One of the most popular objections against epistemic contextualism is the so-called?warranted assertability? objection. The objection is based on the possibility of a?warranted assertability manoeuvre?, also known as a WAM. I argue here that WAMs are of very limited scope and importance. An important class of cases cannot be dealt with by WAMs. No analogue of WAMs is available for these cases. One should thus not take WAMs too seriously in the debate about epistemic contextualism.

ABSTRACT Many epistemologists explain the empirically attested contextual variation in knowledge ascriptions by appeal to a kind of warranted assertability maneuver (WAM) that finds the locus of variability in epistemic norms of assertion. I show that this way to WAM fails. It cannot explain the variability of embedded uses of knowledge sentences in assertoric speech acts in which the knowledge sentences are not themselves asserted.

Contextualism is a quite popular research program nowadays. In essence, the contextualist holds that the truth conditions of knowledge attributing and of knowledge denying sentences vary in accordance with the context in which the sentences are uttered. This theory is positively motivated by its capability of best explaining certain intuitions we have about knowledge attributions and knowledge denials. In this paper, I will argue that this positive motivation isn't as compelling as the contextualists think it to be. This I will (...) do by construing a so-called ‘warranted assertability maneuver’ against contextualism which shows that, with respect to knowledge attributing and denying sentences, the con-textualist has confused a variance in warranted assertability conditions for a variance in truth conditions. (shrink)

In recent literature, a very popular position about the normativity of assertion claims that standards for epistemically proper assertion vary with practical context, while standards for knowledge do not. This paper shows this claim is strongly incompatible with the received value-theoretic view regarding the relationship between the axiological and the deontic: one of the two has to go.

In light of embracing the Shiftiness Dilemma, the vast majority of philosophers accept Assertion Incompatibilism: given intuitive variability of proper assertion with practical stakes, Classical Invariantism is incompatible with a biconditional knowledge norm of assertion. There are also a few dissenting voices, however: some invariantists venture to preserve both Classical Invariantism and the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (Assertion Compatibilism). There are two varieties of Compatibilism available on the market. This chapter discusses the first of the two: Pragmatic Compatibilism employs a (...) pragmatic warranted assertability manoeuvre to explain away the shiftiness data. The chapter argues that the view has difficulties with delivering epistemic normative independence for cases of shiftiness of assertions that do not involve knowledge attributions or explicitly tabled error possibilities. (shrink)

This chapter looks into the feasibility of preserving the independence of epistemically proper thought from practical considerations via the second horn of the Shiftiness Dilemma. For people who like Classical Invariantism about knowledge attributions, the jump from variation in assertability with stakes to contextualism or pragmatic encroachment seemed rushed. As such, these authors venture to account for the Shiftiness Intuition under a Classical Invariantist umbrella by arguing for context sensitivity of proper assertability. This chapter argues that the view fails on (...) prior plausibility due to being incompatible with the following highly uncontroversial value-theoretic claim: norms of type X are associated with values of type X. (shrink)

Contextualists such as Cohen and DeRose claim that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions vary contextually, in particular that the strength of epistemic position required for one to be truly ascribed knowledge depends on features of the attributor's context. Contextualists support their view by appeal to our intuitions about when it's correct (or incorrect) to ascribe knowledge. Someone might argue that some of these intuitions merely reflect when it is conversationally appropriate to ascribe knowledge, not when knowledge is truly ascribed, (...) and so try to accommodate these intuitions even on an invariantist view. DeRose (Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, 1998; Philosophical Review, 2002) argues that any such 'warranted assertibility manoeuvre', or 'WAM', against contextualism is unlikely to succeed. Here, I argue that his objections to a WAM against contextualism are not persuasive and offer a pragmatic account of the data about ascriptions of knowledge. (shrink)

According to the world-actualization model (WAM), God creates by selecting and actualizing a possible world. This chapter argues that WAM is in tension with divine creativity. To flesh out the nature of creativity, three types of creative thought processes described by Margaret Boden are introduced. It is then argued that the God of WAM fails to exhibit any of them. Next, the chapter explores several ways one might try to ease the tension between divine creativity and the world-actualization model, including (...) potential transformations of WAM itself, but none of these appear particularly satisfactory. The chapter concludes with three desiderata one ought to satisfy in creating a creative model of creation; a truly creative God must display originality, purpose, and world-specific intentions in the creation of the world. (shrink)

