Projects

Maciej Witek has received a Bekker grant from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (decision No. BPN/BEK/2022/1/00199/DEC/1) for the research project “Beyond illocution and perlocution. Accommodation, etiolation, and self-expression in covert speech actions”, which will be carried out at the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge in the 2023-2024 academic year (10 months). To learn more about the project and its objectives, please visit the project website: http://ccrg.usz.edu.pl/beyond-illocution-and-perlocution/.

Embodied cognition rejects the notion that perceptual processes are calculations performed by a disembodied agent and is considered by some researchers as the next step in the evolution of the cognitive science. Cognition turns out to be dependent on the physical body of the cognitive agent constantly interacting with his world. The new proposal focuses on the next level of analysis and embodies mental functioning, indicating abnormalities in the microbiota-gut-brain axis as the physical-biological cause of mental disorders. The recognition of microbiota, beyond the sensorimotor approach, as an integral part of the physical body seems justified. In his groundbreaking work from 1998 Gershon described the guts with a term ‘the second brain’. Disorders of the intestinal bacterial flora may be related to mental health, including anxiety and depression. Microorganisms inhabiting the guts, through communication pathways between them and the brain, can modulate mood, host's stress response and cognitive functions. Today's understanding of embodied cognition is largely based on sensorimotor cognition theories of perception. The inclusion of microbiota in information processing mechanisms performed by cognitive architectures can contribute to an interesting interdisciplinary discussion involving cognitive scientists, philosophers, psychologists, biologists and doctors. I intend to use the achievements of microbiology in an attempt to extend theories of the nature of embodied cognition with the modulating influence of the ‘second brain’.

In this project, we examine the adequacy of the Gricean programme in the philosophy of language and cognitive science and, next, develop an alternative, Austinian framework based on the idea that using language is a social practice that consists of performing conventional speech acts: acts done conforming to a convention. After a critical discussion of the Gricean approach, we elaborate on the Austinian ideas to be found in the philosophical literature and use them to account for (i) the variety and constitution of linguistic meaning, (ii) the structure and content of communicative acts, (iii) the mechanisms and cognitive underpinnings of verbal communication, and (iv) the evolutionary and developmental emergence of linguistic and communicative skills. We use the Austinian framework to account for a number of discursive phenomena such as accommodation, presuppositions, irony, presumptions, demonstrative reference, as well as for the evolutionary emergence of illocutionary interaction. To find out more, please visit the project website

The aim of this project is to reconstruct the selected applications of paraphrases. Their usage will be analyzed on the basis of Carnap’s, Ajdukiewicz’s and Quine’s philosophy. The first one treated paraphrase as a means to indicate the verbal nature of ontology while the other two philosophers - to show substantive ontological problems. Another goal of this project is to analyze implicit premises of the following philosophical programs: Carnap’s idea of philosophy as the analysis of syntax and conceptual schemes, Ajdukiewicz’s semantic epistemology and Quine’s naturalized philosophy. This research will enable us to systematize views on paraphrase and present differences and similarities between its various applications. As a result, it will be possible to answer the question of what kind of analysis a paraphrase is: decompositional, regressive or transformative.