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The legacy of philosophical behaviourism: the concept of mind without minds
Soutor, Milan ; Kolman, Vojtěch (advisor) ; Hill, James (referee)
The epistemological problem of unity and its development in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell is the main subject of this essay. The first chapter is devoted to naïve realism developed by G. E. Moore and adopted by early Russell. I explain the notion of objective unity of proposition. The second chapter concerns Russell's departure from naïve realism and the multiple relation of judgment which Wittgenstein's criticism rendered as fatally unable to handle the problem of synthetic unity. The breakdown of this theory led Russell to naturalism, which is the topic of the last chapter. I pay special attention to the regressive argument proposed in slightly different versions by Moore, L. Wittgenstein and G. Ryle. Keywords realism, neutral monism, behaviorism, unity, consciousness
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The impossibility of private language
Hnyk, Tomáš ; Kolman, Vojtěch (advisor) ; Dostálová, Ludmila (referee)
Wittgenstein's argument against private language is subjected to scru- tiny in this thesis. Three arguments against private language are found. Private language would be impossible to imagine, would not have a function and would lack any criteria of right or wrong use. Next, several reactions by later philosophers are discussed leading to a better understanding of Wittgenstein's argumentation. Soames's and Ayer's objections help to point out that thought experiments are admissible only when respecting our forms of life. They also empha- size the fact that Wittgenstein was not concerned with truth condi- tions but with assertibility conditions. Last, Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein is mentioned briefly.
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The Role of Convention in Austin's Speech Act Theory
Josisová, Pavlína ; Peregrin, Jaroslav (advisor) ; Kolman, Vojtěch (referee)
The diploma thesis examines the role of convention in J. L. Austin's speech act theory. It describes the possibility of "how to do things with words": such an analysis of language will be suggested that does not focus on the category of truth when dealing with particular utterances but rather replaces it with the category of felicity of a speech act in the social context. After having offered the explication including the central points of the given theory, there starts the investigation of which parts of the speech act theory are conventionally based and what role do conventions play in the speech act theory as a whole.
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Are there any pohotographic representations? Roger Scruton and his critics
Bergmann, Dominik ; Kolman, Vojtěch (advisor) ; Petříček, Miroslav (referee)
This thesis focuses on the answering whether photographic representations exist or not. The answer is searched for in discussions of Roger Scruton and some of his critics. According to Scruton's argument presented in the essay entitled Photography and Representation a photograph cannot be a representation. Scruton claims that only such medium can become a representation that has a certain intentional relation to its subject, however a photograph is defined merely by its causal relation to such object. Scruton's critics believe that a photograph is a representation and criticize him for: i) underestimating the role a photographer's intentions play in a photograph; ii) disregarding a photograph's ability to provide a new way of seeing and thus becoming representational; iii) equivocating between the subject of a painting and the subject of a photograph. It is demonstrated that arguments of Scruton's critics are not able to show Scruton's concept of photography to be false. However, an alternative approach to representation provides a basis to demonstrate in what sense a photograph may be a representation. For that reason it is suggested to consider a photography as an essentially paradoxical medium merging into itself the intentional and causal. Keywords: photograph, representation, intentional...
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The logical analysis and the logical form of the statements "A exists"
Dostálová, Ludmila ; Materna, Pavel (advisor) ; Zouhar, Marián (referee) ; Kolman, Vojtěch (referee)
The thesis investigates the logical form of the statements "so-and-so exists". Firstly, the historical survey was displayed in order to identify the meaning of this sort of statements. Hence starting conditions of the logical analysis were defined as well as the requirements that the background logic of the logical analysis must fulfill in order to be an adequate tool to express their logical form. Consequently, various logical forms of existential statements as they are expressed in different logic systems were compared in order to show to what extent they fulfull the demand. The evaluation criteria were: the equivalency of truth-conditions, fulfillment of intuitions, and the acceptability of the deductive results.
