Polite talk – The paper aims to analyze the role that books of manners from different historical times assign to language in defining politeness. It also tries to find differences and similarities among them and to explain principles that books of manners share with theoretical models on politeness, notwithstanding the descriptive perspective of the first and the normative point of view of the latter.

AIMS: The primary goal of the presented research was to investigate the memory effects of implicit negation, conveyed using implicatures, as compared to explicit negation. We also speculated that implicit negation might require more cognitive effort.

METHODS: Three experiments were conducted (total N = 181), in which participants were presented with a description containing implicit or explicit negation, followed by a memory recognition test of items present, negated or not mentioned in the description. We manipulated the pace at which the description was presented (own pace vs. fixed) and whether participants were informed about the upcoming recognition test.

RESULTS: We found no differences between explicit and implicit negation in the number of false alarms to negated and not mentioned items, response times or time spent reading the source material. Bayesian analyses indicated a 90% probability that there were no differences in the number of false alarms between explicit and implicit negation.

CONCLUSIONS: Implicit and explicit negation lead to a similar quality of recognition, and seem to require a similar amount of time to process, indicating comparable cognitive effort.

The article offers a discourse-analytic examination of original (English) and interpreted (Polish) versions of several extracts from plenary speeches by three Members of the European Parliament (Janusz Korwin-Mikke, Nigel Farage and Guy Verhofstadt). Controversial statements that have met with adverse reactions of the audience and/or the media are selected for analysis. The author endeavours to assess the degree to which pragmatic equivalence has been achieved by Polish interpreters. Another pertinent question is whether the identifi ed shifts are due to some systemic differences between the pragmatics of the source and target languages or to other factors, such as the constraints typical for simultaneous interpreting or specific, local problems.

We demonstrate a modularity bug in the interface system of Java 8 on the practical example of a textbook design of a modular interface for vector spaces. Our example originates in our teaching of modular object-oriented design in Java 8 to undergraduate students, simply following standard programming practices and mathematical denitions. The bug shows up as a compilation error and should be xed with a language extension due to the importance of best practices (design delity).

In the paper I present the famous argument between Peter F. Strawson and Bertrand Russell on definite descriptions. I do not go into details of the two rival solutions to the problem of definite descriptions. Instead I present the controversy against the background of two traditions within analytic philosophy, i.e. the philosophy of natural language (Strawson) and the philosophy of ideal language (Russell). In consequence, the aim of this paper is to sketch the principal features of the two traditions and to indicate their influence on the argument. In the first paragraph I discuss Russell’s theory of descriptions and present it as a result of dramatic changes that he had made in his philosophy before he finally presented them in On Denoting in 1905. The second paragraph deals with the two traditions within analytic philosophy after the linguistic turn and underlines the role of Strawson in the philosophy of natural language. In the third paragraph I analyze in detail Strawson’s arguments against the theory of descriptions and I focus on some details that are usually omitted in standard presentations. The fourth paragraph discusses Russell’s response to Strawson’s objections, i.e. the counter-arguments formulated from the standpoint of philosophy of ideal language. I end with some suggestions about how to reconcile both approaches.

The aim of this paper is to consider the not so well investigated problem of the role that language has played in Karl Marx’s thinking. The first section discusses several examples of Marxist attempts at philosophical or linguistic reflection on language. I propose the thesis that Marxist meaning theory did not seriously evolve due to the domination of the ‛Traditional Meaning Theory’ (TMT) – irrespective of the actual social conditions. In the second section I undertake some adumbrations on the tendencies of contemporary philosophy of language, such as externalism or pragmatism, whose premonitions can be found in Marx. I also point out that combined with historical materialism they can no longer fit TMT. Finally, I argue that the notion of language and the division of linguistic labor may solve some issues of Marx’s conception of ideology.

The contemporary warfare seems to have great influence on the way social sciences position themselves within the socio-political contexts of today. This is being implemented in many cases by the geopolitical context of 9/11 and the fall of former centers of power (end of the Cold War). Cultural anthropology, which shared a similar dilemma in the formative period of its own history provides us today with one of the most controversial examples in this matter. The program initiated by US Army back in 2006 called Human Terrain System started a wide spread debate on ethical issues regarding doing ethnographic fieldwork in a militarized landscape. HTS became thus a field of intellectual and political polemics between certain groups of researches. The academic and political debate on HTS seems to be put in a post-colonial context as a new form of mixing of science and ideology. This paper tackles the problem of emergence of a new type of anthropological understanding of the cultural other and as well its own methods and ethical standards in a situation, where crisis seems to be a permanent state of the discipline and the world its trying to describe.

The article consists of two parts. In the first one (introductory) I recall—following Edmund Husserl, Stanisław Ossowski and Adam Schaff—the main formulations of the “principle of transparency of the sign.” In these formulations it is usually said about (1) the transparency of the sign regarding objects denoted by the sign (denoted, designated and/or named), or (2) the transparency of the sign regarding its meaning (respectively, events, states of affairs and facts designated by the sign). However, as Husserl pointed out, one can also speak about (3) the transparency of the sign in relations to the activities and mental states of the sign’s users (senders and recipients). After all, only due to the transparency of the sign understood in this way, it is possible for people to communicate with each other, thus the sign can also has an expressive and communicative function. In turn, the second part of the article (essential) contains a reconstruction of the Leon Koj’s approach; Koj gave a consistently formalized form to the theory of sign based on the principle of transparency— the form of an axiomatized logical system (using Quine's formalism from his Mathematical Logic). One of Koj's main goals was also to indicate the close relationship between semantics and pragmatics, and even the primacy of pragmatics over semantics. Formal-logical tools have also shown that the theory of sign based on the principle of transparency neither contravene The Law of Non-Contradiction (at least in its psychological formulation), nor contain or imply semantic antinomies such us antinomy of the liar. Because it is a theory easily negotiable with Alfred Tarski’s theory of language levels.

Science means here mathematics and those empirical disciplines which avail themselves of mathematical models. The pragmatic approach is conceived in Karl R. Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (p. 276) sense: a logical appraisal of the success of a theory amounts to the appraisal of its corroboration. This kind of appraisal is exemplified in section 6 by a case study—on how Isaac Newton justified his theory of gravitation. The computational approach in problem-solving processes consists in considering them in terms of computability: either as being performed according to a model of computation in a narrower sense, e.g., the Turing machine, or in a wider perspective—of machines associated with a non-mechanical device called “oracle” by Alan Turing (1939). Oracle can be interpreted as computer theoretic representation of intuition or invention. Computational approach in another sense means considering problem-solving processes in terms of logical gates, supposed to be a physical basis for solving problems with a reasoning.

Pragmatic rationalism about science, seen at the background of classical rationalism (Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz etc.), claims that any scientific idea, either in empirical theories or in mathematics, should be checked through applications to problem-solving processes. Both the versions claim the existence of abstract objects, available to intellectual intuition. The difference concerns the dynamics of science: (i) the classical rationalism regards science as a stationary system that does not need improvements after having reached an optimal state, while (ii) the pragmatical version conceives science as evolving dynamically due to fertile interactions between creative intuitions, or inventions, with mechanical procedures.

The dynamics of science is featured with various models, like Derek J. de Solla Price’s exponential and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm model (the most familiar instances). This essay suggests considering Turing’s idea of oracle as a complementary model to explain most adequately, in terms of exceptional inventiveness, the dynamics of mathematics and mathematizable empirical sciences.