W książce Źródło i noc. Wprowadzenie do współczesnego absconditeizmu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo WAM 2020) Miłosz Hołda wnikliwie przedstawia poruszaną problematykę i proponuje ciekawe rozwiązania. Stanowiąc ambitną próbę wypracowania oryginalnego stanowiska w ważnym obszarze myśli chrześcijańskiej, publikacja domaga się krytycznej refleksji i uwypuklenia istotnych problemów, co jest celem niniejszego tekstu. Chodzi zwłaszcza o dwie kwestie o kluczowym znaczeniu dla teizmu: (nie)działanie Boga w świecie oraz godzenie „Boga filozofii” z „Bogiem objawienia”. W pierwszym z wymienionych zagadnień podstawowym problemem jest (częściowo) niewłaściwe podejście do (...) przyrodniczego obrazu świata oraz do filozofii nauki i teologii nauki. W drugim obszarze głównym mankamentem analiz Hołdy jest rozbieżność między manifestowanym poparciem dla teizmu klasycznego a brakiem krytycznego spojrzenia na te jego elementy, które utrudniają, w niektórych zaś aspektach uniemożliwiają, wyrażenie istotnych treści judeochrześcijańskiego objawienia. Zawarte w artykule uwagi nie obalają w całości głównych tez stawianych przez Hołdę, lecz prowadzą do ich modyfikacji, dowartościowującej przyrodniczy obraz świata. (shrink)

Contextualism, in its standard form, is the view that the truth conditions of sentences of the form ‘S knows that P’ vary according to the context in which they are uttered. One possible objection to contextualism appeals to what Keith DeRose calls a warranted assertability maneuver (or WAM), according to which it is not our knowledge sentences themselves that have context-sensitive truth conditions, but what is pragmatically conveyed by the use of such sentences. Thus, proponents of WAMs argue, the context (...) sensitivity of knowledge attributions is not a semantic phenomenon but a pragmatic one. I examine a number of WAMs and show that each (i) is seriously flawed, or (ii) undercuts standard contextualism if we hold a minimalist conception of semantic content. I propose an alternative form of contextualism that accommodates minimalism and is immune to the second type of WAM, and show that this new form of contextualism shares the virtues of standard contextualism. (shrink)

DeRose appeals to ordinary English usage to support his contextualist semantics for "know"-attributions. A common objection holds that though the relevant assertions are both appropriate and seemingly true, their seeming truth arises merely from their appropriateness. This Warranted Assertability Maneuver (WAM) aims to provide a stand-alone objection by providing a reason not to take the ordinary language data at face-value. However, there is no plausible model or mechanism for the pragmatic phenomena WAMmers must postulate. Given what the WAM requires, it (...) is doubtful it could work out in detail. (shrink)

Abstract: In responding to the cases that motivate epistemic contextualism, invariantists sometimes use a warranted assertability maneuver (WAM), according to which we mistakenly judge an assertion to be true because we confuse conversational propriety with truth. I argue that no invariantist WAM against Stewart Cohen's Airport Case can succeed. The problem is that such a WAM is inconsistent with the known ways of accounting for the evidence that motivates the knowledge account of assertion.

Short paper about debate on cognitive meaning of religious use of language in early analytic philosophy of religion. Published in Companion to Philosophy of Religion, edited by Janusz Salamon, Cracow: WAM, 2016.

Powyższy artykuł jest znacznie skróconą i nieznacznie zmienioną wersją niemieckiego opracowania, które się ukazało w książce: Roman Darowski, Filozofia jezuitów w Polsce w XX wieku. Próba syntezy - Słownik autorów, Kraków 2001, Wyższa Szkoła Filozoficzno-Pedagogiczna Ignatianum - Wydawnictwo WAM, s. 306-329. Zamieszczona tam wersja polska zawiera m.in. pełną bibliografię prac T. Slipki.

Research with North American English-speaking samples has demonstrated that men and women hold differing perceptions of women performing managerial roles. There has been little empirical research to compare perceptions of women managers across cultures primarily due to language differences. To aid such research, we translated the women as managers scale (WAMS; Peters, Terborg, & Taynor, 1974) into Spanish and surveyed 412 individuals in the U.S. and Chile. Results showed that the dimensionality of the WAMS was similar on two factors. These (...) results provide useful tools for future cross-cultural research and practical human resource applications for multinational enterprises. (shrink)

Roman Darowski. Philosophical Anthropology: Outline of Fundamental Problems. Translated from Polish by Łukasz Darowski SDS. Wydawnictwo Ignatianum [Editions of Ignatianum, The Jesuit University of Cracow, Wydawnictwo WAM: Cracow, 2014.—Author’s summary The translation of this book into English we are dealing with here is a somewhat changed and revised version of the 4th edition of Filozofia człowieka in Polish. The last section has been expanded, while the “History of Philosophical Anthropology” chapter and the Anthology of Texts section have both been omitted.

