The main goal of this article is to compare the opinions of citizens from four European countries (Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Poland) regarding basic income in the broader context, among other things, of welfare regimes these countries represent. Statistical analyses of the Europeans’ attitudes towards basic income are based on interviews carried out in 28 European Union countries. Four countries, representing four different types of welfare regimes that can be found in the literature (the Nordic model has been excluded due to the sample size), and differing in economic welfare as well as historical experiences in regard to socio-economic system formation, have been selected for further analysis. Our analysis is based on special use of the single posthoc test with the Bonferroni adjustment for evaluating cross-country differences in basic income support and use of logistic regression for verifying the within-country impact of particular effects on basic income attitudes. The results of our analysis do not confirm that either the type of welfare regime or the level of social services in particular countries have a significant impact on attitudes toward basic income attitudes. However, we found the clear and direct impact of basic income awareness on supporting the programme.
Over the last 20 years, Polish society’s attitude towards people with disabilities has changed for the better. However, we still have not completely rid ourselves of prejudices, fears, and stereotypes.
On one hand, the development of medicine allows to prolong the life of patients who previously had no chance for survive, on the other hand, though, it condemns some of them and their loved ones to extreme suffering. Fear of suffering is the main reason for a possible wish for euthanasia. The research aimed at measuring the attitude towards euthanasia among doctors and nurses who come in professional contact with terminally ill patients or patients versus the medical personnel who do not come in such contact. The research included: age, profession and workplace as well as personal experience in providing care to the seriously ill. The Attitudes Towards Euthanasia Questionnaire by Głębocka and Gawor was used during the research. The method consists of three scales: Informational Support, Liberal Approach and Conservative Approach. Medical stuff taking care of terminally ill patients were less conservative in their opinions than the participants from the comparative group. The intergroup differences in terms of Liberal Approach towards Euthanasia Scale were not obtained. It turned out that the age fostered the conservative approach, and working at the intensive care units or taking care of an ill relative fostered the reduction of such approach. All the respondents approve the idea of providing the patients and their families with informational support. Working in intensive care units or taking care of terminally ill relatives seems to reduce conservative attitudes towards euthanasia because persons with such experience have personally faced the multifaceted emotional and physical costs of suffering.
Freedom and Resentment (1962), written by Peter Frederick Strawson, is one of the most influential papers in 20th century investigations regarding the problem of free will. An interesting criticism of that work was proposed by his son, Galen Strawson, who analyzed and rejected his father’s view, called the theory of reactive attitudes. In my paper I reconstruct the views of Peter Strawson and present counterarguments put forward by Galen Strawson. In the summary I suggest, following Robert Kane, that the disagreement may reflect some important changes in analytic philosophy.
The paper presents the characteristics of the attitude that students have towards electric cars and the significance of distinguished attitude elements in creating interest in the purchase of such vehicles. Electric cars are the new type of vehicles that have an electric motor and use the electricity stored in batteries. They are introduced to the market, but for various reasons the volume of sales is not high. So far, it is not sufficiently known how electric vehicles are assessed by Poles. The presented research is an attempt to know what the attitude towards this type of vehicle. The attitude model tested in this research includes three areas: knowledge about them, emotions that they evoke and potential behaviors. The participants were students of Rzeszów University of Technology – a group of young people who are potential consumers of new technologies. The obtained results indicate that electric cars are rather unknown. At the same time, they arouse great interest and their image is very positive. The attitude characteristics towards this type of vehicle is supplemented by perceived limitations: too high of a purchase price, lack of sufficient information about them and unsatisfactory technical parameters, mainly the long time needed to recharge the battery and the insufficiently long distance with one recharge. The interest in the purchase is dependent on positive emotions, and the lack of sufficient information is an obstacle in thinking about buying such a vehicle. Understanding the attitudes of Polish students towards electric cars can be helpful in adapting information about such cars to potential customers, which in turn may affect the level of interest and sales volume.
