Dialogue and Universalism

The paper offers a critical analysis of the skeptic’s conviction that his doubts about the truth of thought on existence of the world outside the mind are not equivalent to real the doubts about existence of the world alone, but they are only a theoretical and speculative problem of knowledge. The main case of this criticism is based on the Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s philosophy, precisely, on his theory of truth.

Some problems concerning transcendental epistemic arguments are raised on the basis of Jan Srzednicki’s epistemological conception presented in the bookEpistemology after Wittgenstein. Jan Srzednicki’s New Epistemological Perspective by Grażyna Żurkowska. The problem of the cognition immediacy is briefly discussed. The great philosophical importance of many other relevant topics is indicated, i.e. the internal similarity of Jan Srzednicki’s philosophical challenge to the project of Heideggerian hermeneutics or the problem of mutual relations between language and cognition.

This article presents J. Srzednicki’s epistemological conception and confronts it generally with contemporary versions of epistemological relativism.

Following Grażyna Żurkowska’s work presenting Jan Srzednicki’s views on Wittgenstein’s philosophy (Epistemologia po Wittgensteinie. Nowa perspektywa epistemologiczna Jana Srzednickiego, Wydawnictwo UMCS, Lublin 2006) [Epistemology after Wittgenstein. A New Epistemological Perspective by Jan Srzednicki], the author of this paper ponders the effect of Wittgenstein’s conception upon the domain of epistemology. According to Srzednicki, such an effect is in having posed a skeptical challenge which opened a new epistemological perspective. The author is critical toward this approach and argues that the most genuine intention behind Wittgenstein’s investigations was to draw attention to the diversity of such our concepts as cognition, knowledge, truth, etc. Such diversity is not a challenge but a fact which needs to be accounted for in epistemological studies.

Wittgenstein’s philosophy endeavored to define the role of language as communicative. Language became an original “code” of multifarious meanings and designations but it is also a code which entails emotions and different sorts of internal and external reactions of an individual. The mechanism of penalty and the notion of penalty have invariably raised emotions and meaningful reactions. The analysis focuses on a short derivation of the notion of penalty. It considers its functions, basic tasks and external impact—a short word revealing so many actions and social behaviors.

The paper investigates Jan Srzednicki’s epistemological conception with its main Kantian problem on the very possibility of cognition. Investigating Srzednicki’s conception the paper refers to its interpretation elaborated by Grażyna Żurkowska.

In the comments presented below, I consider critically to Srzednicki’s epistemological realism, and his modernistic and anti-dialectical fundamentalism

In the article the author tries to find some similarities and differences between phenomenological tradition and Srzednicki’s project of the new epistemology. He mostly refers to the thought of a French philosopher, Merleau-Ponty. Especially representative to the arguments is his late turn to metaphysical perspective presented in the work, Visible and Invisible, where he made an attempt to express a kind of logic which may reveal the world and ourselves in its mutual interconnections.

The article juxtaposes Jan Srzednicki’s conception of cognition with Jean Piaget’s psychology of cognition. Human’s (child’s) cognition is syncretic. Various cognitive data are confused, systematized, dogmatized or become chaotic, and mistakes appear. These mistakes can be overcome thanks to analytical, intuitive or logical perspectives. Cognition moves from the sphere of “children’s dogmatism” to the world of “mature skepticism”. The syncretic cognition can be overcome thanks to various cognitive procedures, e.g., analytical, logical or intuitive. The intuitive cognition is primary and synthetic—it is present in the acts of analytical cognition. Syncretism may lead to dogmatism if it is uncritical or to skepticism if it is connected with logical procedures. It is explained to a different extent both by Piaget’s epistemology of development and also by epistemology of Srzednicki’s logical gap.

The term “transcendental” means something which is a necessary and a priori condition of knowledge. In other words, “the transcendental” refers to all presuppositions of a knower who is ready for knowing. These presuppositions are sometimes called “epistemic assumptions”. The paper presents author’s interpretation of the knowledge necessary conditions. The theoretical background for this interpretation is Kazimierz Twardowski’s theory of actions and products, and John Searle’s theory of human action.

The fundamental problem of Jan Srzednicki’s new epistemology is the question: how thoughts surpass the resistance of that what is ontologically present, how this process is possible? In Srzednicki’s opinion, thinking is a process of distancing from the pressure of ontological presence. His ideas offer a splendid inspiration for philosophy of medicine which attempts to answer the question “whether (and how) a disease is cognizable?” This question refers directly to and is translated into the question of the capacity to diagnose particular diseases. Answering to the above stated question whether disease is cognizable we should answer in the affirmative, however, in a “modified” form that its pre-cognitive resistance to reality is formed at the articulated level. Somewhat intuitively we feel the presence of a disease before we express it in words as a disease according to our scientific or informal thought style.

In the book Kłopot z istnieniem.[The Trouble with the Existence (1963).Ed. Toruń 2002] Henryk Elzenberg formulates valuable philosophical remarks about suffering. I present them here as “statements”. They provoke many questions defining here as „problems”.At the end in appendix I confront briefly the epistemological position of Elzenberg with that postulated by Jan Srzednicki in the book Kłopoty pojęciowe [Notional Troubles], Warszawa 1993.

Henryk Elzenberg (1887–1967)—a Polish philosopher, axiologist and existentialist claimed that creativity concealed the secret of life and death. Creativity connects many extremities and contradictions, it requires sacrifices, asceticism, perfectionism, but also yearning, liberty, sensuality and desire.

The greatest challenge with which the Readers of my book had to cope with was the problem of ontological presence. In Srzednicki’s conception ontological presence has two dimensions: a logical and an onto-factual one.Every cognitive perspective is always contingent but this contingency must be limited somehow. Srzednicki restores the ontological dimension of cognition (crossed out by traditional epistemology and philosophy), but avoids ontological fundamentalism. His conception gives rise to a new model of metaphysics understood not as the most general theory of being or a general theory of cognition but as the non-epistemic closure of all epistemological projects and theoretical discourses.The main parameters of the epistemic closure can only be reconstructed theoretically in the logical space of the observer. This non-epistemic closure is marked by three categorical constraints: ontological, formative and normative.Srzednicki overcomes Wittgenstein’s skepticism by understanding transcendentalism much more deeply.