In a constitutional monarchy, the Sovereign acts according to constitutional rules, rather than arbitrarily. That is so even in a country such as Britain which has no codified constitution. Today the rules of constitutional monarchy whose purpose it is to preserve the political neutrality of the Sovereign, serve to protect her from political involvement. Her powers remain essentially residual - selection of a Prime Minister and refusal of a dissolution under very rare circumstances.The main influence of the Sovereign, however, comes (...) through her exercise of the three rights identified by Bagehot - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to wam; and through her role as Head of the Commonwealth.The enormous popularity of the monarchy in Britain today arises because it has come to be divorced from partisan politics, and so can act as a focus of national unity. (shrink)

Review of Ireneusz Ziemiński's book: Metaphysics of Death. Krakow: WAM Publishing House, 2010.

Review of the book: Człowiek na granicy istnienia. Dyskusje o śmierci mózgowej i innych aspektach umierania, Grzegorz Hołub, Piotr Duchliński, Akademia Ignatianum w Krakowie, Wydawnictwo WAM, Kraków 2017.

The paper is a review of the book Przewodnik po metafizyce (ed. S. Ko³odziej­czyk, WAM, Kraków 2011). The book consists of fourteen essays concerning key issues of metaphysics, mostly written by leading Polish experts. The review contains a number of critical and polemic comments on some of the essays.

Against contextualism, Duncan Pritchard has argued that conversational pragmatics give rise to an argument in favour of invariantist neoMooreanism. More specifically, he argues that when we conjoin a Moorean view with a warranted assertability manoeuvre, we can satisfy our pretheoretical intuitions (which are decidedly invariantist), whereas contextualists cannot. In the following paper, I challenge Pritchard’s argument and contend that he is too quick to declare victory for invariantism, for not only does the WAM he employs appear to be ad hoc (...) vis-à-vis DeRose’s plausible criteria, but it also seems to have very implausible pragmatic implications when subjected to close scrutiny. (shrink)

Presented paper is my reply to Prof. Andrzej Biłat’s review of the book Przewodnik po metafizyce (A Companion to Metaphysics) edited by myself and published by WAM Press. It contains answers to both general and particular remarks and comments risen by Prof. Biłat.

W artykule przedstawiam tzw. chwyt z zasadnej stwierdzalności (WAM) wymierzony w znaną argumentację E. Gettiera, która miała wykazać nieadekwatność tradycyjnej definicji wiedzy. Keith DeRose sformułował trzy warunki poprawności WAM – pokazuję, że zaproponowany w pracy WAM je spełnia. Jeśli zaproponowany sposób wyjaśnienia Gettierowskich przykładów jest poprawny, to konkluzywność argumentacji Gettiera staje się wątpliwa. Jeśli jednak nie jest i przykładów Gettiera nie można wyjaśnić poprzez odwołanie się do generowania fałszywych implikatur konwersacyjnych przez prawdziwe asercje określonych zdań, to warunki poprawności nałożone przez (...) DeRose’a na WAM okazują się niewystarczające. W pracy proponuję więc uzupełnić listę tychże o następujący warunek: jeżeli w określonym kontekście k asercja danego zdania Z ma być nieakceptowalna jedynie ze względu na generowanie w tych okolicznościach fałszywych implikatur i1, ..., in, to asercja tego zdania w każdym innym kontekście k*, która generować będzie w k* dokładnie te same fałszywe implikatury i1, ..., in, ma być również nieakceptowalna (i to w równym stopniu). (shrink)

In this paper I present a warranted assertability maneuver (WAM) and three necessary criteria for its rational applications proposed by Keith DeRose. I show that these criteria are not sufficient to reject a WAM directed against Gettier’s famous cases, for it satisfies all the criteria. If the WAM against Gettier’s claim is correct, then Gettier’s argumentation is less persuasive and conclusive than it has seemed before and it becomes questionable. If one were to insist that the Gettier cases truly showed (...) that the traditional definition of knowledge was too broad and should not be explained in terms of generating false conversational implicatures by true assertions of Gettier’s sentences, then one would have to conclude that there should be some other unidentified by DeRose criteria which were not satisfied by the WAM in Gettier case discussion. Therefore I propose the fourth standard for successful WAM: If in a context C the assertion of sentence S is unacceptable only because it generates some false conversational implicatures I1,…, In, then the assertion of S in any other context C* generating false I1,…, In is unacceptable to the same extent as the assertion of S in C. (shrink)