In the article, the authors propose a typology of political knowledge from online learning activities and test its validity in an empirical qualitative study. The essence of their proposal is that meaningful study of the process of acquiring knowledge (rational analysis of factors modifying attitudes) must take into account both the perspective of the citizen (the demand for information) and an analysis of the publicly available knowledge (the supply of information). The authors distinguish three main methods of acquiring information: heuristic, reflective, and by-product learning. They note the importance of generational factors in shaping the cognitive activity of Internet users. There has been a gradual increase in the importance of source management, with simultaneous alienation and skepticism towards information obtained on the Internet. While the authors’ analysis is restricted to the Internet, their approach is not reductionist in that they consider the internet to be a medium for traditional media and its influence on civic attitudes.
Previous research showed that children can exhibit preferences for social categories already at preschool age. One of the crucial factors in the development of children’s attitudes toward others is children’s observation and imitation of adults’ nonverbal messages. The aim of our study is to examine whether children’s tendency to perceive and follow nonverbally expressed attitudes toward other people is related to ingroup bias, i.e. the tendency to favor one’s own group over other groups. We examined 175 preschool children (age in months: 61–87; M = 72.6, SD = 6.53) presenting them with a video of a conversation between a message sender and a message recipient. The study was conducted in a minimal group paradigm. We found that children accurately identified the message sender’s attitude toward the recipient and also generalized this attitude to other members of the new group. We also found explicit ingroup bias among children from the message sender’s group. However, no generalization of the sender’s attitude to other ingroup members was found. The results are discussed in reference to previous findings on the role of imitation of adult’s non-verbal behavior for the development of social attitudes among children.
The paper focuses on two research objectives. First, it aims to critically examine a reductio ad absurdum argument against incompatibilism whose main themes can be found in Peter F. Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment. The doubts raised about the argument are inspired by a thought experiment based on fictitious Ludovico’s technique described in Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. The second objective consists in outlining a version of the compatibilist stance – the version which is immune to Strawson’s objections against the traditional rendering of compatibilism and enables deeper understanding of various possible interpretations of the controversy between compatibilists and their opponents. The proposed position includes a hypothesis on the function of the attitude of participation and the expressivist explications of the concepts crucial for the practice of ascribing moral responsibility. The important feature of the analyses in question is the central role of the states of mind whose content are plans for reactive moral sentiments.
The article presents Peter F. Strawson’s remarks on the free will debate, which he has presented in the essay ‘Freedom and Resentment’. Strawson avoids taking a stance on the question whether the thesis of determinism is correct. Instead he shows the essential difficulties and far reaching consequences of acknowledging this thesis. He recognizes the inseparable connection between freedom and responsibility in the philosophy after Kant. He consequently questions whether we really understand what it would mean to claim that determinism is true. He focuses on what he calls ‘reactiv attitudes’ triggered by the way in which other people behave toward us. Their behavior evokes emotional reaction in us – gratitude, respect, curiosity, but also distrust, resentment, disappointment. Those emotional responses are not purely subjective and they underlie moral judgments and complicated interpersonal relations. We suspend our reactive attitudes towards animals, very small children or people that we think are mentally ill. Instead we adopt objective (psychiatric, scientific) attitudes towards them. But to acknowledge the thesis of determinism implicates that we should treat all people this way. The paper is not so much concerned with an analysis of advantages and weak points of Strawson’s version of compatibilism, but focuses instead on the originality of his contribution to the debate on free will and on his brilliant treatment of reactive attitudes.
In this work, we present a failure detection system in sensors of any robot. It is based on the k-fold cross-validation approach and built from N neural networks, where N is the number of signals read from sensors. Our tests were carried out using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, quadrocopter), where signals were read from three sensors: accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope. Artificial neural network was used to determine Euler angles, based on signals from these sensors. The presented system is an extension of the system that we proposed in one of our previous papers. The improvement shown in this work took place on two levels. The first one was related to improvement of a neural network՚s reproduction quality – we have replaced a recurrent neural network with a convolutional one. The second level was associated with the improvement of the validation process, i.e. with adding some new criteria to check the values of Euler՚s angles determined by the convolutional neural network in subsequent time steps. To highlight the proposed system improvement we present a number of indicators such as RMSE, NRMSE and NDR (Normalized Detection Ratio).