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Instrumentality of knowledge: instrumentalism in philosophy of scienc
Cvek, Boris ; Peregrin, Jaroslav (advisor) ; Kolman, Vojtěch (referee) ; Švec, Ondřej (referee)
Richard Rorty's main thesis in his work Philosphy and the Mirror of Nature centers on a critique of representationalism in a fundamentally relativistic way. The aim of this disseration is to grasp Rorty's ideas in broader sense as a critique of inadequate interpretation of knowing- that and shift the attention to knowing-how as a key to new understanding the success of natural sciences. The fact that something is reproducibly possible for us to make in the surrounding world is not relative, and it is precisely in this way that technology (knowing- how) spreads so successfully even at multi-cultural level. In contrast, the explanatory function (knowing-that) of the natural sciences is relative, making sense only in the context of what is already known and accepted. Natural sciences are so successful because their experiments and only then take agreement of hypothesis with experimental practice (knowing-how) as the criterion of its acceptability. This dissertation offers, as a way out of Rortian relativism, the concept of "open authority" and proposes a new development in philosophic pragmatism based on it.
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Late Wittgensteinian Ethics as Clarification, Cultivation and Enrichment of Ethical Ways of Seeing
Rozen, David ; Kolman, Vojtěch (advisor) ; Palkoska, Jan (referee)
The aim of the work is to present the possibilities of ethics in late Wittgensteinian framework. In course of the investigation will be presented: (1) early Wittgensteinian ethics, (2) late Wittgensteinian anti-foundationalism and (3) its consequences for analytical meta-ethics - it will be argued (a) against epistemologization of ethics and (b) for need of more complex understanding of ethics, by which traditional meta-ethical disputes of realism with anti-realism and of cognitivism with non-cognitivism will be overcame -, which will result in (4) development of late Wittgensteinian ethics. Ethics will be presented as consisting in ethical ways of seeing of the world, through which various phenomena arise as ethically relevant and late Wittgensteinian ethical investigation will be developed as clarification, cultivation and enrichment of our ethical ways of seeing in overall - partially subjective and partially intersubjective - context of language, life forms and life stories from which they arise. Keywords Ethics, meta-ethics, Wittgenstein, anti-foundationalism, truth in ethics, aspect seeing, perspicuous representation, ethics as clarification, life forms
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Philosophy of Ordinary Language - its Decline and What to Do After It
Ivan, Michal ; Kolman, Vojtěch (advisor) ; Peregrin, Jaroslav (referee) ; Tomeček, Marek (referee)
The general topic of the thesis is the history of the Ordinary Language Philosophy. To be more precise, it deals with the critical arguments, which were raised against is. The thesis offers a short historical and sociological review of the Ordinary Language Philosophy. Critical analysis shows two things: 1) the main reason for the rejection was a different understanding of meaning (and consequences of such a understanding); 2) critics begged the question and already assumed the justification of these rejections in their arguments. The area of this criticism was: the paradigm case argument, the empirical nature of the statements of meaning produced by the Ordinary Language Philosophy, the structural elements of meaning and the political implications of the theory of meaning. The thesis criticizes the Ordinary Language Philosophy in those parts (and in such interpretations), where its understanding of meaning does not differ from the understanding of the critics and where they share common assumptions. On the other hand, the thesis argues for an interpretation, which avoids classical understanding of meaning in all its consequences. Finally, the thesis asks how the Ordinary Language Philosophy can be useful for contemporary debates.
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Wittgenstein's Perspicuous Representations
Suchý, Jindřich ; Kolman, Vojtěch (advisor) ; Hill, James (referee)
The aim of my thesis is to present Wittgenstein's late philosophical concept of perspicuous representations as a tool to "dissolve" philosophical problems. According to Wittgenstein, the problems of philosophy are to be understood as conceptual confusions, or misunderstandings. The role of philosophy consists of dissolving them by presenting connections between concepts. The philosophy is thus conceived as a therapy consisting both of the negative task (of dissolving philosophical problems) and the positive task (of clarifying the norms of representation). The thesis starts with description of Wittgenstein's concept of philosophical problem and of its methodological base. After that, the influence of the important figures such as Hertz, Boltzmann and Goethe is discussed with particular focus on the color-octahedron which represents the only Wittgenstein's systematically developed example of the perspicuous representation. Perspicuous representations are thus presented as an instrument used to represent the preconditions of human understanding of the world.
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