W książce Źródło i noc. Wprowadzenie do współczesnego absconditeizmu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo WAM 2020) Miłosz Hołda wnikliwie przedstawia poruszaną problematykę i proponuje ciekawe rozwiązania. Stanowiąc ambitną próbę wypracowania oryginalnego stanowiska w ważnym obszarze myśli chrześcijańskiej, publikacja domaga się krytycznej refleksji i uwypuklenia istotnych problemów, co jest celem niniejszego tekstu. Chodzi zwłaszcza o dwie kwestie o kluczowym znaczeniu dla teizmu: (nie)działanie Boga w świecie oraz godzenie „Boga filozofii” z „Bogiem objawienia”. W pierwszym z wymienionych zagadnień podstawowym problemem jest (częściowo) niewłaściwe podejście do (...) przyrodniczego obrazu świata oraz do filozofii nauki i teologii nauki. W drugim obszarze głównym mankamentem analiz Hołdy jest rozbieżność między manifestowanym poparciem dla teizmu klasycznego a brakiem krytycznego spojrzenia na te jego elementy, które utrudniają, w niektórych zaś aspektach uniemożliwiają, wyrażenie istotnych treści judeo-chrześcijańskiego objawienia. Zawarte w artykule uwagi nie obalają w całości głównych tez stawianych przez Hołdę, lecz prowadzą do ich modyfikacji, dowartościowującej przyrodniczy obraz świata. (shrink)

In a number of papers, Keith DeRose articulates his reasons for thinking that we cannot plausibly explain the mechanics of knowledge attribution in terms of varying conditions of warranted assertability (1998, 2002). His reasoning is largely comparative: “know,” he argues, proves a poor candidate for such a diagnosis when compared to other terms to which such warranted assertabilility maneuvers (i.e., WAMs) clearly apply. More specifically, DeRose aims, through to use of such comparative case studies, to identify several general principles through (...) which we might determine when WAMs are called for. In what follows, I take issue with one of these principles and argue that DeRose’s efforts to deploy the others to pro-contextualist (i.e., anti-invariantist) ends are misguided. I conclude by examining DeRose’s specific objection to Unger’s skeptical invariantism, and identify a problematic feature of his recurrent appeals to linguistic intuition. The payoff of this is an enhanced appreciation of the factors on which the contextualist/invariantist dispute should be seen to turn. (shrink)

This work is a manifesto for epistemic independence: the independence of good thinking from practical considerations. It presents a functionalist account of the normativity of assertion in conjunction with an integrated view of the normativity of constative speech acts.

Recenzja książki: Val Dusek, Wprowadzenie do filozofii techniki, tł. Zbigniew Kasprzyk, ser. „Myśl Filozoficzna: wprowadzenia, panorama zagadnień, historia myśli filozoficznej”, Wydawnictwo WAM, Kraków 2011, ss. 268.

This is a review article of a recently published guide to the philosophy of language, Przewodnik po filozofii języka, Wydawnictwo WAM, Kraków 2016). The article presents this publication against a background of other monographs and guides devoted to the topic of the contemporary philosophy of language which have been published in English. It aims at highlighting the main issues discussed by this philosophy, as well as its relation to linguistics.

This chapter examines how improvisation within higher popular music education (HPME) could serve as a powerful pedagogical tool to resist the ideological norms imposed by Western art music (WAM) and industrial agendas derived from neoliberal ideology. Central to this discussion is the notion of playing with failure: a reimagining of mistakes as productive moments within a learning journey, fostering the potential for critical engagement and creative autonomy in students. This chapter delineates the pervasive influence of both WAM-based pedagogical approaches and (...) the neoliberal emphasis on employability, which often marginalize alternative epistemologies and limit the space for students’ creative potential. Drawing on critical theory and critical pedagogy, this chapter explores how conceptualizing improvisation as a form of embodied knowledge, an act of becoming, and an opportunity to “play with failure” within HPME could dismantle oppressive educational structures, and thereby has the potential to promote a more inclusive and emancipatory learning environment. Ultimately, this chapter theorizes improvisation as a counter-hegemonic and liberatory praxis that encourages students and educators to cultivate a critical consciousness and a more liberated musical identity, which challenges dominant institutional, ideological, and industrial narratives and seeks to redefine the educational experience within contemporary HPME. (shrink)