýva aktualismus nebo Melia modalismus. Prior byl ovlivněn mnohými autory, ale tento clanek se zaměřuje předevsim na dva důležite zdroje jeho mysleni, Wittgensteina a logiky Varsavske skoly. Wittgensteinovi Prior přiznava zasadni význam, když ve svých dilech diskutuje podobu možných světů, jakožto souboru propozic. Druhým významným rysem Priorova pojeti možných světů je odmitnuti jejich realne existence stejně jako odmitnuti existence entit, ktere se v nich vyskytuji. To bylo snad umožněno Priorovým přijetim některých systemů logiků Varsavske skoly, předevsim Leśniewskeho a Łukasiewicze.

By using the concept of possible worlds as system states, it is possible to express a system’s internal state with the configuration of the system’s variables. In the same way, the (usually incomplete and not necessarily correct) belief of an intelligent agent about the system’s state can be expressed by a set of possible worlds. If this belief is to be changed due to more accurate information about the system’s true state, it is reasonable to incorporate the new information while at the same time abandon as little information as possible, that is, to minimally change the belief of the agent. In this paper we define semantical distances between possible worlds based on the background beliefs of an agent which are represented as a conditional knowledge base, by defining distances on the syntax of the (semantical) conditional structure. With these distances, we instantiate AGM belief change operators that incorporate new information into the belief state and implement the principle of minimal change by selecting a set of worlds that are closest to the actual beliefs. We demonstrate that using the background knowledge to calculate distances allows us to change the belief state of the agent in a way that is semantically more correct than using, e.g., Dalal’s distance. We finally discuss that defining the distances on a syntactical distance on conditional structures allows us to implement the resulting belief change operators more efficiently.

This paper has two aims. The first aim is to unify the diverse interpretations of the to-infinitive in English. By adopting Lewis’s (1986) concept of possible worlds, I will claim that the infinitive represents incorporation of a possible world by the ‘real’ world. The second aim is to explain how certain predicates have come to select the infinitive or the gerund or both. I will argue that historic changes along with the semantic restraint of the infinitive can account for the current state of complementation.

Borrowing the concept of possible worlds from logic and semantics and using it from a semiotic perspective, this paper indicates new ways of analysing mimesis in literature. Little does it matter to the sign whether the object to which it refers exists as mind-dependent or mind-independent: the action of the sign is always the signification of another sign. It is the imitation of an imitation.

The article presents a critical analysis of the concept of possible worlds in the context of intellectual leisure culture. The methodology of constructing artificial worlds is studied on the example of literary phantasmagorias by R. Akutagawa and S. Czech. The author suggests that a critical analysis of the possible world and understanding its logic requires the participation of an agent of reasoning in it. The conclusion is drawn that the practice of creating possible worlds in fiction can be considered as an act of indirect self-reflection.

The concept of possible worlds, originally introduced in philosophical logic, has recently gained interdisciplinary influence; it proves to be a productive tool when borrowed by literary theory to explain the notion of fictional worlds. In this book Ruth Ronen develops a comparative reading of the use of possible worlds in philosophy and in literary theory, and offers an analysis of the way the concept contributes to our understanding of fictionality and the structure and ontology of fictional worlds. Dr Ronen suggests a new set of criteria for the definition of fictionality, making rigorous distinctions between fictional and possible worlds; and through specific studies of domains within fictional worlds - events, objects, time, and point of view - she proposes a radical rethinking of the problem of fictionality in general and fictional narrativity in particular.

The article is dedicated to the study of the functioning of language means, which in the primary or secondary function are able to express the modality of probability in modern Spanish and Italian languages. We consider the category of probability as a kind of modal category both in terms of logical (epistemic) modality, functional grammar, and from the standpoint of the theory of linguistic communication. Probability as a kind of modality is one of the most common types of modality with a large gradation of semantic meanings - from complete ignorance to complete confidence. The range of language tools that can express this kind of subjective modality in Spanish and Italian seems vast. It is a functional-semantic category that combines different levels of language: modal adverbs, modal verbs, fixed syntactic constructions, forms of such moods as indicativo, subjuntivo, condicional in Spanish and indicativo, congiuntivo, condizionale in Italian, two forms of the future tense in both languages that are able to develop this modal meaning. All of them can interact with each other, reinforcing the studied modal significance. And so it is possible to express various gradation of probability. Due to the functional-semantic approach to the study of this category on the material of different languages, functional-semantic fields with central and peripheral zones were created. The structuring of these fields became possible due to the separation of primary and secondary probability modalities in the studied units. It seems that everything has already been said about this category, but a new round of interest in logical modality, adapting the concept of possible worlds to the category of probability, again raised the question of its content and caused the need to defend the fact that linguistic modality, although based on logical modality, does not identify with it.